Commentary

TV Promo Season Goes Into Overdrive

An initially enticing promo last night from Fox went like this: "Join Jessica Simpson and Dane Cook as they host 'Teen Choice 2006' with all your favorite stars. And with a first time anywhere, live performance by... Kevin Federline!"

Can't wait. Talk about your build-up/let-downs. Guess Federline's wife wasn't available.

One thing for sure:  It's the first time anywhere this season for underselling a network TV show.  Of course, Federline is Britney Spear's husband, and from what we can gather from his resume, a dancer, who likes wearing 1940s style hats. As you can see from the promo, he'll do a little singing--hip-hop--for our listening pleasure. 

TV promo creatives are now working overtime--so you can excuse some late-in-the-season creative exhaustion. With just a couple of weeks to go before the start of the fall season, TV promos are in full swing. Networks have seen new show tracking studies, so they now know which shows will need just a reminder for viewers to watch, and which will demand a bigger kick in the pants.

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It's also time for viewers to weed out the contenders from the pretenders. It's a tough job; they have to work quickly against quick-moving TV promos.

NBC walks right down the middle in offering up a simple sales line for Aaron Sorkin's "Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip": "The stars are about to collide."  

The double entendre works. First, there are the stars in the fictional world of the show, which is about a sketch comedy program in the vein of "Saturday Night Live." Then, there are the really big stars acting in this series--Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet, D.L. Hughley, Steven Weber, and Timothy Busfield.

A voiceover in the TV promo adds this: "The creator of 'The West Wing' is about to do to TV... what he did to the White House!"

That's hard to beat, marketing-wise. One has to least give the show a look--and that's all the marketing folks need at NBC.  The rest is up to Aaron Sorkin, the creator of "The West Wing." Maybe viewers don't know his name--exactly--but they surely know the brand, "The West Wing." There was no mention that this was the creator who "brought you 'Sports Night.'"

It's a TV promo garden of delights:  Sorkin, Federline, the famous, the not-so-famous, the potential hits, the surefire flops. Surprises are everywhere. If brands are everything, maybe Federline should bang out a hip-hop version of "Baby One More Time."

In this garden, hit some happy TV weeding.

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