Recently, a contest initiated by the FOX Affiliate Board surfaced. The goal of the contest was to create three :30 PSAs that illustrate how local broadcast television is good. At least, better for the community than the sterile and distant cable/dish networks. This contest apparently stems from some Senator who is trying to change the structure of DMAs. He would like to see cities that are near their state’s border to NOT get the networks from the closest and largest city over cable if the larger city is in a different state. For instance, I live in Spokane, WA which is right up against the Idaho Panhandle…not far from Coeur d’Alene. In Mr. Senator’s view, Coeur d’Alene should not be getting Spokane stations over cable (though Spokane news organizations report heavily on the goings-on of Cd’A) and should instead get the largest and nearest Idaho city…in this case, Boise. Well, the FOX Affiliate Board purports to have a litany of reasons why this is a bad idea. So, they posed a contest to all FOX affiliate creative service departments to come up with a series of three 30 second PSAs illustrating the benefits to keeping television stations local. Using the bullet points we were given with the contest rules the following spots are what Ben Schaefer and I came up with.
   |
It turns out that our entries were entirely too feel-good. The top four winning campaigns all demonized someone. In every case there was a bad guy who was going to take your TV away or ruin it for you somehow. The strangest part is that the first place winning campaign made the Cable companies the bad guy. The cable companies aren’t really involved and were nowhere in the notes and rules of the contest. Even worst, the winning spots were a direct rip off of the DirecTV campaign below. It’s still a meeting of the cable company, but instead of DirecTV being the subject of their criticism it’s local broadcast television.
In the end, even though we didn’t win I am still very proud of how the spots turned out. I’m posting them here as a testament to that.
