Reviving a 1991 music image campaign goes against the “grain of what television news is nowadays, but that is what we wanted to do,” says Cyle Dickens, creative services branding specialist at Gray’s NBC affiliate.
On Oct. 31, KWQC, Gray’s NBC affiliate in Davenport, Iowa, launched a news music image campaign promoting its year-long 75th anniversary celebration.
KWQC serves the Quad cities of Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island across the Mississippi in Illinois.
The news music image campaign, “Hello,” is familiar to long-time residents of the area as it aired from 1991 until 2012.
“Hello” was composed and produced by Frank Gari and is described as “one of the most popular local television campaigns ever made,” according to Bloomberg in 2013.
The campaign has been recorded with localized lyrics and images in approximately 120 media markets across the United States, Canada, Latin America and Australia.
Cyle Dickens, a meteorologist, and creative services branding specialist at KWQC, grew up in the Quad Cities area, and remembers the 1991 “Hello” music campaign fondly.
He says as a kid, he used to watch the news on KWQC and that news music the station used then had an impact on him.
“It just had a way of making you feel good about the news and about what you were watching,” he says.
The idea to revive a news music image campaign from 1991 started in a May meeting as management was discussing the station’s rebranding. Dickens says a lot of ideas were thrown on the table, including his to resurrect a 32-year-old branding campaign.
“I expected to get an instant no,” he says. But surprisingly, “every single one of us was on board,” Dickens says.
Part of the buy-in from the management team was familiarity with the Gari campaign when it was used at KWQC or at other stations.
Dickens says within about “six months to a year after we started running the Hello Quad Cities campaign in the ’90s, we became the No. 1 station in the country as far as share goes.”
Even though KWQC’s shares in its newscasts run between a staggering 40 and 50 today, Dickens thought a return to what worked in the 1990s, would work today, reviving what Dickens calls the best “marketing ever for this industry and some of the most successful. Nostalgia branding is very powerful.”
So, the station began the process of finding the 32-year-old “Hello” branding campaign somewhere within the station, hoping to use it in 2023.
Luckily, the station has a vast archive. “We don’t throw anything away,” Dickens says.
He found the audio master of the “Hello” reel and took it to a local vendor who had the right equipment to play the tapes.
“My eyes lit up,” Dickens says. “It was crystal clear and in absolute great quality.”
KWQC relicensed the music through Warner Chapel Productions Music, which owns the Frank Gari library.
Dickens says reviving a 1991 music image campaign goes against the “grain of what television news is nowadays, but that is what we wanted to do. We wanted to go to a more traditional feel and tap into our history. It just has a feeling to it.”
Dickens believes the return to unique local branding is key to the success of local TV news, adding that four stations have contacted him looking to get the “Hello” news music package.
The response from the community has been overwhelming.
Emails, phone calls and comments pour in daily, Dickens says.
“There has not been a single negative comment,” he says. “It’s been all positive.”
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