Selling Sex in Cable-Land

Cable World, July 25, 2005

More networks are pushing the boundaries to cut through the clutter.

By Mavis Scanlon

Sex and advertising are like baseball and hot dogs--they've gone together since advertising's early days, when the (mostly male) mavens of Madison Avenue deduced that a pretty face would help sell cars and beer. Off-air advertising for cable networks has been pretty staid compared to the average beer commercial. Until recently.

Court TV GM Marc Juris, who's charged with bringing younger eyeballs to the network, may well be the father of provocation. It was under Juris that Fuse famously plastered sex queen Robin Byrd on New York City's bus fleet as part of its 2003 rebranding from MuchMusic.

These days, even TBS has joined the fray, with its racy 30-second on-air and 30- and 60-second online promos for The Real Gilligan's Island that feature a coconut cream pie food fight between Mary Ann and Ginger. The longer version only is available after 10 p.m., and even comes with a warning: "The video you are about to see is recommended for mature audiences."

Speed Channel has a clever twist on the "sex sells" theme: When men aren't thinking about sex, they're thinking about cars, the net's trade ads assert. Court TV's tongue-in-cheek, double-entendre-laden ads for Impossible Heists are just the latest example of the trend.

Each network has different strategies, different goals, and different audience targets--some arguably harder to reach than others.

"For us to do a campaign like Impossible Heists, we needed to make some noise, and we needed to break through the clutter and we needed to show the marketplace Court TV is evolving," says Mary Corigliano, Court TV's SVP, marketing. "It's not gratuitous. It totally makes sense, and it's organic to the advertising."

The racier version of the ads ran in New York only, as well as in Entertainment Weekly and Time Out New York and Time Out Chicago. (TV and radio spots in the top 15 markets were far tamer.)

Networks buying media in New York are speaking to two constituencies, says brand strategist Lee Hunt: consumers as well as advertisers and their agencies. That type of advertising is targeted to younger, often male, media planners and buyers, Hunt says. "It's not just in the fact that it's about sex, but it cuts through the clutter," he says. "These are people who see so much advertising coming across their desks on sales orders that to be able to get their attention is pretty remarkable."

No matter how you characterize them--provocative, shocking, offensive or racy--just five or six years ago, networks, with few exceptions, were far more conservative with their off-air advertising.

"I think it's easier today than it was 20 years ago," says Sandy Rubinstein, VP marketing, Fuse. "It's an evolution of our society; our sensibilities change."

It's also a matter of taste: At first glance Court TV's Heists ads go over the line. At second glance they're rather silly and kind of funny. Similarly, Fuse's current branding campaign that takes on the hip but ubiquitous--and therefore mainstream--iPod might strike some as offensive; others may find it hilarious.

"We want to be clever and innovative and have fantastic humor and talk about what's happening in the now," Rubinstein says. "But we don't want to go over the edge."

Barring a mammoth ad budget, teetering on the edge of salacious is one way to gain attention, and--hopefully, for a network--the all-important "buzz."

"The reality is that off-air advertising for a television show has to compete with so many other products and services," Hunt says. "Not only is the television dial being fragmented, but people's entertainment choices are so highly fragmented now that being able to sell a show off-air is really difficult."

[Copyright 2005 Access Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved.]