[itvt] ITV Interview: George Schweitzer, President of Marketing, CBS

As president of CBS's Marketing Group, George Schweitzer's job is (in his own words) "to get people to watch TV." He recently spoke to [itvt]'s Tracy Swedlow about CBS's efforts to market its programming to viewers in an increasingly fragmented, multiplatform and interactive TV universe. Those efforts include free previews on TiVo and the Web; a free VOD service on Comcast; a branded channel on YouTube; and even advertisements etched into eggshells. In the course of the interview, Schweitzer also explains--among other things--how, by offering programming on non-traditional platforms, CBS attempts to reach "TV enthusiasts"--i.e. the kinds of viewers who, he says, "make shows into hits."

[itvt]: George, you hold the title president of marketing at CBS…

Schweitzer: Yes. What that means is that my job is to get people to watch TV.

[itvt]: That sounds like a fun job.

Schweitzer: Well, it is some days. But getting people to watch network television is a lot harder, because nowadays people have so many other things they can do. In other words, there's a lot of fragmentation. That's not to say that that fragmentation isn't a good thing. As you probably know, we're getting involved in all these other platforms. The big asset that we have is our content, which is like a magnet: everyone ends up at our doorstep, looking for our content--whether it's "60 Minutes" or "Survivor" or "The Amazing Race" or "David Letterman" or our sports coverage. Everyone wants it. Which is good.

[itvt]: So part of your job is exploring technologies for multiplatform and interactive television?

Schweitzer: Yes. Though, as a marketing guy, I do this in relation to getting people to watch CBS. We have people on the business side who are interested in multiplatform as a self-sustaining business. That's not me: I don't do deals to put our shows on Google, and things like that. What I do is that, once those deals are made, I exploit them in order to get people to watch more CBS programming.

[itvt]: Could you tell us a little about your background, and about how you ended up in this position at CBS.

Schweitzer: I grew up in New York City, and I was always interested in television. I wanted to be a newsman. I went to Boston University's Communications School, and I studied broadcast journalism. I ran the radio station at the university. I did actually graduate college, but I didn't go to the graduation ceremony, because I got a job in the CBS newsroom, working midnight to 8AM, Wednesday through Sunday.   That was one of those great, wonderful, exciting jobs that I'll never forget. Because you talk to people and learn so much and do so many things. Originally, I was going to be a journalist, but then I became intrigued with production. So I got into the production side of things, and I stayed with that for a while. I was in news and sports production, and I also worked for a year on the "Captain Kangaroo" children's show. I was one of Captain Kangaroo's producers in the late 70's.

[itvt]: Really? I used to be a big fan of that show when I was a kid. So you worked with Bunny Rabbit and…

Schweitzer: And Mr. Green Jeans and Mr. Moose and Grandfather Clock and all our other friends. That was kind of an interesting assignment.

Then I moved into marketing--just through a series of different jobs. I didn't study marketing in school, but I found it was what I was best suited for. I know I came to it up a circuitous route, but it actually makes you a better evangelist for your product if you know how the product is made, and have been immersed in it for a long time. So I found myself becoming the head of advertising, promotion and marketing in the late 80's/early 90's. And I've been in marketing ever since.

It's really like running an advertising agency for CBS. We don't sell commercials--but we do the commercials for CBS. We have people in New York and LA, and we do all the on-air promotion for entertainment, news, sports, "Letterman" and late night in general, "60 Minutes," Katie Couric, soap operas, game shows, "CSI," and so on.

We do thousands of video commercials. We do radio. We do outdoor billboards. All the advertising that you--I would hope--see plastered over San Francisco, we're responsible for that. We also do direct marketing and interactive advertising. You name it--we do it. Our job is to get people to watch. And, as I mentioned earlier, that job's getting harder and harder all the time. Part of what makes our job hard is that we're asking people to spend an hour or two of their leisure time, which is extremely precious, as people really don't have a lot of leisure time. So that can be a real fight.

Sometimes, I think it would be easier to ask consumers for $10 than it is to ask them to keep watching for an hour--because watching a particular TV show for an hour really takes a commitment. So your programming has to be good, and your advertising has to be even better.

[itvt]: What kinds of activities must CBS compete against when trying to attract viewers to its programs?

Schweitzer: There are a lot of things people do: they're on the Internet; they're listening to music; they're reading; they're engaged in family activities. Anything they do outside of work and sleep counts as leisure, and we're all competing for that time, and it's just getting harder and harder. On the other hand, that's what makes it more interesting and more fun, and that's why we are branching out into so many of these new platforms and offering viewers interactivity. It's really a combination of throwing a lot of stuff up against the wall, and seeing what sticks and what slides off--but also, it involves making smart investments and building relationships with other companies.

[itvt]: And the new platforms you're branching out into for promotional purposes include…

Schweitzer: Well, a couple of recent examples would be the free cable VOD service we just launched with Comcast, and the deal we signed with YouTube where we have our own channel on their service. I think the "NCIS" catfight is currently number one: it's gotten 1.5 million views; and the "Bush is drinking again" segment from Craig Ferguson has gotten 600,000. We've also got video on Google, and video on Yahoo!. We actually have a "60 Minutes" site on Yahoo! where we provide them with regularly updated material.

You see, one of the great things about the interactive space and the digital space for a company like ours is…well, just look at news alone: we do a half-hour network evening news broadcast, but we collect news 24 hours a day. So there's all this stuff that just doesn't go anywhere. Well, at least it used not to go anywhere. Now we can process this news on CBSNews.com, 24 hours a day. So we can give visitors to that site really up-to-date stuff: reporters' blogs and notebooks, stories and other stuff that used to just go nowhere. Now there's a place for it to go.

[itvt]: So CBS sees new, interactive digital platforms as…

Schweitzer: As something that's really exciting. Because in addition to the reality of what you can do now, what's even more exciting is what's coming down the pike. As you know, it's pretty amazing what kinds of things are currently taking place just in terms of the development of different platforms and the ability to transmit video. It just doesn't seem that long ago that we were all doing dial-up. And now, people are like, "Oh my God. Dialup? Why would anyone do that?" Now we're all into broadband--but it wasn't so long ago that being able to access video with just one click seemed like a pipe dream that would never be realized. That was just five years ago.

So we are investing aggressively in new platforms, but not stupidly. We're picking the areas the company will invest in very carefully. As you know, we own CBS SportsLine, which is a very active site. It's really a huge Internet business, mostly thanks to fantasy sports. And, of course, it has lots of video: there's a Video of the Day, video archives, stuff like that. We also bought--in what we term a "smart, strategic investment"--CSTV. It's on DirecTV and cable, but it's more about interactive than it is about cable: among other things, it operates 250 college sports Web sites. So the athletic sites for USC, Notre Dame or whatever are all powered by CSTV: they run those sites for the colleges.

CSTV has been a really good multiplatform investment for us--it has a very passionate, loyal user-base of people who still feel connected to their college sports team. Now, the guys who run it are also spearheading our relationship with YouTube. That's because the CSTV team are all into broadband video and have done a lot of that stuff.

[itvt]: Other broadband platforms CBS has invested in include innertube, CBS.com and ShowBuzz, correct?

Schweitzer: Yes. Now, the exciting thing for us about all these new platforms emerging is that it all comes back to the content. As trite as that may sound, it really is true--and very, very positive for us. Because what we're finding is that, in a world of choice, people want stuff that they're familiar with--in other words, they want the branded stuff. They're going to ask for or seek out things they know, before they explore things they're not familiar with. So that's a benefit that the multiplatform universe provides us with. Of course, it also provides us with a challenge, in that we're no longer in control of the schedule. We're no longer in a world where we have the viewers watch this show at eight, that show at nine and the next show at ten. The experience of watching TV is becoming increasingly non-linear, because DVR's are becoming so widespread. You don't have to be home when a show is broadcast, in order to watch it. You don't have to watch it according to our schedule. And you can watch something on another network while recording something on our network.

[itvt]: How do you tailor your marketing messages when you're targeting viewers on so many different platforms?

Schweitzer: It's all about marketing the content--because the people you're targeting are generally platform-agnostic. Half the people can't even tell you what network they're watching a show on. However, they do know they're watching "CSI" or "Letterman." So I would say that our brands are our programs, not our companies, and that's especially true in the multiplatform universe. We have 22 hours of primetime programming alone every week, and we also have daytime, late-night, sports and news programming, and each of those programs is a distinct brand.

[itvt]: As you know, user-generated content is an important emerging trend. How does this new thinking that programmers need to have more of a dialog with their viewers--even to the extent of allowing those viewers to help create programs--affect your marketing efforts?

Schweitzer: Well, for years--ever since its beginning in fact--broadcasting was a one-way medium. It went one-way from the radio to the listener or from the TV to the viewer. It never went back. But now we can close that loop by using digital properties. So, we use the Internet not only to do entertainment-oriented things like allowing viewers to vote, but to actually get feedback on our programming from our viewer base: our research department has set up an interactive viewers' panel, which has over 40,000 members. So now we test programming, do surveys, get viewer responses and so on. It's very interactive.

[itvt]: Are you doing any projects where you invite viewers to upload their own videos?

Schweitzer: We're just beginning to do that now, though it's mostly connected to projects we're doing with advertisers who want to solicit original video material. And we're talking to various companies and Web sites that are in the user-generated video space.

Obviously, YouTube is one of those companies. But there are some other companies out there in the developmental stages that have brought us some interesting ideas for using user-generated video in an advertiser-related way, so to speak. This, obviously, is of great interest to us, because advertising is the largest part of our income. We don't charge subscriptions to CBS. We sell advertising.

In general, our advertisers are very interested in new interactive technologies. They're always asking us, "What's the next thing? How can I get into interactive? Show me what to do." They're searching for ways to take advantage of these technologies, just as we are. The advertisers and their agencies all want to have a part in this, but they're not sure exactly how it all works. So we have to be enablers of this phenomenon--in fact, we're often in what you might call a one-stop-shopping mode: big company X, Y and Z will come to us and say, "OK, we'd like to sponsor '60 Minutes' and 'CSI,' but we'd also like to be on the interactive platforms as well." We make that happen.

[itvt]: This fall television season has seen CBS--and the other networks--distributing and even premiering a lot of their content on new platforms, including the Web and TiVo. How has that been working out for CBS?

Schweitzer: Great. First of all, you get real numbers. You know who's actually watching your shows--well, not specifically who's watching, but you know the number of people who are accessing your shows. The other great thing about it is that people who watch TV on the Internet or who have a TiVo have automatically self-selected as hardcore television viewers. It goes without saying that they're interested in television. This is great because…well, do you know how hard it is to find these kinds of people? By offering a show on TiVo, you know that it's going to reach an audience of enthusiastic TV watchers. If you tell someone that they can watch a show before it's broadcast, and they go ahead and watch it, then you know they're really interested in television. And being able to reach those kinds of people is really great for us, even if the numbers of people we're reaching are relatively small compared to the numbers we reach with our linear broadcasts.

[itvt]: Now, as you know, these kinds of promotions disintermediate or bypass various players, including the cable companies…

Schweitzer: We have no interest in bypassing the cable companies per se. But remember that a one-to-one relationship is what every marketer wants with their customers. And CBS has two basic types of customer: the viewers and the advertisers. The advertisers are our business-to-business customers, so to speak, and we are both interested in the consumer as our ultimate customer, and we both want to create one-to-one relationships with the consumer. So this isn't so much about bypassing anybody; it's simply about doing our best to serve our two types of customer--the advertisers and the viewers. We and our advertisers simply want to reach viewers, and we're going to try to reach them on whatever platform they're using--whether they want to watch our programs on a Verizon mobile phone, on YouTube, Google, TiVo or whatever.

[itvt]: Do you have any numbers that reflect how your programs did on TiVo?

Schweitzer: Yes, but we don't give them out for competitive reasons. But if you ask TiVo, they'll tell you that this whole thing was very, very healthy for them. It was way above the norms for interaction that they had had before. They were very happy with it, and we're going to be doing other things with them. As I said before, being able to reach people who are enthusiastic TV viewers is hugely important to us, because those are the kinds of people who talk about TV. They're the people who make shows into hits. It used to be the case that you could reach these kinds of people by advertising your programs in TV Guide: you could be pretty certain that someone who bought TV Guide was a hardcore TV viewer. But a lot of people don't read TV Guide anymore, because they now all use on-screen guides. Do you remember 10 or 15 years ago when TV Guide was 400 pages thick? In September, when they ran the new season previews, it used to be hard to find a copy--everybody would buy it. That's not happening any more. That's why they changed their format: it no longer has local listings, and has become more of a TV entertainment magazine. They're actually doing a good job of reinventing it, but the world that it was originally invented for has disappeared.

[itvt]: Now, the reduced relevance of TV Guide leads to my next question: how do you now let people know when your shows are going to appear? Presumably you can't just rely on them regularly checking their EPG?

Schweitzer: One thing we're doing is encouraging people to sign up for alerts to their cell phones. We formed a partnership this fall with Free411. It's an interesting company: they get sponsors to pay for free 411 calls from cell phones (otherwise those calls cost a buck or so). Then the consumer dials 1.800.Free.411 and gets a free information call, in exchange for listening to a 10-second advertiser message. So we bought advertising on Free 411 for the month of September. You heard a CBS star say, "Hi! I'm Skeet Ulrich. My new show, 'Jericho,' is about what happens in a town after a nuclear blast. Watch it tonight on CBS. And if you want a reminder to watch it or record it, hit *225," or whatever. You would then get a text message either a half-hour before the show or the day of, saying, "Don't forget to record the show tonight," or watch it or whatever. So that was kind of cool. We did it as an experiment. We really thought it was great.

[itvt]: Are you working with any mobile phone companies as part of your efforts to attract people to your programming?

Schweitzer: Our folks are talking with all of them: Verizon, Sprint, Cingular… We already have huge relationships with all these companies, because they're major advertisers on CBS. The wireless companies are…basically, every commercial break, you're going to see one.

So, we have established relationships on the commerce side with them already. And I think it really all comes full-circle: they want a relationship with the consumer, through various media, in some form of "entertainment-marketing" connection. That's obviously good for us as an entertainment company. On the other hand, it's still hard. Marketing is always going to be a business of both contact and impact. Making contact with the consumer you're targeting is one thing, and anyone can do that--I used to say, "Anyone can buy an ad in People magazine." But making an impact is the hard part. It's the emotional part--the resonance that comes from hitting a responsive chord with your messaging. It's creative work, and it's the most delicate work of all. But it's also the most exciting.

[itvt]: Of all your various efforts to get people to watch CBS programming in a fragmented, Balkanized, multiplatform TV universe, which has been the most successful?

Schweitzer: That's easy to answer: our most successful campaign this year was when we did advertising on eggs.

[itvt]: Eggs?

Schweitzer: Well, eggshells, yes. We were the first company ever to advertise on eggs. We advertised on over 35 million eggs in grocery stores around the country. The campaign took place during September and October. We worked with a company that had designed equipment to put an expiration date on eggshells. In Europe they do that now, because they had some scandals where farmers or whoever were putting past-due eggs in newly stamped boxes. So they mandated what they call "freshness dating." This company came up with a laser-based high-speed printing system, that doesn't require ink--so the process doesn't use anything that could actually get in your food. It etches the date into the eggshell itself. Well, the company had to figure out who was going to pay for this new freshness-dating process, and they decided they would sell advertising. So we found these guys and we became their first advertisers--their guinea pigs--and, as I said, we used their service to print advertising on eggshells for the month of September and the beginning of October. They laser-wrote 35 million eggs with the titles of various CBS shows and corresponding advertising slogans. So, for example, "CSI--Crack the Case" or "The Amazing Race--Scramble to Win." So that, along with putting our programming on innertube and TiVo, proved really successful for us this fall season.

[itvt]: How is innertube doing, by the way?

Schweitzer: It's doing really well, and we're starting to get a good idea of what kinds of things are popular on the service and what kinds of things aren't. We have a lot of original programming on there now. One thing we're doing are video interviews with the "Survivor" cast-off for that week; and we're also doing regular interviews with the cast of "The Amazing Race." These kinds of supplemental interviews really work well for our reality television brands. Now bear in mind that, for now at least, innertube isn't about huge numbers of viewers--this isn't the kind of area where you have to get a certain Nielsen rating or you're a failure. It's about reaching enthusiastic TV viewers and building a one-to-one relationship with them. It's about setting up what you might call a transactional relationship with those viewers: having a back-and-forth with them and setting up communities where they can  talk about programming. We can learn from these communities and respond to what the viewers are saying they want--and we do.

Another great thing about innertube is that it gives us an opportunity to run programming that you just couldn't do on CBS Television. So, interactive projects like "Intern," where viewers could compete for a roll in one of our soap operas. Also, innertube, as well as other broadband video services like our YouTube channel and Google, give a whole new life to shows in our library like "I Love Lucy," "The Twilight Zone," "Gunsmoke" and "Sonny & Cher" that haven't been on regular network TV for years, but that are still hugely popular with small enthusiastic groups of consumers.

[itvt]: Inasmuch as a lot of your older shows have enthusiastic groups of fans around them--after all, one of the properties you own is "Star Trek"--have you considered building user-generated content projects around them? I don't know if you're aware of this, but there are actually groups of "Star Trek" fans out there who are making new, not-for-profit "Star Trek" episodes and movies, just to share with other fans.

Schweitzer: That's definitely something we've talked about. But sometimes there are simply more ideas than people to do them.

URL: CBS

Originally Published: November 29, 2006  in [itvt] Issue 7.07

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