This is another in a series of Marketing Masters articles about the people whose jobs are to get people to watch TV, specifically local news. Market Share is interviewing TV broadcasting marketers at the corporate and station level to learn more about them, their job, their company, their backgrounds, their beliefs and their goals. If […]
This is another in a series of Marketing Masters articles about the people whose jobs are to get people to watch TV, specifically local news.
Market Share is interviewing TV broadcasting marketers at the corporate and station level to learn more about them, their job, their company, their backgrounds, their beliefs and their goals.
If you’d like to recommend a marketer you think I ought to profile, even yourself, just let me know.
After 45 years marketing local TV at 10 stations in 8 states, Cil Frazier has retired. I spoke with Frazier from Birmingham where she will continue to live since she retired as marketing and community affairs director at WVTM, the Hearst NBC affiliate there.
Her career spans 45 years from her first job in 1971 at WQXI in Atlanta with stops over the years at WCBD, Charleston; WTVC, Chattanooga; WPEC, West Palm Beach; WVEC, Norfolk; WGAL, Lancaster; WBMG/WIAT, Birmingham; WSOC, Charlotte; WJBF, Augusta; and WVTM, Birmingham.
If you picture the retired-Frazier driving off into the sunset in an RV, you’re only partially right.
Market Share: So what are you going to do now?
Cil Frazier: It’s strange to think that after all these years, I’m not going in to work.
But I‘m kind of excited about what the future holds.
I’m going stay in Birmingham, I really love this place, it’s just terrific. It feels like its home.
I’ve been volunteering for a literacy group that puts me into a classroom once a week, with 4th graders, to teach them how to read for pleasure. And it has been a delight and very rewarding.
And I’m a member of the local United Way campaign cabinet, to contact media on behalf of the United Way. I want to still feel useful, I want to still feel like I’m contributing.
And I’m going to be doing some traveling. I’ve got a friend who around on an RV 6 months a year. It was always kind of a bucket list thing, and the invitation came and I jumped on it.
MS: Where did you grow up?
Frazier: Morristown, TN was my home. I went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. My first time around, I majored in journalism, but graduated with a BS in Communication/Broadcasting.
MS: What was your first TV job?
Frazier: WQXI-TV hired me in 1971 as a promotion coordinator.
(MS: WQXI was Atlanta’s ABC affiliate at the time. The station later changed its call letters to WXIA and in 1980 became an NBC affiliate).
Frazier: It was literally film at 11. Network promos came in on 16mm film. We had live voice-over announcers on staff to do commercials, promos, and tags. No morning local news, you had a half-hour in the evening and at 11 pm.
I don’t remember doing topicals. You had three network affiliates, there was a PBS station, and not really any cable. So it pretty much sold itself.
Fridays were always hell trying to finish 3 logs before midnight. Didn’t always make that deadline!
MS: Describe your job. What is your typical day like?
Frazier: There was never a typical day during my career. That’s one of the exciting challenges of being in this business.
Over the years I’ve done everything from pulling cable; reporting on breaking news; driving anchor-packed vehicles in parades to re-launching a station with an on-air countdown clock; covering master control during furloughs; executive producing local daily non-news programming to sleeping on the floor of my office during bad weather to make sure my station was first with the POP when the storms passed.
I remember producing live 24-hour telethons, getting no sleep while trying to raise lots of money.
Auditioning 4 year-old tap dancers for a month before the show to hosting Phil Donahue in town for a week of shows which included Julie Nixon Eisenhower.
I remember when I was in Charleston, there was a plane crash, and we were out of reporters so they sent me to the airport to see what I could find out.
That was part of the excitement of the job to begin with, you may have a plan when you come in, but once you got in there, your life was no longer your own.
MS: Which market was your favorite?
Frazier: I loved Lancaster. And Charleston, it’s just a beautiful place to be, right on the water.
MS: What do you like to do when you’re not working?
Frazier: I became an amateur radio operator (HAM) when I was 13, which instilled my love of broadcasting. I tried golf once. Sucked. Took up skeet shooting and am much better at that. I was widowed in 2007 after 36 years of marriage.
MS: What’s the best and worst part about your job?
Frazier: The best part of this job is the people I’ve met and friends I’ve made over time.
The worst part of this job is that it’s a demanding job that kept me from doing the right things for my family. My husband was having open heart surgery after a flat-line heart attack. It was the beginning of the May sweeps and I was brand new in Lancaster. I had to get back for May sweeps. Friends were there with him but I had to leave him in the hospital. He survived for another 16 years.
MS: How did you measure success in your job?
Frazier: That’s easy. My success is based on the number and caliber of broadcasters who honor me with a modicum of credit for their success in this business. I got my pleasure from the success of the people I worked with.
When I announced I was retiring on Facebook, I had forgotten about and was surprised to hear from so many people who I had helped along the way.
MS: What’s the one thing about your job that your staff doesn’t know?
Frazier: How much I care about their individual success.
MS: What can we do to recruit new viewers?
Frazier: Be local, be relevant. Invest the dollars needed to let prospective viewers know what you offer and when and where to find it.
MS: Any advice for young people thinking of doing this as a career?
Frazier: If you’re not a news junkie, you’ll turn out to be one pretty quickly.
They need a passion for it. The work is too intense for it to just be a job. If you don’t love it, if you haven’t dreamed of it, don’t go there.
MS: Anything else?
Frazier: It’s just been a great ride, most of my 45 years, I would say, ‘one of these days I’m going to have to get a real job, because this was such a pleasure to do’.
MS: In 1998, the news on WBMG in Birmingham was so bad, the station cancelled it and ran a countdown clock for 40 days until the station could launch new newscasts.
Cil Frazier was the station’s marketing director at the time, and she helped put together this video presentation which was shown at the annual 1998 Promax/BDA conference in Toronto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0LXp4d7ztI&feature=youtu.be
To read more about how the station blew up its call letters and became WIAT, click here.
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