Cable TV Sticks to Its Battle Plan in War for Audiences

NEW YORK — As the new TV season approaches, CBS, NBC and ABC will battle the still-growing cable dragon as never before. They’ll also have all sorts of new promotional schemes to woo the viewers who once routinely tuned them in but now have--and regularly watch--a wide range of alternatives.

So, is the stage is set for a major video joust in mid-September, when the networks’ season starts? Will cable take on the Big Three in a head-on war for the hearts and buying power of viewers?

Cable’s answer is no, generally speaking. Its big “watch us” campaign--but not its season kickoff month--will be in April, the same time as the last three years.

Still, one would think the young cable giant is ready for a September face-off. Cable is now in nearly 56% of the nation’s 90.4 million TV homes. By one estimate, there are 30 or more channels and 25 cable networks, with the major cable outlets alloting increasing amounts of money for original programming.

In contrast, the Big Three, which 10 years ago had a combined 90% share of the audience, are steadily losing viewers to cable and other viewing choices. They ended last season, one crippled by the 22-week writers strike, with a 68% share in prime time, their lowest in history.

Individual cable networks vary the start of their respective seasons, although several trot out some of their new programs in July and August, says a National Cable Television Assn. official.

That, says association marketing vice president Char Beales, is “because the networks are not competitive at that point and so cable really tries to get a jump on the fall season by introducing new programs in the summer.

“They (the programs) get a lot of sampling. . . . We get some of our highest ratings in the summer.”

Although viewing traditionally drops in the summer, that probably was of small solace to the networks in the week ending July 16--even with NBC’s All-Star Baseball Game telecast, their total share of audience dropped to 57%.

But the Big Three--whose executives bravely suggested in April that the worst is over and that their audience share will stabilize at 63% to 65% in 1995--are far from down and out.

While the cable industry is projecting nearly $2 billion in cable advertising revenues this year, upfront buying on the networks--commercial time bought before the new season starts--is estimated at $3.6 billion, or $4 billion if the upstart Fox Broadcasting operation is included.

True, a forecast by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency says that network audience share will drop to 60% by 1995, while cable will rise to 23% by then. But it also reminds that the cable share then, as it is now, “still will be fragmented among 20-plus cable networks.”

David Kenin, senior vice president of programming at cable’s USA Network, notes in speaking of the major networks’ coming season that NBC, CBS and ABC still “are in a very powerful position. They cover 100% of the country and have much higher ratings” than cable.

That’s a big reason his company, which with 48.5 million homes served is the fourth-largest in cable, isn’t about to joust with the Big Three as they kick off their new season in September.

USA never has done that, he says: “We don’t think we can effectively counter-program against that tremendous surge of power and money they display in their fall season. We more or less premiere things around the year, and the big boost is normally in January, spring and summer.”

Avoiding what he calls “this juggernaut” of season-starting September hoopla and premieres of NBC, CBS and ABC shows tends to be the norm in cable, where ratings for individual networks rarely approach or exceed those of the lowest-rated shows aired by the Big Three.

Cable’s closest equivalent to the big networks’ heavily promoted September kickoffs is its big “watch us” campaign in April, National Cable Month, whose theme this year was “Thirty Days of Great Nights.”

No theme has been announced yet for next April’s campaign. But, as in past years, the campaign will tout the various cable networks and their offerings on participating cable channels. But, unlike the Big Three, the campaign doesn’t premiere a flood of new programs.

Individual cable networks vary the starts of their big bids for viewers or start-of-season campaigns. A check with several larger services shows that they generally start their campaigns in the manner described by Kenin, or a month or so after the Big Three have fired off their September salvos.

USA, although it will add reruns of the CBS-axed “The Equalizer” to its roster in mid-September, will wait until October to double its ratings-getting original-movie fare from one to two per month.

HBO, for which viewers pay extra and with 20.5 million subscribers is the largest pay-TV service, premiered Lorne Michaels’ Monty Python-like “The Kids in the Hall” comedy series last month.

The service has four fights left on its eight-fight, $26-million deal with boxing champ Mike Tyson, whose first-round smiting of Carl (The Truth) Williams was televised July 21.

HBO says it will try to get a jump on the Big Three this month and continue its push into September, with another Tyson tilt and two new half-hour young-folks series: Jim Henson’s musical “The Ghost of Faffner Hall” and a cartoon series based on the “Babar” books. It also will offer a “preview week” look at HBO wares on basic cable--in short, a peek at no extra charge to viewers.

Come Nov. 1, HBO will launch on basic cable its new, advertiser-supported, 24-hour Comedy Channel, with rival Viacom’s “Hah” channel not due to check in until early next year.

But, as in past years for its extra-fee operation, HBO will “really try to stack our schedule through August and those first three weeks of September to build viewer loyalty and awareness,” said Seth Abraham, HBO senior vice president for programming.

“We can’t afford to wait to just be steamrollered over when the new network season begins. . . . We will come out of the chute early and with a lot of noise.”

Cable maestro Ted Turner’s Atlanta superstation TBS, the biggest general entertainment emporium on cable with 49.1 million homes served, also will try to get a summer jump on the major networks.

Turner has waged verbal war on the major networks. It may come as no surprise that TBS is doing the same this year, but with film.

“We’re starting our fall season, if you will, on Aug. 25, with the first of four movie festivals,” said Robert Levi, TBS’s executive vice president. The first, he said, will be called “World War II: TBS Remembers.”

That, he said, is an Aug. 25-Sept. 10 packet of such theatrical movies about World War II as “The Dirty Dozen” and “Patton,” and also two off-network TV miniseries, “Inside the Third Reich” and “Ike: The War Years.”

Showtime spokesman MacLipscomb Jr. said his pay-TV service, which it says serves 10 million homes, hasn’t a let-’er-rip fall kickoff, but is offering new wares--including Shelley Duvall’s “Nightmare Classics” quartet of shows--this summer.

But the company has no season that starts with banners and bugles, he said. Rather, “we are just rolling programming in” and there’s no “three-week key period where we’re going to show everything new we have.”

“Ours is not as seasonally oriented as the networks,” Lipscomb said, because the networks’ business “is based on the volume of eyeballs that they’re able to generate for their shows” and thus their advertising revenue.

In contrast, he says, Showtime’s goal is to provide shows that will drum up new subscribers and keep satisfying the ones it has “so that they continue to resubscribe on a monthly basis.”

This summer and fall, CBS, NBC and ABC, scrapping now for every possible viewer, are trying something completely different: cross-promotion campaigns. NBC is hooking up with Sears, CBS with K mart, and ABC will say hello in 5,000 movie theaters, all of this to let you know they truly love you.

CBS will even be pummeling airline passengers with its new-season campaign, having contracted with American Airlines and TWA to make that part of the in-flight movie package for the rest of this summer and into the fall.

New for the networks, but “that’s just a page out of the cable book,” says the cable association’s Beales. “They’re just mimicking what we’ve been doing for a long time.”

A prime example: HBO, which says that it’s had cross-promotion campaigns in past years with Hertz, Nabisco and Sony videotape.

This year, well before CBS took to the cabins of TWA and American, HBO already was promoting itself on those airlines and four others.

Excerpts of HBO shows precede the in-flight movies of TWA and American on domestic runs and on international runs of Pan American and three foreign airlines, according to HBO consumer promotion director Scoot MacPherson.

Showtime, which once had a tie-in with Sony videotape, also is in the cross-promotion derby again, starting in October with the Redenbacher popcorn empire for an “Instant Winner Days” campaign it will run on basic cable services as well as its own pay-extra channels.

Beales says the massive cross-promotion campaigns of NBC, CBS and ABC will result in a “high tune-in” in September:

“The real question is: Will the viewer stay with them. And all that rests on the quality of the (network) shows. Because once you’ve got new choices, people will go and check out those choices.”