The Blip Blog • Building a rising tide

Building a rising tide

Television networks, despite being mired in a distribution and business model first unveiled at the 1939 Worlds Fair, have some good ideas. One of those good ideas is cross-promotion.

Television networks use anywhere from five to fifteen percent of their advertising inventory to promote shows other than the one you’re currently watching. They do this to launch new shows, grow the audiences of troubled shows and build on the success of successful shows.

Starting this week we’re starting to experiment with ways to help shows build their audiences through cross-promotion. We’re doing this by reserving a small percentage of ad inventory (overlay and postroll) for promotion.

Our initial test will promote only a small number of shows. If this initial test is successful we will gradually expand the program to cover an increasing number of shows. We haven’t yet developed formal criteria for participation, but we’re generally looking for high quality shows that are either already proven to be very sticky (in other words they’ll make the most of each incremental viewer) or brand new shows that need an extra boost.

We’ll be running these promos on all shows that are opted into overlay or postroll advertisements. They will not preempt — in fact, they will be preempted by — high paying advertisements. They may occasionally preempt low paying “filler” ads that we use when there are no appropriate ads to show to a particular viewer or in a particular situation.

We’re optimistic that this experiment will give us new weapons with which to build show audiences. Let us know what you think.