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One of the luxuries of having a stable schedule is that there’s a bit of time to focus on each premiere before having to move to the next one. That didn’t used to be the case when networks premiered almost all of their new fall shows over the same two-week period. But in an age when new shows premiere year-round, networks have to be strategic about what they are opening when.
CBS is taking advantage both of its stability and its big platforms to launch this year’s priorities over six stages.
“Just five new shows plus Stephen Colbert plus Thursday Night Football gives us a nice rollout calendar and gives us stronger platforms to promote each one coming up,” says George Schweitzer, president of the CBS Marketing Group. “That’s what different for us this year.”
Stage one — the highly successful launch of The Late Show starring Stephen Colbert — allowed CBS to start airing new-show promos in front of audience that doesn’t necessarily watch CBS, said Schweitzer. Colbert is only the second host to star on the program after David Letterman’s iconic 33-year run. Colbert premiered on Tuesday, Sept. 8, to 6.6 million viewers, making it the most-watched show in late-night that evening. Since then, it’s dropped to a respectable second place, averaging 3.7 million viewers to NBC’s typical leader, The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, with 4.3 million viewers.
CBS’ next big marketing opportunity came on Thursday, Sept. 17, with the opening of Thursday Night Football. Although football audiences are always big, even if the game is a blowout, the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs put on quite a show with a nail-biter of a game that was won by a last-minute Broncos touchdown. That game drew 21.117 million viewers, the biggest audience yet for the young franchise, and up 2 percent from last year’s 20.777 million for the Pittsburgh Steelers-Baltimore Ravens game on Sept. 11, 2014.
“Football is basically a huge, live promotional platform for us,” says Schweitzer, emphasizing that football viewers tend to watch live and don’t skip through commercials and promos. “And not only is it a promotional platform, but football also allows us to schedule things differently in the fall because we don’t have to put on entertainment programming on Thursday nights.”
CBS moves its huge hit, The Big Bang Theory, back to Mondays in the fall, allowing the network to premiere other shows behind it. This fall, Big Bang will air at 8 p.m. on Mondays, leading into its third phase of fall premieres with new sitcom Life in Pieces, which stars James Brolin, Dianne Wiest, Colin Hanks and Breaking Bad‘s Betsy Brandt and premieres on Monday, Sept. 21. Only one other new show premieres during premiere week, Limitless, based on the movie starring Bradley Cooper, who is an executive producer on the series and will occasionally appear as the character he played in the film.
Like all networks these days, CBS does many fun, innovative things to promote its shows. In advance of the premiere of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, street teams in New York handed out bottles of Stumptown Coffee’s Iced “Col’brew” coffee. For Code Black, which is docu-style drama about a Los Angeles ER, the network created stress balls for people to squeeze and wrapped a promotional ambulance in show graphics. And for Life in Pieces, it put ads on NYC pizza boxes.
But the real power of promo still lies in making early trailers, clips and sneak peeks available to viewers, says Schweitzer.
“The number-one thing viewers want to see is clips of the show,” he says. “They want to see a preview. They want us to show them what the show is. What’s changed is these video clips are being seen online. And that’s great because we can better target audiences and play longer clips. The can see a 30-second promo in a football game or a 2 1/2 minute behind-the-scenes piece on CBS.com, on our YouTube channel or on a served programmatic ad on Facebook or Twitter. We can be very precise and send an ad to all the people who liked Big Bang Theory or Arrow or Flash, or to all the people who had a conversation in the last 30 days on Twitter about a superhero show.
“We are using digital precision quite frequently. We’ll promote a show to the masses and then to well-defined targets within those masses. Data and analytics has all become much more sophisticated and available to us.”
After those two shows premiere, CBS gets a short break until phase four begins with the launch of Code Black, starring Marcia Gay Harden and Luis Guzman, on Wednesday, Sept. 30 at 10 p.m.
In between Limitless and Code Black’s premieres, however, comes the series finale of CSI. The show that started it all ends its 15-season run on Sunday, Sept. 27
After Sept. 20, CBS gets a month or so to get those shows up and running before launching phase five with perhaps its most anticipated show this season: Supergirl, starring Melissa Benoist, on Oct. 26, at 8:30 p.m., taking advantage of Big Bang‘s final Monday night lead-in. On Nov. 2, Supergirl will move into its regular 8 p.m. time slot, while Big Bang returns to Thursday nights with the end of Thursday Night Football.
The show’s trailer alone blew up on YouTube after this year’s upfront presentations, with more than 14 million views to date. Below is a more recent promo:
Last week, CBS released an early look of one of the show’s first villains, Red Tornado, pictured below.
CBS’ last premiere this fall—and phase six—will be the debut of quirky single-camera comedy Angel from Hell, starring Glee’s Jane Lynch, opening on Thursday, Nov. 5, after Mom, starring Anna Faris and Allison Janney, at 9:30 p.m.
Even with viewers turning to many different platforms to watch television, a network’s own air remains its best promotional platform, says Schweitzer.
“Some 70% of viewing is still linear. When you ask someone how they found out about Limitless, for example, they’ll usually say something like ‘I saw a spot for it while I was watching NCIS.’
“There are many different ways and times to watch television. Our first choice, of course, is that they watch us live. Our second choice is that they watch within three days and our third is within seven days. But in the end, we just want them watching our shows.”
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