Marketing News without Marketing Directors

Television marketing directors are dropping like flies all over the country.  At many stations the CSD position is simply being eliminated.  The promo producers are moved into news and sales.  This means overburdened News Directors now must take on the added responsibility for creating and marketing their product.

If you look at most of the major advertisers in the world, you'll notice few of them have in-house agencies.  After some rather scorching failures in the past, corporate America learned that a healthy distance between manufacturing and customer wooing is important for success.

The problem is that most of us are so in love with our own products, that we lack the healthy objectivity required to truly understand a customer's less passionate feelings about what we do.  We are proud parents who just can't imagine that our baby is not the best looking, smartest kid in the world.

When the people who make the donuts are the same people who sell the donuts, the advertising starts to focus on yeast ratios, baking time and glazing efficiency.  Because the donut company's ad agency is outside the manufacturing process, it knows that donuts are all about customer indulgence.  Great ad campaigns firmly channel the branding to the customer's feelings about the brand. They decisively move away from the self-congratulatory, in-house biases that come from working in the trenches each day.

News marketing that looks like news
As I take a look at marketing campaigns from stations that have lost their marketing director, I notice a trend.  The marketing looks a lot less like advertising and a lot more like news stories.

The number of shots and the volume of copy steadily increases.  Statements of journalistic ethics move to the forefront.  In general, the connection to the viewer tends to wane as self-congratulatory scenes of speeding live trucks, rain-pelted meteorologists, and harried reporters take center stage.   The marketing starts to objectively "report" the station's content characteristics, when it should be using that content to build a human connection on the viewer's terms.

When we look at other industries, most of us can easily recognize this kind of  misguided self-congratulatory advertising tone.  Take a look at this bad local ad for a local heating and air conditioning company. This ad is bad because it breaks some of the most basic rules of advertising:

1) It was created by and for the in-house staff.
2) It is self absorbed.
3) The only people shown in the ad are the company staff.
4) The only thing they talk about is how they do their job.
5) All the video shows employees doing typical work.
6) There is not a customer in it.
7) There is no customer benefit.

Most of us look at this ad and say, "I'd never do anything like that," but if you look at those seven sins listed above, a lot of news marketing fails on every one of them.  Sure, the promos we create have higher production values, snappier copy, and crisp graphics, but you'll notice a startling omission in most TV campaigns - the customer.

This next TV news promo was created by a well-meaning news director who had lost his marketing director. When he showed me this spot, he was the first to admit that he was not a marketing person and felt a bit out of his element.  This news director did what news people know best - he told a story, and that story is about why his product is great.   This promo has dazzling production values.  The news team looks fantastic.  It has a "big league" feel.  But when you really analyze what's in this commercial, it committed the same seven mistakes as our heating & air ad - this one just looks a lot slicker.

What you will also notice is this is a scene right out of a Hollywood movie.  It is sublime journalistic perfection.  It is a first-amendment fantasy and makes all of us who went to journalism school beam with pride.  This is how a newsroom likes to see itself.  Show this promo at the station meeting and all the in-house staff will walk a little taller, and be even more impressed with their own abilities.

Getting our focus back on the viewer
The promo never made the critical advertising leap to the customer's vantage point.   It is all set inside the newsroom.  You never see a viewer or anyone outside the station.  The station showcases its own journalistic priorities, and just assumes the viewer has the exact same motivations.  Unbiased, objective reporting that digs for the facts is clearly this station's top priority, but is this the top priority for the viewer?  Sure, objectivity is something viewers expect, but is it important enough to motivate the viewer to change her news choice?  Do viewers feel their current news choice isn't objective and hard working?

During these tough economic times, our audience is transfixed by their own priorities and problems - mortgages, raising kids, paying the bills and getting ahead on their job.  If the information we provide helps them to further those priorities, we win a fan. If our brand reflects who our audience hopes to be, if it connects with them on the core level of their values, they will switch to our newscast and keep coming back.

But if the brand we present narcissistically builds our own egos, endlessly pats ourselves on the back, and ignores the viewer's priorities, we brand ourselves as arrogant and self-absorbed.  Journalistic ethics are our priority, not the viewer's priority.  Movies like "Anchorman, the legend of Ron Burgandy" are a lot of fun to watch, but my guess is that the public suspects there is a little bit of Ron in all of us in the news business.

News marketing isn't a mission statement for what the newsroom likes to do, or a laundry list of exemplary product characteristics.  Effective marketing is a personal conversation that should be done entirely from the customer's vantage point.  If you are a station staffer out there on the front line each day, it is quite easy to slip into this kind of newsroom-centric promotion.  Because we are impressed with hard-working, action-oriented reporters, it is hard to imagine that our viewers won't be equally impressed by them as well.

Compensate for your own bias
As we move into the age of diminished marketing staffs and merged departments, it is important that those who direct the station marketing recognize their own very natural innate bias.  To effectively market your product, you must shed your in-house rose-colored glasses and approach your branding from a dispassionate outside perspective.  Often times, that means swallowing your on-the-job pride and owning the vantage point that a lot of customers have never heard of your product, don't like it, and feel it's irrelevant.

The job of an ad agency is to give the client brutally honest feedback about its product position.  Its job is to dispassionately assess where the product stands in the customer's mind, and create a realistic and pragmatic branding plan to influence skeptical customers who are already overwhelmed with advertising clutter. 

Some news directors can't stand to hear bad things about their product so their marketing never gets out of the starting gates.  Because they promote a product that only exists in their own minds, it never connects with the audience.  Embracing a product's warts and flaws are as necessary as touting its successes.   That marketing director who was outside the daily news routine helped to facilitate that honest outside opinion.  Because she did not make the product, she had a more realistic view of its customer appeal.  If your news staff is now handling your news marketing too, it is important to constantly be on guard that you're not kidding yourself.   Remember to take off the proud papa content hat and put on the skeptical and dispassionate advertiser hat when creating branding for your station.

Next week - news branding tactics that work best when times are toughest.

Graeme Newell is a broadcast and web marketing specialist.  He guarantees that his teasing seminar will immediately increase your news ratings or his workshop is free.  Find out more here.