THE SELLING OF THE DTV TRANSITION

Jack Dempsey, general manager of CBS affiliate WJHL in the Tri-Cities market of Tennessee and Virginia, spoke to a local Rotary Club last week, trying to explain the DTV transition and how the folks that use rooftop antennas and rabbit ears may lose their TV pictures in less than 18 months, if they don’t take action before then.

Dave Madsen, general manager of KTIV, the NBC affiliate in Sioux City, Iowa, is scheduled to give pretty much the same talk at the local Augusta Lutheran Church in a couple of weeks.

It’s no coincidence. Dempsey, Madsen and many other broadcasters are being recruited and scheduled by the NAB’s DTV Speakers Bureau, part of the trade group’s multifaceted, multimillion dollar campaign to make sure that every American knows about the transition, particularly those who live in the 20 million homes that rely on over-the-air reception.

NAB “has made the DTV transition its single highest priority,” NAB Joint Board Chair Jack Sander told the FCC last month in an open letter.

“The goal of our campaign is for no consumer to lose access to free local television programming after Feb. 17, 2009, due to a lack of information about the DTV transition,” the Sander letter says.

NAB is still being stingy about details of the campaign and how much is being spent, although it has outlined the plan in the Sander letter and in an earlier letter from NAB President David Rehr to members of Congress.

However, NAB is expected to reveal more of what it is doing over the course of September when the DTV transition will be in the political spotlight.

In the Senate, the Special Committee on Aging, chaired by Wisconsin Democrat Herb Kohl, will convene a Sept. 19 hearing on the DTV transition.

And the Senate Commerce Committee is also likely to hold a hearing.

At the FCC, comments are due Sept. 17 on how to go about “creating a coordinated, national DTV consumer education campaign.” And the commission has scheduled a Sept. 26 consumer education workshop on the subject.

Meanwhile, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is holding a DTV Expo on Sept 25 featuring Rehr, CEA President Gary Shapiro and CEA President Kyle McSlarrow.

It’s politics that is motivating the NAB campaign.

By NAB’s count, 19.6 million of the 112 million TV homes—17.5%—rely solely on over-the-air broadcasting for their TV service and another 14.7 million subscribe to cable or satellite, but have at least one set that is not hooked up and still receives TV off air.

Right now, as the transition heads into its final stretch, TV stations are simultaneously broadcasting analog and digital signals. But come midnight on Feb. 17, 2009, they must switch off their analog signal and go digital only.

Congress fears that unless the people who live in the 34.3 million off-air homes are warned about the analog cut-off, many may wake up on the morning of Feb. 18 with TVs that no longer work and take it out on their local congressmen.

Congress is trying to head off such a disaster by allocating $1 billion for a program that will subsidize the purchase of digital-to-analog converters that will enable old analog TV sets to receive the new digital signals and by pressuring the NAB and the other TV trade groups to educate the public about the transition and the availability of the converter boxes.

NAB has gotten the message from the Hill: Consumers may blame Congress if things get ugly in February 2009, but Congress will blame broadcasters.

Working together, the trade groups have distilled their consumer message to the essentials.

If your sets are hooked up to cable or satellite, don’t sweat it. You don’t have to do anything.

If your sets are not hooked up, you have three options:

1)   Buy a new set with a digital tuner. By the end of this year, virtually every set in the stores, HD or SD, will have one.

2)   Subscribe to cable or satellite.

3)   Buy a converter box with a government coupon that will allow you to buy knock $40 off the anticipated price of $60 or $70.

To make sure its campaign is as effective as possible, the NAB has been conducting fresh research on principal the targets of the campaign—the over-the-air viewers. The research includes focus groups with various types of consumers, including the elderly, African-Americans and Spanish speakers.

Armed with the research, NAB will get the message out through a PR push, PSAs, paid advertising and an extensive grassroots effort, of which the speakers bureau is just a part.

It will also encourage elected representatives to do some of the work by briefing Hill staff and by providing congressional offices with “toolkits”—PowerPoints, sample press releases, sample op-eds, talking points—so that members and their aides can take the message back home to their constituents.

To make it all happen, the NAB has hired a five-person team head by Jonathan Collegio, a former spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Collegio and his team have already begun getting the DTV transition story out by briefing reporters. Thus far, they’ve hit New York, Chicago, San Jose and Washington.

“We're making sure that reporters all across the country know about the transition and see in person the converter box demonstration,” says Collegio.

Plus, he says, NAB will call on state broadcast association to help conduct those briefings in all 50 states

Collegio hopes to supplement the stories those efforts generate—so-called “earned media”—with paid media, advertisements in newspapers, on public transportation and at points of sale.

As part of the grassroot effort, NAB is getting the word out to state legislators, governors, county information officers, mayors and city councilmen by conducting briefings at national conferences held by organizations such as the National Association of Counties and National Conference of State Legislators.

Collegio says NAB has also been active in the creation and coordination of the DTV Transition Coalition, www.dtvtransition,org, which now has 161 members and meets bi-monthly.

The inside team’s work in being supplemented by that of some high-priced outside consultants.

The speakers bureau is being handled by Crosby-Volmer International Communications, which is known for its media and grassroots campaigns and which had done work for NAB’s Rehr in his prior job as head of the National Beer Wholesalers Association.

“Our goal is to make sure that no consumer’s TV set goes fuzzy and gray after Feb 17, 2009, “says Rob Volmer, president of Crosby-Volmer. 

Broadcasters wishing to sign-up for the speakers bureau can do so by visiting www.dtvspeak.com.

The firm will also train speakers online, provide them with sample speeches and handout materials, plus a video to air during their speech.

In the end the bureau hopes to book more than 8,000 speaking engagements over the next eight months, says Volmer.

Volmer says his firm is also overseeing consumer outreach to the Hispanic community and is responsible for the creation of the NAB’s tell-all DTV Web site, www.DTVanswers.com.

Some TV stations have already incorporated the NAB site into their station sites. State broadcasting associations are using the link as well to help educate the public.

A traveling DTV roadshow incorporating two trucks will crisscross the nation, stopping at sporting events, state fairs and other public functions to give consumers a first-hand look at how a DTV converter will actually work. NAB hopes to cover more than 200 cities in the next 18 months.

For some of the research, NAB has turned to Los Angeles-based SmithGeiger  and Washington-based Strategy One.

“We need to know as much as possible about the people we’re trying to reach,” says Collegio.

“We need to know where they get their information, who they are and which message best resonates with them when you’re telling them about DTV.”

NAB’s effort is also getting help from within the industry on the PSA component of the media outreach effort. Industry sources confirm that NBC is producing the first of the PSAs and that NAB will unveil it later this month.

Hoping to encourage heavy use of the PSAs by stations, the NAB will be offering PSAs in two versions—a simple 30-second version and a 25-second version that will allow stations to sell a five-second tag to an advertiser, perhaps a local consumer electronics store.

Everybody has a different idea about when the PSAs should begin, says Collegio.

“There are some who think the PSAs should have begun three years go and there are some who think we should concentrate our efforts toward the end of the campaign.”

Collegio also says the PSA package will include the production and distribution of a 30-minute educational DTV program for stations to air some time early next year.

NAB won’t divulge what it spending on the campaign, but Collegio says it’s plenty.

“If you take the amount of money NAB is spending internally and add that to the market value of the public service announcements that networks and stations will run, you are looking at a campaign that will easily go into multiple tens of millions of dollars.”