A change of the calendar always indicates a good time to take stock of things. So, I'm taking stock here of the work I've done over the year, as a Producer, as a Writer, and as a Brand Manager. Most of this is stuff that I can claim some success with; others have tales of regret attached to them. In either case, here goes...
The year started with an easy call. Our local sports guy, former Philadelphia Eagle Vai Sikahema, had signed on to do a charity boxing event, rekindling an old athletic pursuit of his. (Later in the year, he would go on to fight Jose Canseco and knock him out in just minutes.) To play up the PR from the charity event, one of our gifted cameramen, Matt Maiorano got some beautiful footage of Vai's training. How could we not cut a spot from it?
Next, I moved on to a new sell for our Weather Guy, Glenn "Hurricane" Schwartz. The market was about to see a comeback from a previously popular weatherman at one of our competitors. We wanted to lay out why Glenn was the man to go to, and we decided that the best way to do it was to play up the obvious difference between Glenn and the "comeback guy". The most obvious difference was their respective looks; Glenn is a geek, while the "comeback guy" is Mr. Slick. We decided to keep the spots simple, cheap and unabashedly to the point. (These were inspired by the 42 Below vodka online ads. Careful, not SFW.)
In 2007, we had begun a new branding tack for Glenn, inspired by the idea of the Target Bullseye. As you may have noticed in the previous videos, Glenn always wears a bowtie. It's his signature wardrobe feature. So, we wondered if there wasn't a way to just brand him with the bowtie. You know, just a symbol that could represent him, our weather, and our station. It was just a hunch, but we have been surprised by how well it's broken through. Glenn came to us with a nickname, but we're making that nickname nearly obsolete with these spots. He now gets emails to "The Bowtie". He shows up for appearances at schools, and the kids are all wearing bowties. Now we just keep feeding the beast. Here's some of this year's installments.
This last one requires a little explanation. I talk with Glenn quite a bit. I find that it helps me write scripts for him, as I get his "voice" in my head. It helps, also, in discovering sells for our weather product I wouldn't have found otherwise. Once, I just asked him to tell me how he got into weather. Most times, that story would end with the following bullet points: Journalism school, reporting of some other type, moving around a lot, falling into weather. With Glenn, however, it's been a straight shot. This is what he intended. So, there was a spot just waiting there. The fact that he grew up in our market only helped; note the references to his high school (one of the area's largest), Herb Clarke (the market's first weather superstar), and his studying at Penn State. (The look of this spot was inspired by a spot I'd seen at Promax in 2007; an animated spot for "Pulp Fiction" using the screenplay's text to make the shape of a gun. This look has also been used for ads for the L.A. Times. We liked the idea of his life's story creating the icon of the bowtie.) A big thanks to Derek Robinson for animating this.
I saw a great spot from WPTV for some kind of plastic surgery once that I filed away in my head. It was so simple, and yet so entertaining, that I thought I might shamelessly recreate it someday, given the right story. That story came during one of our sweeps months, when the delicate topic of vaginal reconstruction was going to be addressed by our health franchise. Obviously, we can't name the topic in the promos - too fraught with peril. So, many thanks to WPTV for letting us emulate them on this one with their blessing.
In the late spring, our news department got the capability of doing a morning traffic ticker. It was a no-brainer to roll with it, as the dominant station in the market had adopted a "time sell" for it's traffic reports -you know, "every 5 minutes", or "traffic on the 2's". To boot, they had developed a catchy jingle for their "time sell" - a little song about it being "just 6 minutes" between traffic checks. So, we figured it was a smart move to position our sell as "no waiting involved" (although it's not completely the case), and poking a little fun at the 6 WHOLE MINUTES of our competitors. Again, we went for shamelessly in-your-face...
After making the point clear, we went for a little fun with our morning team. Here we paid homage to the Law & Order: CI on USA spot.
One more attempt at laughs while selling the same feature of our morning newscast. I wondered, what if we considered other things you could do to save time in the morning, but the options were distasteful compared to just watching our show? I have one regret on this spot: I wish I had written the copy "Better ways to save time than waiting around for a traffic report.." It would've worked better, but that's hindsight....
The summer brought the Olympic games and my biggest miss of the year. For the Olympics, we wanted a new set of image spots that would re-address the philosophy behind our slogan, "Turn to 10". A couple years back, I had written a series of monologues for our talent that outlined the philosophy, and they were received well. I've been fortunate enough to have viewers recite the monologues back to me because they found the message so clear and positive.
I set out to catch lightning in a bottle again, but through different means. This time around, rather than write more scripts, I wanted the talent to enumerate the brand philosophy in their own way. Now that's usually a mistake because what you tend to get is platitudes when you do that, and I'm violently opposed to feel good mush that doesn't mean anything. So, instead, I asked two members of our news team - Tracy and Glenn - to interview each other on their work, and how they pursue the brand philosophy in their work. We forbade them to speak to each other about the interview beforehand. I wanted unadulterated answers, reactions, and all the rest. And when we rolled tape, they delivered better than I could have hoped. The thing I'm proudest of on this project is how well Tracy and Glenn spoke to the brand.
The shortcomings here are entirely my own. Viewers started emailing us about hating the spots, and they had to be pulled. (Let me tell you... You haven't lived until emails flood the station calling for the termination of "whichever idiot came up with those spots.") After asking some creative friends to perform an autopsy, I see where I went wrong. I should've picked a less contrived location than our news set. I should've let the edits breathe more; I cut it so tight, that viewers thought this was a scripted conversation (again, a testament to how well Tracy and Glenn delivered for me). B-roll would've helped; some viewers just found looking at Tracy and Glenn the whole time awkward. Lastly, these premiered during the games, when a giant segment of the audience watching our air was not our usual viewer... I have to believe they reacted negatively because they were pre-disposed to.
In any case, we loved the spots in-house when we were done with them. And, I'm still convinced there's something here. For better or worse, here's one of them.
In an effort to tie-in with NBC's new "Chime In" campaign, we produced a series of ID's where we just had our talent play the NBC chimes, and tried to get their personalities to come through. My favorite is our morning weather guy, Bill Henley - his smart alek persona shows. Culley McGuire pulled these off for us.
Election 2008 gave us a nice chance to look civically minded. We rounded the news team together for a shoot in our department's newly finished studio. I can claim responsibility for little more than the script here; the rest of the credit for this spot goes to Joe DiGerolamo and Culley McGuire. I really like that this has a fresh, different look for a news team / community spot.
As you can probably tell by now, we focus promotion on our weather brand. Our station has a history as the market's weather player, although the competition has come after us over the years. Therefore, we've had to put considerable effort into making our weather sells as "sticky" as possible.
One of the annual opportunities we get is with Glenn's Long-Range Winter Forecast, where he predicts what kind of a winter it will be. He goes so far as to include snow totals, and other specifics.
In years past, we've turned the topical promo for this one special forecast into an event. Two years ago, we built a promo for this forecast wherein Glenn had superpowers. Last year, we turned Glenn into a mentalist with a gift of future sight in a spoof of the promos for the NBC show "Phenomenon". This year, we decided that it might be best to poke fun at those previous portraits we painted by engaging in some simple topical humor.
As the year came to a close, we finally went HD. As luck would have it, we simultaneously premiered a new and improved weather system on our air. A little advance panning made it possible for us to premiere these spots same day as the switch-over. There's not much to explain here, except to point out the "Heroes" shot. Inspired by a "Heroes" poster hanging in our offices, Joe DiGerolamo came through again here. Each of the talent is shot on a green screen, separately, with a fan to match the blowing winds in the spot. Special mention to Mat Mezer for the camera and lighting work. Here is one spot from the campaign.
It's not often you get look back at the work you've done recently and measure its worth, consider its shortcomings, and make choices about what to continue. All in all, it's been a decent year of work.
I hope 2009 brings you good work to enjoy.
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