Rick Lewchuk, former CNN marketing VP, is working with several TV stations to help them with their news marketing. “We talk about focusing on where they need to have growth right now.”
Rick Lewchuk, a former CNN marketing VP, and founder and head coach of Film at 11, is working with several TV stations to help them with their news marketing.
Although Lewchuk wants to keep confidential the stations he’s working with, they are in medium and large markets.
He’s limiting his active client list to three stations and his going-in fee is “not breaking anybody’s bank,” he says.
In a February 2023 Market Share column, I reported Lewchuk was hanging out his shingle at Film at 11 after more than 10 years as SVP of creative marketing and brand standards for CNN Worldwide. During that time, his team won the Promax Global Marketing Team of the Year six times in a row.
In that column, Lewchuk said his experience could help local TV news broadcasters, and that he could “parachute into places that need help.”
Lewchuk says in the markets where he’s working right now, the marketing director approached the general manager and said, “we need help.”
“That has been really, really nice to see that the general managers are willing to support the marketing directors in that way,” Lewchuk says.
He says once he’s signed on to help, the first thing he does is go to the station. “That is Day One on the job. I go to the station wherever it is in the country because I need to talk to people in person. I talk to everybody. I talk to the GM, the marketing team, the news people. They need to understand I am not threatening, that I am there to help them.”
Lewchuk says the “research people are really key, and they are probably one of my strongest allies within the station because they see a lot of what’s happening. We talk the same language on a lot of places.”
Getting research on board provides the foundation for the next steps in marketing, why certain ways of marketing make or may not work depending on the strength of the station’s position in the market.
“It’s not just me coming in with my opinion,” he says. “Every station in the market is not the same depending on whether you are number one, two, three, four or five.”
One of the first places Lewchuk looks to get a handle on the current marketing situation is the station’s log, how much inventory marketing has and how is it being used.
“What I find is the stations are trying to do too much,” he says, meaning too many different marketing messages on the air at the same time.
Lewchuk works with the station management team to try to focus “on what the most important thing is really, what is their A priority. We talk about focusing on where they need to have growth with right now.”
Lewchuk says he tries to get the stations to focus on the money. Where are the payoffs? The station’s website? Its apps? Its newscasts? And which one?
“What are they going to get from your newscast that they are not going to get from any of the other newscasts,” Lewchuk says. “If you are the only one doing a report about something out there that is important to your key viewers, then that is really important to promote. The news people get excited when you start talking about that because then they start looking at what are they doing that is special that the others in the market aren’t doing. And when you start promoting that, they are very happy about it.”
In the end, Lewchuk works with the stations to develop a marketing plan for the whole year.
So far, it’s been a good experience.
“Rightly or wrongly, somebody like me coming from the outside, [and having] worked at CNN for a decade gets everyone on board,” he says. “They sometimes pay more attention to it even though somebody could have been saying it internally. So, a lot of times it’s just reminders of stuff people already know.”
Lewchuk says his goal is to “go in and help these places and move on and leave them more self-sufficient. If anyone still has me around after six months, then I haven’t done my job.”
Comments (0)
Reader Interactions