PROMAX PUTS FOCUS ON MONETIZING NEW MEDIA

If it was the intention of Promax/BDA to hire a new president who had a clear sense of new media, it achieved that when it turned over the organization to Jonathan Block-Verk in January.

The 33-year-old Canadian is a fast-moving, fast-talking executive who doesn’t seem to have much patience for conventional TV.

“I’m coming to this with truly a fresh perspective,” he says. “Clearly, I’m from a generation that is consuming media in this nonlinear fashion.”

Block-Verk says he gets an early morning dose of news and weather from his Nintendo Wii game console (while his four-year-old daughter watches PBS) and then checks in with CNN.com and a Toronto Web site or two for hometown news.

In the evenings, he says, he may kick back with TV (sometimes after a set with Guitar Hero on Wii), but it’s usually not for long.

He is a big fan of Lost and a few other primetime shows, he says, but he is just as likely to watch them on DVD, on the Web or on his iPod as he is on regularly scheduled TV.

Which is not to say that he doesn’t understand old media.

“I certainly know my way around television. I come from a marketing background. I come from the advertising side.”

In fact, when Promax/BDA found him, he was toiling in the oldest medium of all—print. He was publisher and executive producer of events for Boards Magazine, a trade publication for advertising’s creative community.

And Block-Verk’s career is rooted in old media. After studying audio engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, he worked at a local radio station before selling ad space for Playback Magazine, a trade for Canada’s film and TV production community published by the same company as Boards, Brunico Communications.

For there, he jumped to sales and marketing at Chuck Gammage Animation, a producer of animated programming in Toronto.

Block-Verk's career took a sudden turn into the cutting edge of interactive TV when, almost on a whim, he entered and won NATPE’s Microsoft TV Interactive Pitch contest in 2000 with a pitch for Space Challenger, an interactive home improvement game show.

That led to jobs at ExtendMedia and Cylo, companies then on the cutting edge of interactive TV and advertising. But Cylo was too much about technology, so Block-Verk returned to Toronto to rep animation houses. That work eventually led back to Brunico and the top job at Boards Magazine.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY Editor Harry A. Jessell, Block-Verk says he hopes to transform Promax/BDA into a full-service association that not only supports its members' current efforts, but also leads them more deeply into his nonlinear world.

He also begins unveiling details about the annual conference slated for June 17-19 at the Hilton in New York City. Of special note to broadcasters: a half-day symposium on how to make the most of the transition to digital television next February.

An edited transcript:

You’ve been at this for a couple of months now and have talked to a lot of industry people. What’s your strategy for Promax?

Promax is a 53-year-old organization and in 53 years what it has to show for itself is a conference in June and that conference is about television marketing promotion and design. It’s a great conference. It is an important and integral part of the calendar year for people in the business of television marketing promotion and design.

But part of my job is to differentiate the association from the conference in June. That association needs to be about entertainment and information marketing promotion and design across all platforms.

We have to look at the reality of 2008 and look at the skill sets and the needs and the issues and the business trends that our members have to contend with. We want this to be a full-service association, providing community, research, contacts, 365 days a year.

So, we should start thinking of the association as going far beyond television.

But if you’re a TV network or station, you are part of that. You have content that you can use on other platforms. What we as an association need to provide is insight into how to more effectively and efficiently use that content, whether it’s a half-hour news broadcast or a three-minute news segment, so that consumers can access it through whatever media they want.

We’re talking about mobile, we’re talking about PDAs, we’re talking about digital signage, we’re talking about television, we’re talking about digital television, we’re talking about online computers, we’re talking about everything.

If you are looking to stay relevant, you need to understand what these media are and how you can use them and how others are using them to A) market their products and B) monetize their content. It doesn’t matter if you are a station in a teeny tiny market in the middle of Oklahoma or if you’re ABC.

OK, that’s the association. Shouldn’t the conference do the same thing?

Absolutely. It will. We’re taking this conference and we’re going to take it out of the notion of straightforward traditional television. We're going to help stations from the biggest of big to the smallest of the small understand how they can more effectively and more profitably use these platforms to monetize their content.

Your conference this year is set for June in New York. What are your plans for it?

The big thing that we’re talking about is the DTV transition symposium. No other event is going to fundamentally change the American television business than the transition in February of 2009. While there have been many discussions from a technology standpoint, there has been virtually none that take into account the impact DTV will have on marketing and promotion and on the bottom line.

So, this is not just about getting ready for the transition. It’s also about the new digital services—multicasting, HDTV and mobile.

That’s exactly right. The marketing of the DTV transition is of absolute paramount importance.

When you say “symposium,” what does that mean?

It’s going to be broken out as its own separate event on Wednesday afternoon. It’s a half-day symposium. It’s going to be marketed as a part of Promax/BDA, but it’s also going to be marketed separately for people who can only get there for Wednesday.   

Is there a big educational element to this? As you know, the FCC just mandated that TV stations run PSAs and crawls and other things to make sure the public knows about the transition and the analog cut off.

Absolutely. We’ve reached out to the top brass at the FCC and hopefully they will accept our invitation to address our constituents. I think it makes all the sense in the world for them to be there.

The PSAs that the FCC has mandated are coming out of stations’ promos. I don’t think anybody disagrees with that. What’s going to be the impact to the bottom line of a television station that is losing some of its promotional time? What happens to local news?

What else are you planning for the conference?

There are a lot of things that we are going to be announcing and I would be happy to let you know about them, but right now we’re just letting the ink sink into the paper. We are going to have some huge names for the star power, but also some of the industry’s leading executives who are going to provide some insight into the role of marketing, promotion and design in television.

Promax has always gone for big marquee names. So that’s a tradition that’s going to continue.

Yes, well, there’s the power of stardom. I’ve always been a believer that stardom is good. We will be making some announcements in the next few days.

All this talk about digital is exciting, but the job of a lot of TV station promo people is just to sell the evening news. Are you going to be addressing that?

Absolutely. We have a number of sessions devoted to news promotion—the best of news promotion—and really actionable ideas that are going to immediately affect your bottom line.

If you’re a station, you should know that we’re going to be exploring unique ways that people are promoting news and using the news as a monetization resource, exploring the many different ways that you can partner with brands to create integrated sponsorships.

We’re going to be talking about different ways that people are conducting their news coverage. There are really interesting things going on that these new platforms are allowing.

It’s been increasingly tough for NATPE, Promax and other conference organizers to draw TV station people. Do you have any remedy for that?

I’m trying to make as many personal calls with broadcasters as I can, but, you know, it’s the content that’s going to speak to these folks. I want broadcasters to know that we want them at the conference. We will be offering discounts and do whatever else we can do to get them there. This is their conference.

Marketing drives the business. Without marketing, your business sputters. Everybody knows that. Our conference is about providing marketing and promotional executives from stations with the tools, information, insight and inspiration they need to create effective marketing and promotion for their content, whether it’s the 6 o’clock news or a new episode of Lost.

Do you expect all the broadcast networks to be at the conference to meet with their affiliates about promotion?

Right now, NBC and CBS have said they will be at the conference and I would say that generally every network is going to be doing something.

How about the syndicators?

Oh, they’re definitely there. Where the stations are, the syndicators are going to come. If the rates at which syndicators are signing up for rooms and sponsorships and exposure are any indication, then, yes, we’re expecting a lot of the stations.

Do you have any plans to change the venue of the conference in the future?

We are kind of locked in to New York for awhile, but I’m looking at the reasoning behind New York and I’m open to exploring other venues. NewYork seems to be a great place. While it is expensive for [out-of-state] attendees, a lot of the media industry is based in New York so for them to have the opportunity to sort of stroll over to the conference makes a lot of sense.

Is there anything else you would like to say about the conference?

Just that I’m excited that it’s all coming together. We are going to have some big-time announcements that are going to be the kinds of things that are going to get people to decide to come if they are still sitting on the fence. These are the kind of people that I think are going to bring out the people in droves.

You know, CES didn’t build its television attendance by keeping its mind and sights on the old traditional business of television. It has its sights squarely on the new world of television, the new world of entertainment and information content. We’re the conference that’s going to help people figure out how to promote it, market it and monetize it.

NAB and NATPE think they’re going to be the conferences for the melding of old and new media, too, you know.

Yes. I’ve been to NAB what seems like five billion times. NAB is a technology conference. It is about providing the tools for creating content and building platforms. We are about marketing, promotion and the monetization of that content and those platforms.

Do you see yourself in competition with NATPE? It also talks about mobile and digital platforms and all that?

No, I don’t. The NATPEs that I’ve been to have been about buying of syndicated programming. That’s fundamentally what it’s been about.

Promax isn’t concerned about platforms. It’s concerned about how you are going to get people to watch. If it’s on television, it’s fine. If it’s on mobile, it’s fine. If it’s on the Internet, it’s fine. But how are you going to drive people to watch it and how are you going to then monetize it.