Bar None

FOR WHOM THE BAR TOLLS: A look at TNT’s toll booth campaign in Orlando, FL.The signage was much clearer than the signage on tolls at Atlanta’s Georgia 400 highway.

Advertising is the last thing you’re thinking about when your car is moving rapidly down the highway, but a clever piece of promotion managed to penetrate my thick skull, albeit it took a few seconds.

During a Labor Day Weekend stay in Atlanta, I noticed several toll booths on Georgia 400, a busy highway cutting through the city, touting TNT’s Labor Day evening premiere of Steven Bochco’s Raising The Bar. The toll booths were draped in Raising The Bar banners and signage. Good idea, I thought, but what’s the relevance to toll booths?

The answer came a moment or so later when I saw that the bar that stops cars from driving through without paying the toll (perish the thought) was wrapped in a white banner that carried a Raising The Bar logo.

Clever, eh? TNT was promoting Raising The Bar on and with a bar that periodically was being lowered and raised (as each motorist paid his or her toll).

Now I’m not saying the car I was sitting in was moving too fast; for the record, I was not driving, but it took me two or three trips through the toll to spot the next bit of promotion. There were signs on the toll booths that said tolls would be free on Friday from 4-6pm. I found out today that Turner sprung for the toll as part of the Raising The Bar promotion. The toll on GA 400 for cars is $0.50.

The network also paid for motorists at toll plazas in Chicago, Philadelphia and Orlando on Labor Day [see photo of how things looked in Orlando, whose display was far clearer than the one that appeared on toll booths at Atlanta's Georgia 400 highway]. When the Labor Day bell tolled (you knew I had to use that phrase somewhere), the unconventional marketing had helped TNT create ratings history.

How did Turner come up with this clever bit of promotion? “Well, we were thinking of ways to play off the name,” says Turner Networks chief Steve Koonin, “but we didn’t want to give away any alcohol…we wanted to keep that for ourselves.” Needless to say Koonin, who’s one of cable’s most jovial executives, was in a particularly good mood today when ratings for Raising The Bar arrived. “Then we hit on this idea [to use toll booths and their rising and falling bars]…Labor Day is such a driving holiday, it was a natural.”

This is not the first time a cable network has paid fees for consumers in connection with a marketing promo. HBO footed the bill for postage for consumers to send postcards adorned with quotes from prolific letter writers John and Abigail Adams. That move was part of a creative campaign to promote the critically acclaimed John Adams mini series.

But back to TNT. It took a lot more than toll booths to raise the bar. “We went A to Z with extensive marketing [for Raising The Bar],” Koonin says. There was the traditional cross-brand advertising, with special promos on the legal-themed truTV (formerly Court TV). Needless to say TNT legal-themed hit series The Closer also carried a bevy of Raising The Bar promos. “There was also a tremendous amount of radio,” Koonin adds.

Then there were the faux summonses TNT sent to lawyers urging them to sample the series about a quixotic public defender, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and the tyrannical judge he battles, played to perfection by Jane Kaczmarek. “We also sent a sample [of the series] to school teachers, who we knew would be home [on Labor Day, the night before the first day of school]. Teachers are great broadcast towers when they talk to parents.” All this and a bit of local press, too.

Turner’s efforts worked, even better than imagined. “We knew it would do well,” Koonin says, “but we had no idea it would become the best premiere in the history of the medium.” The 7.7 million viewers and 5.7 million households who tuned in made Raising The Bar the best new series launch of all time. It topped previous cable record holder USA’s The 4400, which bowed to 7.4 million.

The fact that Raising The Bar’s record evening occurred against broadcast debuts on the CW (Gossip Girl attracted 3.4 million, down from last year’s 3.7 million, but up in adults and women 18-34 and adults/women 18-49) and Fox (Prison Break, 6.5 million avg, down vs last year’s ep 1 showing), the Republican Convention (NBC topped the broadcasters with 5.5 million viewers) and college football was not lost on Koonin, whose goal is to make TNT a broadcast network on cable. “To have had this kind of success in the face of that bodes real well for cable…it shows cable and we can program all year long.”