Local TV news marketers around the country are continuing to rise to the challenge of working remotely while adjusting their branding messages in these times of uncertainty due to the pandemic. In Seattle, Brent Ayres, the marketing and creative services director for KCPQ, the Fox O&O, said that his station had to retire the station’s entire inventory of marketing messages and replace them with new ones during the pandemic.
Local TV news marketers across the country are continuing to rise to the challenge of working remotely while adjusting their branding messages in these times of uncertainty due to the pandemic.
In Seattle, Brent Ayres, the marketing and creative services director for Fox O&O KCPQ, said that his station had to retire the station’s entire inventory of marketing messages and replace them with new ones during the pandemic.
“Our marketing has evolved,” he said. “Our tone and style is more ‘conversational’ than over-the-top and fit well with a shift towards understated, positive messaging.”
Ayres and his staff relied more on using real content from the station’s newscasts to showcase how viewers were rallying.
“We even modified our tagline ‘All Local’ to ‘All Local, All Together’ which seemed like an appropriate, yet subtle, way to integrate our brand into the what was happening around us, while still letting the stories be the focal point.”
Ayres said there are many new challenges but the biggest is being ready and able to adjust to viewers’ habits and needs which seem to change each week, as opposed to over months or years.
“We have gotten very good at working from home, but are still limited at times by some of the speed limitations of a mostly remote production environment. Nevertheless, we’re underway now on new campaigns we think are representative of the way our community and our newscasts look now, while showing viewers how our brand can help make their lives a little easier.”
NOTE: I’ve talked to more than a dozen local TV marketing executives from all over the country to get a sense of where their station’s marketing is now and where it’s going in the future, all under the umbrella, The New Us. And if you have something you want to add about your station’s marketing during this uncertain time, let me know.
Click here to go to The New Us: Local TV Marketing 2020, Part 1
Click here to go to The New Us: Local TV Marketing 2020, Part 2
Click here to go to The New Us: Local TV Marketing 2020, Part 3
Click here to go to The New Us: Local TV Marketing, 2020, Part 4
Click here to go to The New Us: Local TV Marketing In 2020, Part 5
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