• by Ken Liebeskind , August 8, 2001

CNN Headline News didn't just streamline its news broadcasts. It streamlined its advertising, too.

The revamped format of the AOL Time Warner 24 hour cable news network, launched Monday, offers advertisers the opportunity to run their logo for five seconds per half hour below the fold of the TV screen. It's the first time any CNN network has offered this kind of logo placement, according to Greg D'Alba, executive vice president of CNN sales and marketing.

He distinguished it from the customary program sponsorship offered by CNN where an advertiser's logo appears at the beginning of the broadcast in a billboard position. The new sponsorship plays the logo during the program and places it at the bottom of the screen within the context of news material. The logo can also be targeted to specific parts of the news broadcast, such as business, entertainment, health or sports. "It's strategically placed sponsor logos," D'Alba says.

The company specializes in combo deals, with advertisers buying Headline News along with CNN and other AOL Time Warner properties. They can also buy advertising on company websites.

The first customer set to run below the fold logos is Bank of America, which signed a $30 million multi-platform deal last month.

No other clients have been signed because the new format has just started and the company is still conducting upfront negotiations. "We've completed less than one third of the broadcast upfront, but anticipate a lot of sponsorship activity," D'Alba says.

He thinks the network will sell well because of its audience composition (60 percent male), its heavy distribution (reaching 78 million homes) and its live visual format with multi-screen capability.

The changes in advertising accompany a format change that includes a bordered screen with bits of information such as weather, stock indexes and headlines. And of course there are the new anchors, including Andrea Thompson, the former star of NYPD Blue.

Harry Keeshan, senior vice president of national broadcast at Creative Media PHD, a division of the Omnicom Group, says the changes were made to "stop the fall of ratings toward MSNBC and Fox News at CNN's expense." The idea is to target a younger audience (the median viewer age is now 54), which is why the new anchors were brought on. "It was always Ted Turner's belief to just report the news," he says. But Ted Turner is no longer in charge. Now it's Jamie Kellner and Garth Ancier, the top executives at Turner Broadcasting System, who are behind the new format.

When asked whether the skew to a younger audience would bring new advertisers, Keeshan said he wasn't sure. He said he's bought Headline News for TiVo, Applied Materials and Breyers ice cream, but wasn't sure he'd expand the list with the new format. "It's all about ratings," he says. "We might consider broadening it out to entertainment based clients, but we're not sure yet."

The new format got off to a shaky start in the primetime ratings on Monday. The cable news network averaged 109,000 households and 56,000 adults aged 25-54 in primetime (8 to 11 p.m.) -- a drop of 25% in both households and in the key ad-friendly demo compared with Headline's July average.

Comparing Monday's numbers in primetime to Headline News' average primetime rating for August 2000, the falloff is 35% among adults 25-54 and 24% in households.

The network's opening-night performance was severely criticized by many media critics, who complained that the screen was constantly cluttered with headlines, sports reports, stock prices and weather maps. The steadily shifting text and graphics ended up relegating the onscreen anchors to a ghetto in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

For total day, Headline News averaged 136,000 households and 63,000 adults 25-54, up 11% in households but down 5% in adults 25-54 compared with last August's average.