• by March 1, 2001

By Ken Liebeskind

When Bob Wehling, global marketing officer of Proctor & Gamble asked Jamie Wellner, CEO of the WB network, for more family friendly programming, Wellner reportedly told him, "Put your money where your mouth is." And Wehling did just that.

Wehling launched the Family Friendly Programming Forum (FFPF), an organization of major television advertisers that pays seed money to networks to create scripts for family friendly shows.

In its first initiative, FFPF funded eight scripts for Gilmore Girls, a WB series about a single mother and her teenage daughter that premiered last fall. The pilot episode was from a script developed through FFPF, although none of the other scripts were ever aired.

At first, WB was the only network to participate in FFPF, but recently CBS and ABC joined in. Now, each network will receive funds to develop scripts.

Script development is only one of the things FFPF does. It also gives out awards for family friendly programs (Everybody Loves Raymond and The West Wing were recent winners) and scholarships to students studying television. It is all part of an effort to clean up prime time TV and create programs major advertisers want to support. For years, television has been criticized for excess sex and violence, with sexual content on 68% of prime-time network shows, according to a recent study.

"The issue for advertisers is having the proper showcase to advertise certain products," says John McKeegan, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, another founding member of FFPF. "A lot of shows are strong for adult oriented products, but if you have products to get into prime time early in the evening it gets much harder. From our standpoint, it's difficult to find the appropriate showcase for things like baby products. And a number of other advertisers feel the same way."

Johnson & Johnson is a major advertiser on Gilmore Girls, which demonstrates that FFPF's efforts could pay off. "This is the first show to come out of this and it's also a good show," McKeegan says. "We're pleased to be able to advertise there."

The FFPF was started by Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson with help from the Association of National Advertisers, the trade organization that currently runs FFPF from its New York office.

Of the 43 advertisers currently associated with FFPF, 13 contributed money for script development. They have reportedly contributed $1 million so far, which has been criticized for not going very far in the development of scripts.

But the money could help the networks develop new shows, especially smaller ones like WB. "We're a small network and don't have the budget, so this gives us more to develop shows we might not have done," says a WB spokesman who requested anonymity.

The problem is that most of the scripts that are developed will never make it on the air. "The rejection of scripts is enormous," McKeegan says. "Very few make it to the pilot stage let alone get