REMOTE FREE TV.....TEE HEE

 A little while after I retired from FOX Broadcasting I was asked to be on an HRTS panel regarding audience measurement. I didn't feel I had much to add to the the heated discussion between Nielsen and Comscore but my friend Julie Piepenkotter was going to be on the panel and I looked forward to seeing her.

 I didn't say much but as the conversation came around to NETFLIX and viewing transparency I jumped in and said that once NETFLIX starts selling ads, which I believed was inevitable, we would start getting "real" numbers. Of course I was dismissed. That ain't gonna happen. Not the first time that's happened to me. You know picture in picture ads that you see in sports and pro wrestling? I brought that up years before it started and was told that advertisers would never allow their ads to run like that.......anyway......

I'm bringing this all up because ads are pervasive on the streamers now and the streamers are encouraging their consumers to go down that path. Commercials are your friend.

Here's a story about how a couple of network executives outsmarted themselves and cost FBC lots of money for absolutely no reason.....and guess what? seven years after they did something stupid THEY DID THE SAME THING AGAIN!!!!! AND I WARNED THEM BOTH TIMES!!!!! BUT WHAT THE FUCK DO I KNOW????? I'll calm down now.

It's pilot week 2008. We have screened the pilots and have heard from all the interested parties and now we are in the small group that will finalize the schedule. We were almost done when I showed up in the scheduling room and there is Jon Nesvig our head of sales and Tony Vinciquerra CEO FOX 
Networks Group looking like the cats who ate the canary. They waited for us all to assemble and then told us they have an idea. You see they expected this to be a soft upfront so they figured out a way to entice advertisers to place a bet on FOX.

Here's the pitch: Why don't we cut the number of commercials in half so there is less time between breaks. Reduce the supply, increase the demand. Also with shorter breaks the viewer is less likely to leave the set or graze. They were really proud of themselves.

Of course being the jerk that I am I said: "Let me see if I understand. If we have half the commercials we would need to double the CPM to generate the same revenue. Also if we have fewer commercial time that means more program time. What are we going to fill it with?" Them: "We'll ask the studio to give us longer shows" Me: "So you're going to go to Peter Roth (Head of Warner TV Studio at the time) and tell him to give us a longer version of a show and he's going to go sure no problem but we need to increase the licence fee and I need to re-edit the shows for syndication so that has to be factored in." How does this make sense?"

We did it anyway

We got to New York for the upfront presentation. Kevin Reilly, who was President of FOX Entertainment, and I'm not sure totally agreed with this, asked what we should call this strategy to make it sound "sexy". We settled on REMOTE FREE TV. We decided to try this out on FRINGE  in the fall. and add DOLLHOUSE and maybe others in the spring.

Turned out it wasn't a "soft" upfront and we did not come anywhere near doubling the CPM for FRINGE but we had committed.

Sometime that summer, being the total asshole that I am, I asked Peter Liquori, Chairman of FOX Entertainment, and Kevin if maybe we should see if the REMOTE FREE TV message has penetrated the viewers and if we needed to make any adjustments. We were promoting FRINGE all summer as RFTV. They agreed and, in my role as head of Research I asked my sidekick Melva Benoit to conduct some focus groups.

Here's what we found:

People like ads in their shows. They do things during the break (like check email) and they find many ads informative especially promos and movie ads.

Putting fewer ads in breaks would not entice someone to watch a show if they weren't planning on watching it regardless of the commercial load.

People like their remote and REMOTE FREE TV felt to many like you were taking away control of their viewing.

There was no awareness of the phrase REMOTE FREE TV  nor which network it was associated with.

Finally, when they were told REMOTE FREE TV would be on FOX many said they don't trust the network and that would be a disincentive to watch.

Well Well

When FRINGE premiered we did minute-by-minute ratings. Here's what we found:

After the first shorter break (where the dip looked less than normal) the dips at the breaks increased to typical levels as shows with a full commercial load.

Bottom line: People learned to pee quicker.

REMOTE FREE TV lasted a season and was gone.

Fast forward to pilot season 2015....my last at FOX. Among the pilots that we screened was a drama called EMPIRE. I was excited when I saw it and told our head of drama development that he finally made a pilot people will watch.

We were finished setting the schedule when Randy Freer who had replaced Tony V as  CEO of FOX Networks Group told us all he had an idea.....I swear I'm not making this up.....he pitched REMOTE FREE TV!!!!!! I was leaving, had nothing to lose, so I spoke up. Me: Randy we did this before, we called it REMOTE FREE TV, it didn't work." I went through the reasons. Randy: "You're being negative and have no imagination." Me: "I'm simply relaying what happened the last time we did this exact same thing."

EMPIRE was a hit but, with half the commercial load.....need I go on. That strategy lasted less then a season as we quietly added more units to the show.

I thought of all this as we see the streamers becoming more and more like the television networks, embracing commercials. I coined a phrase "cable envy" to describe how networks wanted to act like cable channels. Steamers wanna be networks. No one seems to be content with who they are.

IT'S NEW TO YOU!!!!!!!!

 During my years at NBC we had something called "The 2:30 Meeting". Every day at 2:30 Don Ohlmeyer would assemble his senior staff in his office and we would all participate in what Jack Welch (head of GE) called QMI (Quick Market Intelligence). We would share information about what was going on in broadcasting, update everyone on our department and raise any issues that we felt the room should address.

The 2:30 Meeting was an instrumental part of our success. It is where the idea for branding our red hot Thursday night (Must See TV) started. Seamless nights emerged from that meeting and our strategy for airing Schindler's List (single sponsor....FORD....with one commercial break) was formed there. You had to have a really good excuse to miss the meeting and unbelievably it always started at 2:30!

At one meeting in the spring we were talking about how to promote our repeat heavy summer schedule. I'm sure I had some role in instigating all this but we landed on the idea that the vast majority of network viewers had never seen most of the shows repeated in the summer. Why were we calling shows repeats when they were NEW TO YOU!!!!!!! A show is only a repeat if you have seen it already but, in theory, it's an original if you've never seen it. In essence we were attempting to redefine the concept of repeats and originals and our crack marketing team was tasked with figuring out how to communicate that.

Here's what they came up with:

I guess you need to copy and paste the url on your browser

https://youtu.be/CqIxxFwVYTQ?si=_YnO9ksJ-FilhhMk

Needless to say we were ridiculed for this and, although it might not have resulted in an increase in summer viewing (I don't know maybe in did) we did introduce a new phrase to the TV lexicon which still pops up to this day.

"It's New To You" came to mind this morning when I read about the significant audience that "Yellowstone" attracted on CBS Sunday night. This follows the summer succes off Suits on NETFLIX.

I was talking with a group of NYU undergrads last night and I left them with this: Throughout the history of television there is one and only one constant.....there are 24 hours to a day. 

I remember when my pal Vince Manze and I were tasked by David Zaslav with helping launch Discovery+ and one of the selling points in the initial pass at the marketing was that there were 50,000 available episodes (I think) and I remember feeling that this wasn't a plus but rather an assault. There's just too much.

I think that some of the consequences of this sad moment in the business are the realizations that:

The industry is making way too much content

Broad is better than narrow

With proper planning and platform strategy (er scheduling) the tail for most programs can go out farther than ever

This moment is going to produce several creative ways of taking what already exists and either repackaging or expanding the platforms where it will be exhibited. Without breaking a sweat I have so many ideas on this. There is so much content that, if nothing new was made for quite a while, would the consumer even notice? I can't be the only one with a long list of relatively new shows waiting to be viewed and I've yet to see Tombstone or Veep.

This morning I fondly remembered the 2:30 Meetings and, in the case of IT'S NEW TO YOU, turns out we were right......just a quarter of a century ahead of our time.