The New Us

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 is where viewers are turning now because the COVID-19 pandemic is a neighborhood story. And it’s not going away any time soon, it appears. Creative services directors from markets in Florida, Virginia and Indiana share their most recent marketing messages. The phrase “information you need” is truer now than maybe it’s ever been.

Local TV marketers are navigating new territory so far in 2020 that few could have seen coming.  In San Antonio, KSAT launched a campaign called the Trust Index, a vetting process to separate true reporting from false. And in Richmond, Va., after 36 days of civil unrest, WRIC tries a tricky approach to its marketing.

Marketing at TV stations across the country is undergoing a metamorphosis of sorts in 2020. In this first of a multi-part series, I share the work — and the thinking behind it — of local TV marketing executives to see how it’s changed to reflect the news events so far this year.