Do viewers know who your news personalities are? Could they recognize them and know their names? Does your news anchor or chief meteorologist introduce themselves every time in your daily news topicals? Here in the Philadelphia-area, if I showed 100 people a picture of Jim Gardner, the main news anchor for WPVI, the ABC O&O […]
Do viewers know who your news personalities are? Could they recognize them and know their names? Does your news anchor or chief meteorologist introduce themselves every time in your daily news topicals?
Here in the Philadelphia-area, if I showed 100 people a picture of Jim Gardner, the main news anchor for WPVI, the ABC O&O here, 99 of them would know who Gardner is and where he works. The one who couldn’t probably hasn’t watched TV in the last 37 years, since Gardner first started anchoring Action News.
Yet even with that much familiarity, every night when he does the 11 p.m. news topicals that air in ABC prime programming, his first words are, “I’m Jim Gardner.” Early in my career, at an ad agency that specialized in media marketing, I learned the value of ID/Recognition — the name, the face, the place.
On-air personalities are measured by their “Q” scores, which identifies their familiarity and appeal. Do they know who you are by name? Do they like you? So whenever one of our local TV station clients hired a major news on-air talent, we welcomed them into town with an ID/Recognition spot.
And if their name was unusual, or difficult to pronounce, we would mangle their name as a way to help people remember it.
Here’s how WPVI is getting viewers to know, and hopefully like, their sports anchor, Ducis Rogers.
And click here to find out who are the most and least liked of network TV news personalities.
Comments (0)
Reader Interactions