Word: networks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wondering where to spin your TV dial this September, drop by any of the discount retailer's 2,200 stores. You will be regaled with signs and posters trumpeting CBS shows. Every TV set in the store will be tuned to CBS as well. The chain and the network are even teaming up to promote the CBS/K mart Get Ready Giveaway. The contest, to be advertised on the air and in K mart newspaper supplements, will offer viewers the lure of big prizes if they can match numbers on a card with figures flashed during commercial breaks for certain shows...
...there's more for your life at Sears -- at least, if you are an NBC fan. Along with posters, banners and in-store videos flogging the peacock network, the department-store chain and NBC have concocted a contest pegged to the fall season. Unlike the CBS game, however, you do not have to watch NBC shows to win; you just answer a few questions about them to vie for prizes like a new car or a guest appearance on an NBC show...
...viewers have grown accustomed to the annual late-summer promotional blitz for the networks' fall premieres. But this year the hucksterism has gone far beyond the usual "ABC's the One" and "Come Home to NBC" sloganeering on- screen. Ads for network shows will turn up everywhere from billboards to women's hosiery departments. Besides CBS and NBC linkups with major retailers, a third network, Fox, has teamed with Coca-Cola to promote an Isle of Dreams Treasure Hunt. Only ABC is sitting on the sidelines...
...first time, the networks are even turning to erstwhile competitors for help with the hype. ABC is running commercials for its fall shows in movie theaters. CBS is stuffing brochures inside boxes of blank Maxell videocassettes. NBC is doing the same with Scotch cassettes. ABC is targeting the VCR user with a more high-tech gimmick: a special bar code in the network's November TV Guide ads will enable owners of specially equipped models of Panasonic VCRs to record certain ABC shows automatically...
...coupling of CBS, once the "Tiffany of networks," and the mass- market K mart chain strikes some as tacky. Resorting to contest giveaways, moreover, smacks of desperation: watch our shows not because they are good but because you may win a prize. Some network executives are skeptical about the tactic's effectiveness. "Let's say 20% or 30% want to play the game," says Mark Zakarin, marketing vice president for ABC Entertainment. "The other 70% will be irritated by all the promos." Yet if the lure of loot ends up boosting the ratings, contest mania will undoubtedly spread. Anyone...