My colleague/fellow suffering Mets fan Jon Lafayette has a fun story out this week about the agency giant MediaVest soliciting tapes from stations around the country. The agency asked 800-plus commercial stations to submit tapes about the station and the market, and “unique insights into the economy and culture in big cities and small towns,” writes Lafayette.
Around 350 complied, and MediaVest is keeping those on file.
Lafayette writes:
The videos are an impactful way of imparting the information. “What we really wanted to do was give them some visual capability of getting all the facts about a market quickly, as opposed to having to look through reams of data and books,” says Maribeth Papuga, executive VP, director of local investment and activation at MediaVest.
The tapes kicked up a whole range of local attributes that may have not been known to those at MediaVest.
KSBW in Monterey/Salinas, Calif., submitted a tape in which station general manager Joe Heston talks about the market, which features the top vegetable growing region in the U.S. as well as the Pebble Beach Golf course, along with KSBW itself, the No. 1 station in the market for the past 57 years.
In WBBM Chicago’s tape, Bill Kurtis and other Channel 2 news anchors talk about the Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the Windy City, its diverse and educated citizenry and its distinct neighborhoods. There’s even a sound bite from new mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“In return for being able to put some CBS branding and personalities in it, we put some effort into it, and I think it helped the agency and it may help us and it should help the market in general,” says Bruno Cohen, general manager of WBBM.
