Title: Senior VP, sales strategy, Court TV
Recent interesting deal: “This past December, Court TV ran its second original movie, `The Interrogation of Michael Crowe,’ and General Motors was a premiere sponsor. As part of their package, they sponsored a commercial break which featured two minutes of program material, `The Making of the Interrogation of Michael Crowe,’ followed by a 30-second spot.
“GM was interested in assessing consumer reaction to their sponsorship of the two-minute interstitial and wanted to determine its value relative to a stand-alone :30. To accommodate their concerns, at the conclusion of the movie we invited viewers to visit our Web site and take a short survey. The questions addressed general attitudes toward the movie and the “Making of …” segment. We also asked aided and unaided recall of sponsorship of the two-minute spot and for the :30s that rotated through the movie. The sample size was just over 600 and the incentive was a chance to win one of three $500 prizes. This sort of problem solving adds a dimension of creativity to a negotiation and a deal.”
The next big thing: “The next big thing will be an intensified focus on measures that determine the effectiveness of the advertising environment, including audience retention, tuning duration, attentiveness, loyalty, recall and persuasiveness.”
Is there anything you wish you had sold more of: “It is one thing for a cable network to conduct proprietary research and quite another for a cable network to conduct research in conjunction with partners from the buying side of the business. Court TV teamed with Mindshare and Sears to conduct a study on the advertising effectiveness of a campaign that ran on-air and online. The synergy of media and exploring how they work together is a topic which has great relevancy and implications for the future of media buying. I hope we do more of it in the future.”
Is there anything you wish you had sold less of: “`Forensic Files’ in the upfront. It is such a hot show for us that the movie studios continue to gobble it up in scatter. I have similar feelings about our 8 p.m. original program block `Investigation Zone.”’
If you weren’t in media selling: “I have always wanted to be involved in the theater. It is a good thing I knew at an early age that I had no talent.”