Back to the Future

May 9, 2006 - MediaPostPublications

Will TV return to its single-sponsor glory days?

It seems that 1948 was a very good year for television. There were more than 900 advertisers on TV that year, an astounding 515 percent increase over 1947. "The Ed Sullivan Show," sponsored by Lincoln-Mercury, premiered. B.F. Goodrich sponsored a new series with radio crossover stars George Burns and Gracie Allen. And Milton Berle stole the small screen in September of that year, when "Texaco Star Theater" launched.

With the 2006-2007 upfront upon us, branded entertainment, the "It Girl" of contemporary marketing, is sure to be a heated contender in the annual tug-of-war. But will a return to those lone-ranger days of single-sponsored programming be part of the wrangling?

Yes. And no. Maybe. Depends on whom you ask. But the subject is hot.

In 2005, former Initiative Media CEO and now marketing and media consultant Michael Kassan undertook a study on the future of TV for a large media conglomerate with cable and broadcast properties. He interviewed chief marketing officers at ad agencies around the country. When asked about the prospects for a return to something like "Texaco Star Theater," Kassan says he's heard a lot of talk about it, but thinks "the networks are nervous; they're not getting behind it yet. And still, to their credit, they're smart enough to say, wait a minute, we better look at it."

However, even proponents admit the price of a single-sponsor venture today would be daunting. Cost, in fact, is the largest objection raised by people who don't believe single sponsorship of network shows, with the tens of millions of dollars it would cost, could work anymore.

"The economics just aren't there," says media consultant Erwin Ephron, partner in New York's Ephron, Papazian & Ephron. "The yield to the selling network has to be at a certain point. So the cost to the advertiser becomes extremely high and what he is buying is frequency, he's not buying reach. And most advertisers do not have a range of commercials to justify that. Whenever these things have been done in recent years, they've been done as event marketing and that's fine, like Ford did with the TV broadcast of 'Schindler's List.' It's much bigger than a TV event. That you can justify perhaps, but even that is hard," Ephron says.

Coming up with novel uses of single sponsorship beyond running the same spots over and over is indeed an obstacle. And in a media world obsessed with "engagement," the challenge be-comes that much tougher. In the 21st century, as mpg CEO Charlie Rutman observes, "It's a good thing to be in a lot of places." Besides, he says he doesn't think "a whole season [of sole sponsorship] is economically viable."

But there may be new life for the old single-sponsor gambit in emerging media like broadband and the Internet. "We're not going to return to 'Texaco Star Theater' or 'Hallmark Hall of Fame,' but it could possibly work with emerging media forms, at least in the short term," says Larry Blasius, executive vice president/director, negotiations for Magna Global, whose client Johnson & Johnson scored Emmys in the past three years for an acclaimed series of eponymous Spotlight cable movies. "It's already being done in broadband and other [emerging media] areas because the economics are such that you can do that," Blasius says.

"From a TV perspective, single sponsorship is old tech," adds Brian Terkelsen, senior vice president/ director of entertainment marketing at MediaVest. "From a new media perspective, it isn't necessarily old and therefore it's being tested there. You see brands road-blocking Web sites."

For Terkelsen, single sponsorship has no place in a brave new world in which the water-cooler TV show is an endangered species. "We're not creating a new dialogue with consumers by going back 50 years," he concludes. "We're just pulling something up from a half-century ago, dusting it off and re-applying it. What we're striving for, what everybody should be struggling to figure out, is how to better connect with consumers. They may appreciate limited commercial interruption, but it is not delivering a big brand message without the proper context being added."