“Rather than just one promo,” said Scott Brady, WDRB’s creative services VP, “we launched a whole new news campaign. This was a half-day of tremendous viewing sampling with much of our competitors’ audience tuning in as well! The Strategy was Super Bowl Sunday rather than just the Big Game Ad.”
WDRB, Block Communications’ Fox affiliate in Louisville, Ky. (DMA 48), took advantage of the all the eyeballs watching its station before, during and after the Super Bowl to air a new campaign called Where Louisville Happens.
“Rather than just one promo,” said Scott Brady, WDRB’s creative services VP, “we launched a whole new news campaign. This was a half-day of tremendous viewing sampling with much of our competitors’ audience tuning in as well! The Strategy was Super Bowl Sunday rather than just the Big Game Ad. Super Bowl Sunday has become more like a national holiday to celebrate and recognize heroes for their courage, service, perserverance, and truth. The themes presented on this day are typically built around a sense of bringing communities together to inspire us all. It’s the perfect sync to the story of sports, which is not just about winning and losing, but more about the human experience in overcoming intense challenges to survive and thrive. This also makes a great foundation for a news image campaign. Capturing that human spirit on a local community level with powerful images, and sharing those stories to demonstrate why we are so different in our brand of storytelling.”
“We took a much different approach than most with the creative focusing more on powerful images to showcase our visual storytelling, rather than the more predictable anchors in the studio approach,” said Brady. “We made the message more about our community and our customer rather than ourselves.”
WDRB also aired a relatively new 60-second weather promo featuring 3D augmented reality.
“That turned a lot of heads here,” said Brady.
“Our weather department has been using augmented reality in their daily weather presentations for the past two years now, and our creative department took a shot at raising the bar a bit creating our own version of 3D augmented reality in a promo — pretty impressive stuff!”
Brady said because the Fox affiliates get a variety of lengths of avails on Super Bowl Sunday, the station produced some high-flying shorty promos for its upcoming Festival-Cast Thunder Over Louisville, a one-of-a-kind festival that kicks-off the Kentucky Derby Festival each year. It features an intense airshow with about 40 acts in thunderous flybys over downtown Louisville and the Ohio River, as well as the largest fireworks display in North America. WDRB has the broadcast and streaming right to it in 2020.
NOTE: Fox affiliates across the country took advantage of the huge audience delivered by the Super Bowl to create some outstanding news promos.
WBRC, Gray’s Fox affiliate in Birmingham, Ala. (DMA 44), unveiled a testimonial campaign from tornado survivors who thank the station’s First Alert weather team for saving their lives.
KPTV, Meredith’s Fox affiliate in Portland, Ore. (DMA 22), used Lego art to create a highly visible and original campaign for its morning news program, Good Day Oregon.
At KOKH, Sinclair’s Fox affiliate in Oklahoma City (DMA 43), the station wanted to “rock the idea of what news promotion can be,” said Ethan Edwards, KOKH’s creative services director, talking about the spot his team put together for the Super Bowl.
WDAF, Nexstar’s Fox affiliate in Kansas City, Mo. (DMA 32), debuted a music image promo using a hip-hop/rap song to seize the opportunity of the station’s 94.7 share of the audience with a rating of 58.6 during the Super Bowl.
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