Mark Stafford, Roger Harris

Partners, Jungle Productions

Roger Harris: There’s more opportunity than threat right now. As long as this medium exists called tv, I think there’s going to be people using it as an advertising vehicle in some way. What we might see as television becomes more defined for narrower markets, is advertisers will make their advertising very specific.

What it forces advertisers to do is: one, think about what consumers buy and where they are going to go with their commercials; and two, rather than one commercial that tries to say four or five things, have a commercial that says one thing for that specific viewer.

Mark Stafford: I wonder what would happen if the advertiser has to spread the dollar over 150 stations instead of threeÉ

rh: Éthe question then is, will the execution become less important?

ms: And does it move more towards the cost-effective type of infomercial where the time is so cheap – because the media time is going to get cheaper as there are more stations available. Does that mean we have to grow to fill that volume yet still take less money to do it? Is the economics going to become difficult to deal with?

rh: Are we still going to run major advertising by major companies in primetime network advertising time? And then, is the spinoff into the specialized networks going to be less important, and therefore financially not as great?

ms: Both a&e and the country music stations in the u.s. have large markets. That’s very specific advertising, taking it into a very specialized demographic.

rh: Isn’t tv simply becoming more like radio? Radio is much more targeted specifically at a certain listener, but tv has never been defined in that way. You don’t watch cfto because it’s your age group and because it deals with your lifestyle. When most people put on a radio station, they leave it there. Is that the future of tv?

ms: It means people who deal with specific products who are not overall retailers probably are going to be able to hit their demographic more accurately than if they had broadcast through network tv.

rh: It means we have to adjust our musical and sound styles to a more specific marketplace and maybe understand the market a little bit better.

ms: With the specialized channels you see it happening a lot – people really narrowing down and not trying to reach a broader group, like ytv. That’s something we didn’t have when we were kids, a station geared entirely to my age group, a whole culture that kids are getting into.

rh: tv for children is being designed and groomed.

ms: And it’s available to them 24 hours a day. This is something that is very special and shaping a lot of their viewing habits.

rh: I don’t think people are going to stop advertising on this icon of advertising, tv. It is definitely the most influential, most manipulative vehicle that we have to work with in our industry.

Maybe the source of origin of tv advertising may change for us a little bit at times, in that some of the larger companies may start doing more stuff in America with more importation into Canada, which means we have to develop a stronger foundation out of America for ourselves.

ms: Advertisers will not be slashing their budgets. Because there are more stations available, budgets will be spread thinner. They’ll have the same amount of money available to use for advertising, but have to do it on 40 channels instead of five. That means everybody on the production side is going to get a smaller piece of the cake.

Although at the same time you can argue that because the network is expanding – and I call the tv the network the same way the Internet is the network – there’s more competition so there will be more competitive pricing.

rh: So it suddenly becomes a volume business. I don’t think it’s in the interest of anyone to put a lesser quality product out there.

Look at a couple of campaigns – Coca-Cola or Toyota – in Canada. Coca-Cola designed their commercials for very specific networks. Toyota did the same thing with MuchMusic and then did more family-oriented stuff.

So if that’s the shape of what’s going to come for us, I get very excited about it. We’ve got to start adjusting ourselves. We’re going to have to look at packaging, and entire programming based on different levels.

ms: I found advertising has become more demographic-specific compared to five or six years ago. Look at the Pontiac Sunfire campaign compared to Cavalier.

ms: I do believe the tv medium is going to become much more of an interactive, sociological tool. It’ll have tremendous effects – the Internet at your fingertips as well as tv stations.

rh: It seems the consumer has said they want to make a more informed decision when they make a purchase. What do things like infomercials, or the Internet or the Home Shopping Network allow the consumer to do outside the normal realm of advertising?

I was watching the Home Shopping Network and there was a woman advertising a treadmill. I wasn’t interested in the treadmill, it was fairly low-end, but what they do is show the number of how many are sold.

ms: You can be part of that exciting moment.

rh: She sold 240 in the 15- to 20-minute period I was watching.

ms: You become part of our moment, our family. There’s something appealing about that. It’s interaction.

rh: First and foremost we have to decide what the viewing habits of our consumer are going to be. That’s what’s at stake here. It’s going to be like Camp Tommy – come along for the ride. People get caught up in this stuff.

tv is changing its face very, very quickly. And, the aspect of live is coming back with shopping networks and shows like Cops. The voyeuristic quality of the consumer has become bigger than ever before.

ms: I went to see Quiz Show for the first time. There was something about that time of tv that was so interesting because people watched it because it was live, and they made it almost life and death – the adrenaline, the tension. The whole thing was happening at the moment – like watching o.j. drive down the freeway. Live stuff – maybe that’s where television has lost it in so many ways.

rh: Like cnn and America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s the whole voyeurism thing. Television is a way inside people’s lives.