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Published weekly...or so--usually on Friday.
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Fill Time By Building Your Brand
By JOHN F. KUCZAJ
Have you noticed anything about channel 32's news updates throughout the day? It seems like there are a lot more of them between 5 & 9pm. In fact, the 5pm newsbreak with Walter and (sometimes) Robin is a 2 1/2 minute newscast unto itself.
The current advertising environment is hideously thin, so TV stations need something to fill that ad time. Normally, direct response commercials get tossed into the slots. The classic direct response advertiser was K-Tel, but nowadays there are many different companies with direct response ads. The term direct response refers to a product or service advertised with a phone number or address for the viewer to directly respond to. Ever wonder why those ads appeared mostly during the day or late night? When buying the ad time, the advertiser takes the lowest rate on the rate card - let's say it's $500 for the 9am-3pm daytime block--and expands the time period parameters. For example, those ads for the American flag / pin / t-shirt / pen / g-string set are bought for $500 each and are set to run at anytime between 9am and 12 midnight. Normally, those spots wouldn't have a prayer of running outside the 9am-3pm or 11pm-12 midnight slots. However, with an ad market softer than its ever been, those $500 spots have a much better chance of running in time periods normally priced 2-5 times that. Stations have the option to let those cheap spots run in excellent commercial breaks, or they can just fill the breaks with promotion spots. Unfortunately, station promotion departments have an embarrassment of riches right now with all the time they have to fill.
Channel 32, in a stroke of genius, has decided to use some of that unsold ad time to ratchet up the newsbreaks and create the extended 5pm break. In the process, they promote their news in a more thorough way than their lame promos.
Wow, what an excellent idea! Could this also be the harbinger for a 5pm newscast?
THAT would be interesting!
Losing conciousness…giving butt-hickeys…making me woozy…
By JOHN F. KUCZAJ
I usually catch the last 1/2 hour of Fox News in the Morning with the cutesy twins, so I have been subjected to Bill Zwecker's segments.
I can't tell by reading his enjoyable Sun-Times column, but has he always been such a friggin' suck up?
If I continue to watch Zwecker, I am convinced that cerebral cortex will revolt and slowly compress my brain to the size of a baseball.
Last week he did an interview with Lance Bass, one of the 'NSync embryos about a movie he is in that was shot in Chicago. The questions Zwecker asked made me wretch. His strategy seemed to be "I'll ask a long and ponderous question, making sure to compliment him in many many ways before finally lobbing an easy softball." Bill proceeded to essentially tell Lance how great he was and ask how hard it is for such a great singer to act. Questions like that. Ugh!
Oh, sure, it's Bill Zwecker's job to cozy up to celebrities, but I've been watching Sam Rubin do it for three years and never witnessed him so brazenly suck on someone's ass. Then again, maybe I just missed it before and maybe Zwecker needs more leeway because he's trying to cover the celeb beat from Chicago.
But leaving lip prints on Lance Bass' tuchus? Too repellent for me…I'll be switching back to the old number nine at the first sight of Zwecker.
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Published weekly...or so--usually on Friday.
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