Kathleen Bazkur – Director, On-Air Promotion

Su Grimmer – Vice-President, Sales

Susan Ross – Vice-President, Marketing

YTV, Toronto

Q. How, from a marketing perspective, are you preparing yourself for the arrival of new specialty services?

A. sr – It depends on what services are licensed. If it is a service that could potentially erode a portion of our audience, then, obviously, our strategy will be different than if it’s six country and western music channels.

At any rate, it will be important for us to retain our identity. We think we have a very strong identity, high awareness levels. We just have to continue to develop and refine our personality.

sg – From an agency standpoint, we have carved out a clear niche in the agency’s mind, and we will continue to reinforce that, in everything that we do, from our sales tapes, to the look of our presentation kits, to the way we present the station. It’s imperative that we never flag in our efforts to keep ytv ‘in their face.’

From my own standpoint, the ones that have the most to fear [from the introduction of new specialty services and Death Stars] are not the specialty channels because we have done such a good job of doing what the conventional broadcasters have yet to catch up on, and that is finding a market and going like hell after it.

I think the term ‘broadcaster’ is almost obsolete, and if you look at what [Toronto’s] Citytv is doing, where they are carving out a niche for themselves in news, music and movies, they are saying, ‘The writing’s on the wall. Even though I’m a conventional broadcaster, I’m going to have to start carving up a slice of that pie.’

Q. If you liken the television market to a candy bar counter, what are you doing to make ytv stand out from the competition?

A. kb – The thing that runs across a lot of what we do in terms of our identity on air is energy. That’s a very good fit for a network that’s about kids and families. We don’t believe tv is passive. We want to shake things up, involve the viewer, get television out of a sedentary mode.

Interactivity

sg – Interactivity is very much a catchword these days. Especially with kids and ‘tweens, they are very fickle viewers. We try to make [our programming] something they can respond to, either by dialing in to give an answer, or writing in. They have a say in what is happening on the station and that’s fed back to them.

To give you an example, on New Year’s Day we staged a Warren the Grog takeover of the station. Warren is one of our well-known puppet characters that is part of a program segment on ytv. All through December we built a promotion in which we asked kids to ‘program the network.’ The response rate was astronomical.

To give you another example, one of our premiere properties against kids and ‘tweens is a program called Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Hallowe’en promo

We ran a promotion leading up to the day before Hallowe’en, where we asked kids, ‘Do you have the nerve to watch five back-to-back episodes? If you do, we’ll ask you to respond to questions that will pyramid-build during the course of these five half-hours.’

We did this not knowing that we would shut down New Brunswick’s long-distance lines, which is where the 800 lines fed into. We received over 750,000 attempts from kids wanting to interact that evening.

kb – We want to disprove that our kids are couch potatoes. They want to be involved. We’ve always believed that.

Q. How are you communicating your identity to your viewers?

A. kb – We’re building promotions in which they can get involved. One of our basic positioning rules is that ‘we care about what you think.’

That is reinforced daily by our pjs [program jockeys] and Grogs. They talk directly to the viewer, they put up their names, our address constantly.

sr – We have a kids club that’s four years old, which is a really important interactive tool.

Members get a membership certificate and quarterly newsletter. The newsletter outlines programming information, contests, interactive games, plus sponsor information. We’ve given out crayons and sampled gum through the mailing lists.

It gives kids a chance to write in and participate in contests, plus it gives us a chance to position ourselves on a regular basis. We have 18,000 members and we are looking at trying to increase that over the next year to about 45,000 members.

There is no charge to join the club. It’s really a question of us maintaining the cost of running it. We’re now looking at bringing in partners, advertisers, to help us offset the costs.

Q. How are you communicating ytv’s identity to media buyers and advertisers?

A. sg – I can’t get away from having to tumble the numbers because my stock in trade is numbers. Sometimes the ‘amazing color brochure’ is going to do diddly squat.

However, we did something fun and radical with my sales presentation tape this year. We used our on-air Grog characters to do the presentation. We positioned it against an adult, but we used the energy and fun that the station’s all about to get the message across. The recall was amazing.

Another time we used puppets. Here are these very serious reps, standing in front of media departments, making presentations with these crazy puppets on their hands. I can’t tell you how many agency people remembered our presentation.

Q. What new marketing tools are you using to help in your branding efforts?

A. sg – Our relationship with Pizza Hut [Tuesday is YTV Kids’ Night at Pizza Hut] is a perfect example of that and we are taking that one step further in the spring where some of our characters that are on air will also be made into premium incentive items that we give out at Pizza Hut.

Something else we’re doing – YTV News has become a very successful property for us. It was a pilot project that we started a year ago, to present news to kids and ‘tweens in a palatable way. It’s a fundamental marker in our outreach program into the school system.

We approached a group of radio stations across the country, 40 in all, with like demographics, and said to them, ‘We would like to air a two-minute program on your stations, twice a week, identified as YTV News. We will, in turn, cross-promote the stations broadcasting this, so we’ll reinforce each other in programs of like audience.’

These media partnerships are something we are planning on continuing.