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ABC Builds Its Brand Behind The Camera
By Marji McClure, Senior Writer
When John Ritter passed away last fall,
ABC Television Network advertisers were
unsure how viewers would react to the
return of his popular sitcom. Yet ratings
for a retooled “8 Simple Rules for Dating
My Teenage Daughter” surpassed
expectations. Word needed to get out to
ad buyers quickly on a local basis, not
just to national accounts. WTNH, the
network’s New Haven, CT.-based
affiliate, reported the news to its buyers
by 8 a.m. the next morning with a
document sent to its key account inboxes
with quality images and national ratings
it could customize. The core content
came from the ABC Network.
But the
customer strategy was executed with customer strategy was
executed with
a local touch.
The effort stems from May 2002, when
ABC created its myABC.tv initiative
to allow affiliates like WTNH to use
network resources to create customized
marketing and sales pieces. They
maintain the local look and feel while
keeping the consistent ABC brand.
Technology firm Brandopoly
(http://www.brandopoly.com) provides
the Web-based technology and manages the
servers that store ABC’s creative resources.
“[My sales
people] think it’s great,” says
Paul Spingola, director of creative says Paul Spingola,
director of creative
services for WTNH. “If you think about services
for WTNH. “If
you think about
how [buyers] typically approach the job,
they come in in the morning and the
first thing
they do is check their email.
So we’re able to get the email to them
with our name brand before they even
consider what they’re going to do for
the day. As they go through their day,
potentially making their decisions,
we’re top of mind.”
The
program, used by all 225 affiliates, helps ABC reduce production
and
distribution expenses while creating pieces
that have strong impact on local ad buyers.
Before the system was put in place, the
network created 100 different types of
creative on a market-by-market basis, says
John Nuzzi, VP of affiliate marketing and
promotion for ABC Television Network.
Some affiliates created their own materials,
which caused branding headaches for
Nuzzi’s team. “We would find out after
the fact that they created an ad without
our approval, and it didn’t have the look
and feel of ABC in some cases,” he says. “We
were spending a lot of money on
production for small return.”
ABC previously hired an in-house
graphic designer to create the documents,
print them at network headquarters, and
then mail them out to each affiliate
station. The new system removes this
entire overhead, leading to explosive
ROI of more than 1,400 percent in less
than one year, Nuzzi says.
The documents
created through the on-demand system have the graphic
template consistent to all ABC entities.
Affiliate employees log into a network
system to create their unique spin to them.
For instance, they can add individual
logos to the templates while
maintaining the ABC brand. For a sell
sheet, they can create a localized
headline (“WTNH Wins Friday Night,” for
example). Users then create a PDF file, which can be
printed out or saved to
a local computer. If it’s a newspaper ad, it
can be sent directly to the newspaper.
The system knows
each affiliate’s
preferences and where they are located,
so it knows which affiliate logo to use,
as well as the station’s location and time
zone. Pieces
are created in just minutes,
a marked improvement from a creative
process that once lasted two or more
weeks, Nuzzi says. However, ABC still weeks, Nuzzi
says. However, ABC still
requires approval of all materials before
they are disseminated by affiliates.
“It’s
a massive increase in productivity,” says
Spingola. “Where we had to take says Spingola. “Where
we had to take
many steps to get someplace, now you
take fewer steps to get to the same place.” Both
Spingola and Nuzzi say the system is very user friendly
and this had led to
easy adoption by the affiliates. “The
biggest surprise is how our smaller
markets embraced it more quickly than
our bigger stations,” says Nuzzi. “The
little guys definitely recognize the value
of it. I think part of it is they don’t have
the resources the bigger markets do.”
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