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.