The naming of Comedy Central.

Positioning Comedy Central (neé CTV: Comedy Television) by Fred Seibert

HA! didn’t work for MTV Networks (even with the super duper amazing work we did for them). The Comedy Channel didn’t work for HBO. So they merged in CTV: Comedy Television. Obviously, management didn’t have much of an imagination. 

HBO insisted that their guy be in charge. And after a decade of success together, MTV Networks insisted that Fred/Alan do the positioning and branding. 

I’ve always been obsessed with the way that Motown Records grew from a ghetto Detroit neighborhood by nurturing local talent in their rooming house-turned-soul-hothouse with all the means of production and distribution under one roof (it’s been the way that I’ve nurtured talent in all my businesses), and I thought that CTV should be the same hothouse for comedy. It was a natural. A 24 hour comedy network in the heart of New York City.

Fred/Alan creative director Bill Burnett was the perfect writer to lay out the dream, and completely nailed it. A rock’n’roller turned writer, he was the same age as Alan and me, incubated during the cultural revolution of pop that the Beatles ushered in and Motown thrived in. Based on the form that Alan developed over the years, starting with MTV in 1987, Bill would understand the idea and make it come alive.

Bill’s brand positioning document above put it right out there. But, as you read it you’ll notice he created the notion of setting up a COMEDY CENTRAL to do the talent cultivation keeps coming up over and over again.

CTV management bought the positioning, but more pertinently, they changed the name of the company. They never followed through on almost any of our ideas, but we renamed the network. And after all our successes over the years in developing channel trademarks, the marketing director wanted the glory for himself and ended up with the piece of junk (one man’s opinion, of course) globe they used for 20 years.

Ah well, you can only win some of them.

-Fred

…..

Comedy Central (aka CTV) Brand Positioning 
Writerdf/creative director: Bill Burnett
Executive creative directors: Fred Seibert & Alan Goodman
Fred/Alan, Inc., New York
1991

TV Heaven on the Radio.

Bill Burnett, co-proprietor of Stretch Media with Debrah Lemattre, and cartoon creator extraordinaire, was the creative director of Fred/Alan back in the day.* A few months ago he sent along these three radio spots for TV Heaven, which ran as paid advertising during the years we had repositioned them as the first oldies TV station in America.

We’ve already posted the fantastic animated VH-1 campaign Bill conceived with Mad Magazine wacked genius Don Martin, and we’ll get some more of his stuff up soon, including his strategy that ended up with his naming Comedy Central. 

Bill Burnett writes about the spot on his company’s website, Stretch Media:

“This series of radio spots for TV Heaven 41 in Minnesota are fun.

“We started with an idea inspired by that scene in “The Right Stuff” where John Glenn sees something freaky outside his space ship’s window. From Astronauts we went to Ancient Astronauts….ancient TV Watching Astronauts that is.  Explaining through television the many reports of crop circles, mysterious drawings in the valleys of South America, and deciphering  ancient ruins like the Sphinx. I wish I could remember the names of the actors who did such a wonderful subtle job with the voices.  They were (and I’m sure still are) masters. Play them all and have a heavenly time.”

* Bill was also the creative director at Hanna-Barbera Cartoons during my tenure as the last president of that world famous studio (before Ted Turner sold the company to TIme-Warner). He wrote a phenomenal series of essays about the studio where he positioned the company’s innovative philosophy better than any other time in its history.

I had a bright idea.

It was a critical time for Nick-at-Nite in the early 1990s. Fred/Alan’s innovation had already defied all odds by running just “reruns” and become one of the top rated cable networks. Better yet the channel was “branded,” which meant that advertisers would pay more for their commercials. But there were only so many ways to re-package and re-present old shows, and we’d pretty much used them all.

“What next?” was the theme of the out-of-office meeting that Nickelodeon President Gerry Laybourne called with her staff. Alan and I were specially invited guests.

We tossed around a lot of stuff, mainly variations of what we were already doing. But more marathons (“See all the black & white “Bewitched” episodes in order!”) or stunts (“The Nick-at-Nite String-a-thon!”) weren’t going to cut it; NAN was already the best in the business at that. Nick-at-Nite needed to do something bigger! 

I’d always loved The Dick Van Dyke Show, and we were about to debut it, bringing one of the great classics back to TV for the first time in a long while. It was funny (and 12 year old me had a crush on the young Mary Tyler Moore).

For a long while, I felt like an oldies channel needed a personality. We’d accomplished a lot with packaging and promotion, and over at HA! I tried like crazy to get then to make a deal to use Lucille Ball as “the patron saint of TV comedy,” but no go.

Now, I had a bright idea. Why don’t we actually hire Dick Van Dyke as the Chairman of Nick-at-Nite? He certainly looked the part, with a executive mane of gray hair and an authoritative mustache. 

Programming head Herb Scannell (soon to be CEO) upped the ante. He did a little back of a napkin math and realized the idea could be even bigger. “We’ll announce it as a million dollar deal.” Back in the day, there were no big deals being done with name talent, just little hosting gigs here and there.  ”Salary, promotion, and programming production commitments, we can swing it.” 

Sure enough, the announcement made headlines across the business, and then further, in newspapers across the country. Nick-at-Nite (and cable) was starting to come into its own.

By the way, those people in full dress with Dick up above. A rare clean-up day for the Fred/Alan staff at the industry event announcing Dick’s “promotion” to executive status.

Left to right: Robert Hunter (accounting), Alan Goodman (founder), Bill Burnett (creative director), Dick Van Dyke, Fred Seibert (founder), Bill Horvath (art director), Tom Barreca (account supervisor), Dave Landesburg (account executive), Lou Bauer (media director).

—Fred

The HA! logo.

HA! IDs 1990 for Fred/Alan from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Few designers understood Fred/Alan’s approach to television network logos as well as our first non-Fred, non-Alan creative director, Noel Frankel. 

Our point of view started to form after Frank Olinsky of Manhattan Design brought in the first iteration of the last presentation on the MTV logo. He thought that every usage of the logo (for shows, posters, ads, etcetera) should have a different illustrative approach. We then pushed that idea further and came up with the thought that there could be different logo variations working right next to each other in one piece. In a world where print designers were hired to come up with a trademark, and then motion graphic designers were brought in to “make it move,” Fred/Alan felt that television had become the primary platform for design, so the marks needed to take this fact into account. Build motion into the initial composition, don’t add it afterwards. Our feeling was that you could freeze any frame of our moving logos and use it as a print graphic. Tom Corey and Scott Nash at Corey, McPherson, Nash picked up on this as soon as we started working together, and embedded it into the Nickelodeon and Lifetime logos they did for us. Besides, we felt that a corporate logo would have hundreds of people messing with it anyway, so if we could come up with a way that each designer who worked with it over time could “own” their own designs, the usage of it would be exponentially more exciting.

Noel brought a level of conceptual and executional sophistication to the process that peaked with HA! A bit of background is in order.

In 1989, HBO announced The Comedy Channel as a basic cable offering that was meant to compete formatically and demographically with MTV. Having learned from Ted Turner’s Cable Music Channel that the best defense is a strong offense, MTV Networks quickly announced it’s own comedy network. Given our deep relationship as the original branders-in-chiefs for the company —and the incredible importance of brand establishment at this stage in cable television’s history— Fred/Alan was brought in immediately.*

Naming was the first challenge. Nickelodeon was named before there was even a company (or we would have come up with a better name), and naming MTV and VH-1 were completely driven by Bob Pittman’s focused leadership. So, for MTV Network’s comedy network the best creative minds in a highly creative company generated 400 names, no one could make a decision, so they asked us to come up with a name. Never ones to waste our time with a client who wouldn’t make up their minds, we decided the better part of valor would be to pick one from their list and sell it hard. HA!** was on the list, we loved it, and MTVN paid us a fortune to spend weeks convincing them a name on their own list was best. (So goes the game in corporate America.) 

Noel took it from there. He came up with an approach that allowed anyone who laughed to potentially be part of the network identity. A shouted “HA!” could emanate from anyone’s mouth, photographic or illustrative, and that would keep it fresh and allow for hundreds of fun network IDs.

Time was tight and the network needed to be on air by April 1, 1990 (get it?), a schedule twice as quick as the launch of MTV in 1981. Fred/Alan relied on producers we’d been working with over the past decade to produce the network ID packages, and they all jumped aboard and did some great work.

For those of you following our IDs for various networks during the 80s, most of these 10 second films won’t surprise. They were all good, but pay particular attention to the ones Drew Takahashi directed for his company (Colossal) Pictures (the X spots at the beginning of the compilation above). Always looking to innovate, Drew moved us away from the traditional 2D animation his company had done for us in the past and towards his passion of exploiting the then unique combination of video and computers. His pieces take the fun of Noel’s design and mashes them up with a number of television conventions from the vacuum tube days. Via early MacIntosh computers. 

HA! TV Comedy Network
Network identity IDs
Winter 1990

Logo design: Noel Frankel
Production: Drew Takahashi/(Colossal) Pictures SF, Alex Weil/Charlex NY, Marv Newland/International Rocketship Vancouver BC 

Produced by Albie Hecht, Howard Hoffman, Tom Pomposello, Chris Strand
Executive producers: Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert

…..

* No, HA! doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the Comedy Channel. After two years of slugging it out with each other, they merged into Comedy Central (named by Fred/Alan’s Bill Burnett) as of April 1, 1991.

** The one hiccup in the clearance for the name was that Jim Henson had trademarked Ha! (executed in a Bodoni bold) for his company Henson Associates. Gerry Laybourne from Nickelodeon negotiated with Jim to make it work out.

“The greatest hits!! of music video!!!”

13 second video jingle VH-1 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. This was the network that had my clearest fingerprints all over it, and ultimately became one of the list of reasons I had for leaving the business. In any event, the era of the early 90s remains a personal favorite of mine. But, of course, I’m biased (or maybe it’s just my age).

No one knew what to do with VH-1.

“Video Hits One” didn’t work.

“The Other Music Television” didn’t work.

And “Baby Boomers Deserve Their Own Channel” didn’t work.

Time for some Fred/Alan rebranding.

Tom Freston and I were having a rare sit down outside the office one day in late 1990 lamenting what had crashed and burned at VH-1. Launched as a “fighting brand” to Ted Turner in 1985, the channel had limped along never quite finding it’s way. Don’t know what came over me —maybe it was the continuing strength of our hit invention at Nick-at-Nite— but I blurted out that the “solution” to VH-1 was oldies.

“Music video is just about 10 years old, so the oldest generation of video fans is already between 35 and 45 years old, VH-1’s target. These people have no interest in the newest hair bands, they want to hear the music they already liked and fit it into a soundtrack of their lives. And this generation were teenagers smack dab towards the end of fast talking DJs and zippity jingles. Let’s remix the golden age of Top 40 radio and MTV and turn the channel into ‘VH-1! The Greatest Hits!! of Music Video!!!‘”

I’m not sure what came over Tom either, because he enthusiastically agreed and immediately cleared the way with management. We brought in a leading programming consultant, Fred Jacobs, who enthusiastically took to the idea and brought a lot of great ideas. We walked the entire staff through our point of view, and the reasoning behind it. As usual with a big organization, some people embraced the idea fully, and others were left grumbling (it wasn’t exactly the hippest solution, and MTV Networks was screaming with hipsters).

Creatively we went right to work, because there was a lot to do, and not much of a budget to do it with (remember, it’s not like the channel was in the greatest shape). The format was going to be like “hit radio”, with lots of announcer breaks (voice over only, no more VJs that no one liked), a half dozen “promise” tags (the station slogans), and, for me at least, the most fun was going to be using authentic Top 40 style radio jingles (more later). I enlisted Rowe Jones (we’d worked together on TV Heaven) to do an ungodly amount of daily work for us from his Florida studio; he would write, announce, and produce all the daily copy, and he became the voice of the network.

The jingles were going to be an interesting puzzle. No one on television had taken the 30 year, iconic sounds of hit radio and translated them, and while I thought the sound would be a slam dunk, the visuals were another matter entirely. At Fred/Alan we always thought the most provocative “look” of a network was actually driven through the aural passages, that television was, in fact, as much as an audio medium as visual. I went right the best source in the world, Jonathan and Mary Wolfert’s JAM Creative Productions in Dallas, Texas. Jon was crazy for the idea, and once we settled a few union singer residual issues, he dove right in, taking our dozen tags (from “the greatest hits!! of music video!!!” to “a-nother ow-er! of video pow-er!!!”) and constructing a classic sound with a totally 90s feel.

The video was trickier because what was a “video jingle” anyway? No one had done it before. Perceptual distinction was called for, certainly, but what did that mean? We went to two innovators for the answers. VMA winner Alex Weil at Charlex and Academy Award winner Zbigniew Rybczynski of Zbigvision. And over the Christmas/New Year’s holiday of 1990/91 they bum rushed the execution of flawless packaging for this sort of new channel.

Basically, the gig was like this: we had a number of different jingles, from three second “stingers” to 10+ second full chorus pieces. Both directors would use the exact same tracks, but lay over hundreds of video variations. There wasn’t exactly a budget for all that, but Alex and Zbig would develop a certain number foreground action with singers, dancers, and actors, and green screen as many backgrounds as could be afforded.


Fred/Alan IDs: VH-1 jingles by Charlex from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Charlex founders Charlie Levi and Alex Weil burst onto the scene with their 1984 sweep of the first VMAs (with Jeff Stein and my wife-to-be-10-years-later) for The Cars’ “You Might Think.” High profile assignments for SNL and Fred/Alan soon followed. We were all about the same age with parallel backgrounds and cultural influences (I knew we were in exactly the right place at our first meeting when Charlie made a crack about Fred Flintstone; very rare in the advertising world that someone would go so lowbrow). Fred/Alan actually became the Charlex ad agency in the late 80s. Nickelodeon, Myers’s Rum, and HA! saw some pretty good Fred/Alan-Charlex collabs, and we all had a great time doing it.

Alex Weil was the consummate confederate for VH-1. He had an awesome pop sensibility, but sometimes he wanted to think he was more sophisticated than that. A perfect conflict. And the clash was superbly matched to these jingles. Alex took to them in a heartbeat, reveling in the casting process and the dozens of different mix & match backgrounds he was going to put together with the logos.

My favorite accidental casting came about when Alan saw 1990s Miss Soviet Union and her runner up, beautiful blondes both, on David Letterman’s Late Night and got them over to Charlex the next day (the spot are in the package above). I’m sure they (or their handlers) had absolutely no idea what was going on or what they were lip syncing, but they were VH-1 stars for the next three years.


Fred/Alan IDs: VH-1 jingles by Zbigvision from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Zbigniew Rybczynski was a surprise 1983 Oscar winner for his animated short “Tango and immediately picked shorts assignments for Lorne Michaels’ “The New Show” (where we were introduced by Colossal Pictures’ Lidia Przyluska) and then a whole passel of innovative conceptual music videos and films. Always pushing envelopes with technical R&D, by 1990 Zbig was one of the first directors dedicated to video composing using (then) rare HD video cameras from Sony.

Watching Zbig plan a shoot was a fascinating and often confusing experience. He didn’t make conventional storyboards, preferring to map out the mathematical components of his vision on graph paper. The VH-1 one project was no different. Polish born, he didn’t have any of the nostalgic feelings for the Top 40 style radio jingles that Alex, Alan, or I had; I’ve no idea if he even knew what they were. So, his vision was starker and weirder, not one bit pop (at least not what I was familiar with; people in potato sacks or pajama onsies?). But, the way we figured it, we had plenty of pop with Charlex, and the pieces were just a few seconds each. No one could really have enough time to hate them.

By the time he was done, I found Zbig’s pieces mesmerizing.

……
Alas, “The Greatest Hits!! of Music Video!!!” was destined to be another in the long line of losing formats for VH-1. Our ratings improved dramatically for a little while (as all new VH-1 formats seemed to do) but really just sputtered along for most of it’s time on the air. I’m not exactly sure why it didn’t work, except that maybe our timing was off by maybe 15 years or so (music videos are the most popular film form on YouTube, the world most popular video player by a factor of 10), and it didn’t help that management was only going along because they’d been order to do so. Within a year they were continually undermining it, putting in their hipster touches all over the place. So, ultimately, it was, at best, an idea out of time, and at worst, just plain wrong. John Sykes came into the channel in 1994, hated (hated) the Greatest Hits, and instituted his “Music First” format. It crapped out too.

-Fred
…..
December 26, 1990 & January 4, 1991
Jingles produced by JAM Creative Productions, Dallas, Texas
Videos produced & directed by Alex Weil @ Charlex, NYC, and Zbigniew Rybczynski of Zbigvision, Hoboken, NJ
VH-1 logo: Scott Miller & Myles Tanaka
Executive Producers: Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert, Fred/Alan, Inc., New York

…..

VH-1 IDs Strategy Document 1990

Nickelodeon’s hero.

See more of our Nickelodeon posts here.

Nickelodeon: Everyday Hero on Vimeo.

Writer/producer Scott Webb is probably the creative hero more responsible for the Nickelodeon you love everyday than almost any other single person. It’s not for nothing that he began at Nick as a writer/producer and went on to become the network’s very first worldwide Creative Director.

In June of 1984 Fred/Alan was asked to help revive Nick. WASEC/MTV Networks management knew the success we’d had with the ‘branding’ of MTV (though the B-word wasn’t in use yet), and thought they need to taste more of our secret sauce. The channel had the worst ratings on cable and kids everywhere disliked it intensely. We thought the reasons were clear, Nickelodeon was not welcoming to kids of all ages. It looked and sounded like it was for babies, which was exactly American children thought of it. 

We thought the solution was to stop telling kids what was on (they didn’t really care) and promise them that Nickelodeon was the right place for them to hang around when they were watching television. Why? Because Nickelodeon was going to actually listen to them when it came time to pick the shows. No one else listened to kids, but we would.  

Gerry Laybourne and Debby Beece, Nick’s head honchos, pretty much gave us carte blache as to how we’d pull off this task to them. We, in turn, insisted they hire Scott Webb. Scott had been through boot camp with Fred’s mentor, Dale Pon, so we knew he was whip smart, creative, and strong. He had worked for Fred at The Movie Channel, so we knew his phone number. We knew that even though he didn’t resemble any other hack promotion producer in America (he was less of a TV head than a comic book geek) he’d have exactly the right vibe to reinvent Nickelodeon —and all of television— for the future. 

When he brought in the soundtrack for his first promo Debby thought we’d made a horrible mistake. It’s funny when you hear it now, but at first she thought it was too fast and that no one could ever understand it. (Put it up against any episode of The Fairly OddParents and it sounds downright sloowwww.)

Scott wrote this promo in a media vocabulary that kids would recognize. Comics was the image, “everyday” was the message (it wasn’t just Saturday morning for kids TV anymore), and fun was the takeaway. 

From this day forward, Nickelodeon would never worry about kids again. Six months after “Everyday” ran, with hundreds of other creative spots that followed Scott’s model of “talk with kids, act like kids,” Nick’s image was fixed forever. They went from worst to first in the ratings, where they’ve remained for 25 years.

“Positioning” MTV. 1987.

Positioning MTV: Music Television

Throughout the 80s, our in-house creative team at MTV had established all the original vocabulary (written and visual) for the channel. In 1983, Alan and I resigned and set up Fred/Alan as the media’s first “branding” consultancy and advertising agency. Bob Pittman was a smart and shrewd competitor; he signed us right back up. MTV Networks was our first client.

By 1987 we were being driven insane by a raft of new employees who thought they had the secrets of MTV in their heads, and kept telling us how to “improve” our work for them. The problem was, each and every one of them had a different version of what was right. We suggested that there should be a definitive (yeah, right) “positioning” document so we were all singing from the same (that is, our) hymn sheet. 

Alan wrote an amazing story. I should emphasize the word “story” because, unlike the marketing documents written by typical advertising geeks, or marketing executives trained at business schools, Alan Goodman is first and foremost a brilliant thinker who has complete control of the craft of writing the English language. He wrote a persuasion that thought through the issues at the network (advertisers aren’t sure where MTV fit into their 1980s conception of television channels) and defined within the wider context of media consumption by viewers (“Normal TV is boring. MTV is alive and looks interesting.”) His story had drama and conflict, and ultimately, a solution. And, by the way, he wrote my favorite description of successful media. To paraphrase: television can’t be predictable, it needs to be dependable.

(Everyone liked Alan’s piece so much that it became the template for the future of MTVN marketing. Soon enough, “positioning” documents became de rigueur. To this day, Alan writes these things, as do many other, less talented thinkers. MTV Networks doesn’t do much of anything without “positioning” it first.)

The result? “MTV vs. Normal TV” became the common thinking around the network for quite a while (I would argue they still try to think that way today) and became our ad campaign: 

“TV or MTV?”

We wanted to keep “I Want My MTV!” (which was created by our friend, and my mentor, Dale Pon; but we’d been the network clients for it). But marketing executives of the 1980s were already infected with the virus they have today. “Why stick with a working plan? We want something new!”

-Fred

The first oldies television network.

See more of our Nick-at-Nite posts here.

Alan Goodman and I invented Nick-at-Nite.

It’s funny to see it in print. Ted Turner invented CNN the Cable News Network, Bill Paley created CBS the Columbia Broadcasting Company, John Lack invented MTV Music Television. But, there it is. Two guys most people never heard of invented America’s first oldies channel on television.

By mid-1985 Alan and I had developed the branding and vocabulary for MTV and Nickelodeon, and MTV President Bob Pittman had asked Nick General Manager Gerry Laybourne to figure out what to do with the dark hours after Nickelodeon went off the air at 8pm*. Gerry and her team tried to develop original programming for a number of months before giving up and asking us for suggestions. We were ready for them.

A couple of years before PIttman had purchased the rights to 300 episodes of The Donna Reed Show, a black & white series from from 1960s, because they were cheap and he thought they might be useful someday; I’d heard about the acquisition and started hatching up ways to use them. When we became independent producers in 1983 we spent over a year trying to convince ABC to create an “TV oldies” show in their daytime programming block. They eventually passed. “We’re a television network. We can’t run old, black and white shows!”

So, when Nick came a calling Alan and I had worked out the whole thing in our heads. We could run an entire network with programming that no one else wanted, but was solid enough to get a good rating. Perfect for the audience and perfect for advertisers. Our channel would be the television equivalent of oldies radio, the most successful format in decades. Just like “The Greatest Hits of All Time” we wouldn’t try to hide what we were. The networks might have reruns (sad face), but at Nick-at-Nite we’d be RERUNS!!! (happy face!). It would be a blast.

The powers that be at Nickelodeon did not like The Donna Reed Show at all; it was seen as a pre-feminist throwback that set a depressing role model. I’d watched it for weeks at a time in high school during an illness, and figured any show that could hold the attention of a high school boy for weeks had to be, at the very least, entertaining.

We convinced them to give it a try. Look for shows that fit the budget, were good (meaning strong characters and solid stories), package it all up under our guidance, and go for it. No one was sure what we were smoking, but after our last ditch presentation to Pittman, met with smiles and enthusiasm, they agreed to let us at it.

Alan and I were at Nickelodeon everyday for months lining things up (though we were still ‘outsiders’ we effectively served as the channel’s creative directors for the next seven years). Programming chief Debby Beece came up with the name ‘Nick-at-Nite;’ and she lined up a great debut line-up of Donna Reed, My Three Sons (the black & white years), Mr. Ed, and Route 66. Tom Corey and Scott Nash had already designed the Nickelodeon logo, so we tapped them again. We had a couple of bumps with our Nick promo team, the most important element in our scheme, because a couple of them with hipper-than-thou and thought oldies TV was the dumbest idea in creation. We convinced them by pointing out we didn’t think we were doing great art, just “good TV” (eventually one of our cornerstone promises to the audience). Scott Webb, Bob Mittenthal, Jay Newell, and others wholeheartedly committed to our vision and created some of the most memorable packaging a television network had ever seen.

Nick-at-Nite was an instant success. Within months it was the #1 cable network in prime time. It started being referenced in the popular culture, and became shorthand for suddenly retro culture. In competitive research Nick-at-Nite got credit for any old program a viewer liked, no matter where it ran on TV. And, it paved the way for Nick spinning off the 24 hour TV Land (check out Alan’s first written “positioning” for NANin 1987, “HELLO OUT THERE FROM TV LAND!”).

In many ways, Nick-at-Nite was one of Fred/Alan’s most satisfying triumphs. Creating success where most everyone else thought we had nothing. It doesn’t get any better.

* Back in the day, satellite transponders were scarce and extremely expensive; Nickelodeon leased their nighttime hours to the ARTS channel. When they got their own 24 hour berth and became A&E the cost was too much for Nick to bear without hope for revenue.

—Fred

Positioning Nick-at-Nite

Black & White shows are worthless?

See more of our Nick-at-Nite posts here.

The year is 1988, time for our coming out party, the first kickin’ campaign as a full time advertising agency.

Nick-at-Nite had a big problem, and Fred/Alan needed to fix it.

Advertisers loved the Nick-at-Nite ratings (it was one of the top three primetime cable networks), but the ad sales team was inexperienced and unskilled, and they never knew how to answer the questions from the agencies media groups designed to push the cost of the spots down through the floor.

Primary among them was, “Why should we pay as much for your old black & white as for newer color ones?” Stupid as it sounds —the high ratings meant lots of the same people watching everything else on TV were watching Nick-at-Nite— the sales team thought it was a worthwhile argument.

For the first few years after the creation of Nick-at-Nite, Fred/Alan’s primary role was in the day-to-day activities of the network itself. Promotion, branding, programming, acquisitions, we were involved in every aspect of the channel.

Then, in 1988, our collaborations with MTV Networks had evolved so far that they asked us to morph our production/consulting company into their full service advertising agency. Not knowing all that much about advertising other than it seemed to pay a little better than consulting, we agreed.

Enter Noel Frankel.

The first Nick-at-Nite ad comp, on writer/designer Noel Frankel’s wall

Noel was an experienced ad man, a print designer and copywriter. Aside from his consummate  graphic design and painting skills, Noel brought a sophisticated strategic mind and, maybe more importantly, a twisted, quirky sense of humor. Perfect for Fred/Alan, which needed to start acting like we knew what we were doing. Even though we’d invented the Nick-at-Nite television network (a first —and probably to this day— only time an agency had actually invented a whole TV network), but now we needed to prove we could also invent an ad campaign that would solve their high hurdles with advertisers. 

As his first freelance project for us Noel brought in comps for the Mr. Ed’s After-shave (“A trace of saddle blanket…bouquet of pasture…”). It captured the voice we’d inpsired, but it wasn’t dependent on footage from the episodes. There was a slick, color feel that belied the show’s black & whiteness, and when the ad ran in TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, or any of the media trade publications, it would be a blast of fresh air. No network ever had such great fun with its own shows.

Then Noel adapted the campaign for small size, one color ads, and we added copywriter Bill Burnett to his team. If anything, Bill reveled in the weird even more than Noel, and the campaign started taking on some totally surreal tones.

The other agencies took notice. All of a sudden the networks started getting incoming calls looking for media time. The young media buyers were becoming big fans of the network and wanted their clients to be associated with our cool advertising; they started agitating their clients to get on board. Nick-at-Nite had solved their big problem.

Worthless? These worthless ads really put Fred/Alan on the map as an advertising agency with a sense of advertising way different than anyone else in the country.