Ten years ago, tsn and MuchMusic made their television debut and changed forever the face of the Canadian media environment.

In this special report, we review with David Kirkwood, director of sales and marketing at MuchMusic, Gerry Tymon, vice-president and general manager of TSN’s advertising sales house The Rep Shoppe, and Jim Shepherd, tsn’s director of client services, the major turning points in the history of each service, from both a programming and advertising point-of-view.

As Tymon points out, to appreciate the impact of these two services, one has to understand what the broadcast environment was like at the time.

Advertisers and their agencies were faced with a concept that simultaneously offered them the chance to target market using what they had come to know as a ‘mass medium’ and threatened to complicate the relatively simple world in which they had planned and executed their media buys.

The MuchMusic and TSN retrospectives start on pages Specialty 4 and Specialty 10 respectively.

Also in this special report, we talk to the advertising sales and marketing people at the new specialty services (Bravo!, The New Country Network, The Discovery Channel, Le Reseau de l’information, Life Network, WTN Women’s Television Network and Showcase Television) to find out how far along they are in their sales and marketing efforts.

With just three months until their January 1, 1995 launch date, most of the new services are scrambling to put together sales kits and make the rounds to prospective advertisers and their agencies.

And finally, on page Specialty 16, we have included a one-page guide to the specialty services, both new and established, that sell advertising.

The chart provides basic information about each service’s programming, its primary demographic focus, quarter hour average audience and advertising rates for a 30-second commercial in primetime.

The categories for the chart were determined with the help of Bruce Baumann, vice president at Toronto-based Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising.