Market Column

Marketcol/turner/24/mike1st/mark2nd For Pete Noyes, a longtime TV news director who now teaches at Loyola Marymount University, the low point of the November sweeps came when KCAL-TV Channel 9 aired a segment on its nightly news about an obese man complaining he was too fat to have sex. But then, there were so many low points during the sweeps breathless exposes about UFO conspiracies, tasteless freak shows, live freeway chases to nowhere that Noyes had a tough time singling out any one news nadir. “This was probably the worst sweeps I’ve ever seen,” Noyes said. “I was repulsed by it.” Apparently, so was the rest of the viewing audience. Everyday consumers have been fleeing from TV news, turning to magazines, the Internet, or simply ceasing to care, and the erosion of the audience seemed to intensify in Los Angeles this November. On a Monday-Friday basis, most stations had double-digit declines in their sweeps ratings from November 1997. KNBC-TV Channel 4 gets credit for having the smallest decline in audience share, and it continues to dominate the L.A. news market. Nearly every one of its daily newscasts is No. 1, and during the critical 11 p.m. slot it leaves its competitors in the dust, posting a 19 percent share of the viewing audience. Its closest competitor, KABC-TV Channel 7, took a 15 percent share at 11 p.m. But the most interesting story of the November sweeps is KCBS-TV Channel 2. In November 1997, the station aired an expose of filthy conditions at L.A. restaurants that led to serious reforms by the L.A. County Department of Health Services. The investigation was a major coup for a station that has been flailing in the news race for the past decade. How quickly we forget. In November 1997, KCBS’s 11 p.m. news posted a 6.1 rating/14 share (the rating represents the percentage of all TV households tuned in, the share is the percentage of the current viewing audience watching that station); this year, it posted a 4.4 rating/10 share a 28 percent decline. “It’s inexplicable to me why they had the drop this time,” said Noyes. “The stuff they were doing seemed better than what was going on at the other network stations.” But if audiences were ever loyal to an individual station or newscaster, they aren’t anymore. As pointed out by Joe Saltzman, another former local news producer who is now associate director of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, the only thing that really drives news ratings is the programming before the news is aired. “There’s not a news program in Los Angeles that is so good or innovative that you’re going to turn to it,” Saltzman said. “You’re going to stay on the channel you’re watching.” That helps to explain the dominance of KNBC, whose network shows consistently get top ratings, and the failure of KCBS, which is hobbled by a prime-time slate of also-rans. “I find KNBC to have the worst local news, so why are people watching it? Because the shows leading up to it are far superior,” Saltzman said. Sleeper in Santa Monica Palisades Media Group has managed to keep itself a fairly well-kept secret for the past three years, despite the fact that it’s one of the fastest growing advertising companies in Los Angeles. Santa Monica-based Palisades, which specializes in buying media for entertainment clients, went from $70 million in annual billings in its first year in business, 1996, to $225 million for 1998. And founder Roger Schaffner is ready to stop hiding. Actually, Palisades is already fairly well known in the entertainment industry, but Schaffner has decided to branch out into consumer accounts. He recently plucked a couple of top buyers from Media That Works and Carat/ICG to start up his consumer division, and hired a P.R. agency to spread the word about his company. “You can only grow so far if you restrict yourself to one category,” said Schaffner, whose agency buys media for such clients as Miramax Films, October Films and Fox Searchlight. Schaffner was the head of the entertainment buying division at International Communications Group (now Carat/ICG) before setting out on his own three years ago. Some of his pre-existing clients, including Miramax, followed. His agency now has 25 employees and it plans to add more staff quickly. The new consumer division only has a couple of small clients so far, but it’s hungrily seeking out advertisers in the $10 million-in-annual-billings range. Sweet home, Chicago We often see big New York ad agencies opening outposts in Los Angeles, but it’s not too often that L.A.-based agencies expand to other major cities. Rubin Postaer and Associates, by far the biggest independent agency in L.A., recently bucked the trend by opening a full-service office in Chicago. It was a natural move for Rubin Postaer, considering that both its principals hail from that city. “We’re real comfortable with Chicago; it’s not a mystery to us,” said Larry Postaer, the agency’s executive vice president and creative director. Postaer and partner Gerry Rubin moved to L.A. from Chicago in 1981 to run the L.A. office of the agency then known as Needham Harper (now DDB Needham). They have maintained close ties to the city, and Postaer says most of his family still lives there. The firm’s new Chicago office will be managed by William Marks, while William Mericle and Paul Janas will serve as co-creative directors. All three defected from Publicis & Hal Riney, Chicago. They’ll be joined by 17 employees from a now-closed Rubin Postaer field service office in Arlington Heights, Ill.; that office was a local media-buying outlet, not a full-service agency. So far, the new office has no clients. “It’s a clean slate, but those guys (Marks, Mericle and Janas) are pretty eager beavers in the business arena,” Postaer said. “Maybe there’s someone in Chicago who’s looking for a mid-sized agency with major media clout.” News Editor Dan Turner writes a weekly column on marketing for the Los Angeles Business Journal.