Hijacking Star Trek: Voyager
Fort Smith/Van Buren district Addy Silver Award Winner, Self-Promotion Campaign category, 1996
KFDF’s UPN affiliation didn’t come without one hell of a fight. The local ABC affiliate, KHBS, carried the first season of Star Trek: Voyager as a secondary affiliate, but didn’t carry any of the other UPN programs. But despite Paramount’s syndication contract with KHBS, UPN automatically favored a full affiliate - even a low-power station with virtually no cable carriage - over a secondary affiliation, since their full programming slate (and thus all of their national advertising) would be seen in prime time, instead of a single show on Saturday nights at 10:35. KHBS put up an immense fight, and one of the objects of that fight was KFDF’s promo campaign announcing the Voyager move. The promos, which began airing on Fox 46 during NFL football, generated a huge amount of buzz, and both stations were getting lots of calls about this move. KHBS at one point complained to Paramount that KFDF had aired a promo containing footage to which it had no contractual rights at that point…and KHBS may have technically been correct on that point, but UPN backed up KFDF’s right to air the promos. Voyager was ours.
The “computer display” artwork in the promos was created in Targa TIPS+, and Voyager footage was composited into the final product with the Video Toaster 4000. The KFDF Voyager launch campaign also won an Addy Silver in the Fort Smith/Van Buren district in the Self Promotion Campaign category - though at one point it was nearly disqualified because the judges didn’t believe it was a locally-produced campaign. I remember finding this very irritating at the time, but with hindsight, I now realize it was a huge compliment.
