Marketing your “highbrow” show

Variety looks at four of this year’s Peabody honorees, including The Colbert Report, and how their networks reeled in the audiences.

How to hook highbrow audiences
Peabody honorees used smart marketing tactics
By SUSAN YOUNG

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[I]ntelligent TV can sometimes be the hardest to market, relying more on critics and creative positioning.

From “Mad Men” to fellow Peabody honorees “30 Rock,” “The Colbert Report” and “Dexter” (four of 35 programs honored by the panel this year), each of these winners offers a strong case study in how to attract auds to highbrow fare.

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Truthiness in advertising

Comedy Central scored an unexpected boost promoting Stephen Colbert’s “The Daily Show” spinoff when C-SPAN aired the comedian’s April 2006 speech at the White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner. But it was the attention his remarks generated on video-sharing outlets like YouTube that drove the net’s campaign.

“That clip got millions of hits and made Stephen a hot property,” says Peter Risafi, a senior brand marketing exec for Comedy Central. “With this, we moved into digital marketing for the show so we could leverage those clips that were going viral.”

Risafi’s team began posting broadcast clips, pushing search engine marketing and moving into social networking sites. To grab a politically savvy audience, they allowed clips to go out on such media-oriented blogs as Huffington Post and Gawker.

“If you want to appeal to younger, more educated audiences, you need to understand that the world is changing and that the more sites you are on, the better it is for your show,” Risafi says. “Every night, Stephen has a dialogue with college-age people between 18-34, and their world is a digital world.”

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Read the full article here

It’s interesting to note that this article specifically cites YouTube and the viral success of The Colbert Report‘s clips as influencing Comedy Central’s decision to engage in widespread digital marketing. Of course, it never hurts to have someone like Stephen at the helm of a web-savvy team of show staffers; if you can’t succeed in the digital marketing of a man who’s just won “Webby Person of the Year”, it’s time to throw in the towel.