News That Matters Campaign 2020

February 2020…

With FOX slated to host the Super Bowl in 2020, all hands were on deck to take full advantage of this triannual opportunity when hundreds of thousands of eyeballs would be focused on our station for a few hours and this was that rare time when we could pitch our News Team to an audience whose viewing habits had been interrupted and potentially had some plasticity.

The responsibility fell to me to develop the promotional spot to fit this :30 second moment. Scheduled to be slotted in between multi-million dollar spots during the game this piece had to match the production values of those commercials without a budget and minimal lead-time. Knowing the limitations I decided to use an embedded photojournalistic style to capture real moments of the News Team at work and allowing the style to communicate the seriousness with which they go about their work. Opting for this look allowed us to achieve the highest quality finished product on a compressed timescale and offered strong support for our News Director’s pivot to a very hard news strategy. To add a finishing touch I adapted an animation technique using depth mapping from hand drawn grayscale tonal ranges to accentuate the photos motion. (ironically, a plugin was released about 6 months after this spot was produced that automated most of this process, subsequently flooding the market with this style animation)

The spot aired in the 3rd quarter of the 10th most watched Super Bowl of all time and locally to excellent ratings for a match-up of two out-of-market teams. Little did we know that our pivot to a harder news angle and the serious tone this spot takes would be extremely prescient as one of the most tumultuous years in modern times lay ahead.

…Three Weeks Later…

As the Coronavirus Pandemic began to escalate in early March it became apparent that the production team would quickly have to go remote in order to safely continue operating the station. Understanding the impending restrictions our promotion efforts kicked into high gear in order to accomplish as much as possible with a skeleton crew before in-person work was no longer safe.

Buoyed by the success of my Super Bowl spot, which had received positive feedback across the market we decided to further build on that theme with a series of interview spots with our lead anchors (morning & evening) giving them a platform to talk about the importance of their job while also not mentioning the big “C”. This was for two reasons:

A) Journalist’s job is ALWAYS important so it was critical that these spots touched on universal, evergreen themes while also understanding that the context of the current moment would provide these pieces greater impact without crassly hammering the buzzwords of “pandemic” and “coronavirus” while people are scared and dying.

B) Keeping the focus on broad themes vs. topical subjects future-proofed these spots during a time when we were unsure when, if ever, we’d be able to record new material after the lockdown. The interview style allowed me to develop multiple :30 spots from a single conversation and with advertisers pulling ad-buys that gave us important content to be able to run to fill empty time while maintaining variety in our promotional messaging so we weren’t just repeating the same sound byte ad nauseam for months.

…everybody needs color…

Running in tandem, the re-edited Super Bowl Promo and the half dozen interview spots found alot of success in the early months of the pandemic. Striking a tone that matched the times without being too self-important or sensational these spots supported the hard work of our News Team while also made progress towards longer term image goals. After the initial two months of the lockdown phase of the pandemic however we needed to offer an evolution of the messaging we had started with the initial promo launch.

Using footage shot from all across the state this promo (below) lightened the tone while hewing close to the same themes of the original run of promos. During this time shooting anything in close proximity wasn’t feasible and with so much still unknown I opted to use time otherwise spent coordinating talent and crew to travel around the Vermont’s back roads and shoot scenics at the best times of day. (This also served the dual purpose of collecting footage needed for some other local and corporate level promotional material)

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

While these spots certainly don’t represent the totality of the promotion we had running on the air in 2020, or the context within which they ran, they do represent one thread of the conversation we were having with our viewers about who we are, who we want to be, and what matters to us as an organization. In a year filled with a Global Pandemic, a long over-due conversation about Race & Policing in America, a contested election cycle, widening inequality, our News Team met the moment and what I wanted this series of promos to do was to highlight their hard work and the hard work their stories were doing in the community. Highlighting important issues, wrangling difficult interviews, asking unwelcome questions, lifting up forgotten people. TV News can be fluffy, it can be corporate, it can be surface level, but when it’s at it’s best it can be impactful, it can shine a line in the dark and tip the scales towards change in important moments. It certainly doesn’t do all the heavy lifting but it can be the difference.

As a final wrap-up to this campaign I wanted to put together a year-in-review style promo that called back to what I had so naively produced at the beginning of the year. While the first spot had focused on the News Team doing their jobs, now I wanted to turn the lens outward and focus on everything that they had been working on this year. To accomplish this, I shadowed some of our reporters on assignment to photograph the events as they happened. Obviously some places and subjects I could captured and so once I had plenty of local material I filled in the gaps from Getty Images in order to tell the story of 2020 in as much fullness as possible.