Small Market Exchange Best In Show: KVIA

Virtually all the brilliant ideas and products in this world originate in New York and Los Angeles — ask anybody who lives there if you don’t believe me — but every so often somebody has a good idea in a city so small that its newscasts report car crashes even if no one dies in them.

Last week in Scottsdale, Ariz., about 400 TV sales executives came to the Hyatt Regency resort for the NAB’s annual Small Market Television Exchange. The three-day conference is all about swapping information on unusual commercial campaigns that worked in one market, with the idea that they could work somewhere else.

At the heart of conference is a contest, at the end of which the whole crowd crowns one station for the best new “non-traditional revenue” ad campaign. A couple dozen finalists survive an earlier vetting process that this year included 152 entrees. Peers at the seminar choose The Best of the Best, which is something like the Oscar for small-market salesfolk.

This year, the winner was News-Press & Gazette’s KVIA El Paso, Texas. The ABC affiliate launched “Manhunt Monday” in the spring, and it quickly created a sensation. The idea is really simple: Every Monday on newscasts — and simultaneously on a slideshow on its website — KVIA identifies a new batch of ornery thugs wanted by the cops. That’s information the sheriff’s office is happy to provide, in profusion, for zero dollars and zero cents, which is the kind of production budget lines that smaller stations like.

Madelyn Bonnot Griffin (left), VP of operations, National Communications Inc. and co-chair of the Small Market Television Advisory Committee; René Santana, general sales manager, KVIA El Paso, Texas; and Marcellus Alexander, EVP of television, National Association of Broadcasters.

In its first month of “Manhunt Monday,” page views at the station’s website doubled, to two million uniques. KVIA had absolutely no problem selling a position on the website and a “sponsored by” TV credit to a local bail bondsman, for $12,000 a month. (A bail bondsman still qualifies as a “non-traditional” advertiser, thank goodness.)

The extra Web traffic is allowing Rene Santana, the general sales manager, to raise rates elsewhere on the website. More advertisers are coming. Soon, another bail bondsman (ah, competition!) will become a “Manhunt” advertiser and a defense attorney, who will pay $48,000 for a more enhanced presence, will be added.

Safe to say that once other sales managers get back from Scottsdale, the “Manhunt Monday” features will be showing up at stations nationwide, and not just in small towns. Santana’s happy to hear it because she’s helping to get some bad characters off the street. In El Paso, the cops say their “apprehension rate” has gone up 58% since “Manhunt Monday” began. The thugs featured in ”Manhunt Monday” are members of the Mexican drug cartel mainly. “There’s a plethora of bad guys out there,” she says.  

Significantly, Santana told me, just a couple years ago at this event, none of the Best of the Best finalists had an Internet sales component to their campaigns. This year, virtually all of them did, even if they still hadn’t figured out all the sales angles of the Web.   

In one session about managing and motivating sales execs, Stan Sarna, GSM of WKBN-WYTV, a CBS-ABC duopoly in Youngstown, Ohio,  suggested, only somewhat facetiously, that a good incentive would be to give sales execs “100% commission” on Internet advertisers until it’s time to renew. The rationale is that they’re not selling much on the Web now, so how could it hurt? Retorted Kevin Creamer, GM of Block’s WLIO Lima, Ohio, and the conference’s resident wise guy: “There’s something about that idea that is so crazy it almost makes sense.”

The conference is one huge adrenalin shot. 

The NAB sells the conference by promising broadcasters will go home with more money-making ideas than it costs to attend the event. Sales managers talk candidly about how they will steal an idea here or there.

I saw Gary Lightfoot, key accounts manager for McGraw-Hill’s KMGH Denver at the conference, and I wondered what a big market guy like that was doing there. “I like to come to these things,” he told me. “You find out at a lot of the smaller stations, they really work harder on finding new opportunities.” 

If you’re a journalist, your belief in God is fortified when you find somebody to say exactly what you are thinking.

Out there in markets 76 and worse (or better, depending on your feelings about really fresh air), sales people are not spending all their time reading New York Times stories about the inevitable end of fuddy-duddy broadcasting. These execs live in the real world. They know that most of the time, for news, entertainment and advertising, television beats the alternative.