• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 13, 2011

Take down the filters, and your ratings will go up. That's one theory, anyway. During a recent Promax conference in Las Vegas, Joe Early, president of marketing for Fox Broadcasting, said there is more marketing impact when viewers don't expect messaging for new TV shows, when "they don't have their filter [sic] up."

For example, looking at Simon Cowell's smiling face for Fox's "The X Factor" on a grocery aisle shopping cart might make me sit up and take notice.

Yet Sinclair Broadcast Group programming chief Bill Butler said at the PROMAX event: "You like to think it helps the affiliates, but a theme park ride or kiosk does nothing for ratings in Indianapolis."

Near-term, that sounds about right, and goes to the age-old argument that nothing promotes TV shows like TV.

But it's a changing world. As much as networks and syndicaters want stations to promote their shows on-air, they face local ratings erosion. So many of them are pushing stations to expand promotional horizons through, for example, social media efforts.

New shows expecting high ratings, like "The X Factor," deserve that. Many stations have already hopped on board the social media promotion train for what turned out to be big-rated shows. Just this spring, NBC's "The Voice" got some push from stations' social media efforts.

The problem is that networks want to try something new while stations want the tried and true -- or at least something a little closer to home.

We see large numbers of comments and unique visitors for TV's big shows on Twitter -- and also good traffic for smaller cable shows. But deriving meaning from this is something else. It's tough to figure out the exact correlation between buzz and its effect on shows.

Filtering? Sure, when my guard is down, you can get some awareness. But intent is another story; it's a lot more complicated to make a TV selection when I'm also filtering seemingly thousands of Internet messages for home mortgages, new iPad covers, or liquid energy drinks.