Networks Have No Idea What To Say About Fall LineupsAs you would imagine, it's hard enough for TV networks to come up with marketing campaigns for all their new shows every time the fall season rolls around, because most of the shows are doomed to be failures. Which ones? Hopefully not the ones you, network marketing person, came up with the campaign for! Promotions are always a balancing act between enthusiasm and tempered expectations. But this year the networks are having a slightly different problem: they don't even have enough material on many new shows to make ads for them. Thanks, writers' strike!
Typically, the major networks decide which series will get the biggest fall campaigns after the "upfronts" in May, when they preview new shows for advertisers. However, the writers strike disrupted the pilot-development season. As a consequence, the networks have only 17 new shows slated for fall - far fewer than unusual.
Some new shows haven't had pilots shot, meaning there are no clips to sample for the ad campaign. Other shows coming into their second season have been off the air for a full year now, meaning everyone has forgotten about them. To overcome these problems—and the lack of new shows, period—networks are getting creative. That means annoying the citizens of New York City:
For "Crusoe," a new adventure based on the Daniel Defoe novel, the network will go so far as to strand a real-life Crusoe somewhere in New York and broadcast his travails online.