



This is a story of network promotion going south in a big way. At Promax ’98 in beautiful Toronto, UPN’s top brass promised all of us that the fall 1998 season would be rich with heartwarming, positive, exciting, accessible-to-middle-America shows for the whole family. (This was about a year before Shasta McNasty and WWF Smackdown! premiered.) The new network slogan, we were told repeatedly, would be: “You’ll find yourself on UPN.” We all went home from Promax and started cranking out promos that said, for example, “You’ll find yourself on UPN 32.” UPN played us a “You’ll find yourself on UPN” jingle recorded – at great expense – by New Zealand dance group OMC (who scored on the charts with “How Bizarre”), and so we assumed we were in for the long haul with finding ourselves. Hey, it didn’t matter that this made no sense – the network was going to be using it, and we had to present a unified promotional message.
The network didn’t use it after all. And they never told the affiliates they were abandoning it.
More than one irate promo manager I spoke to that fall had spent a lot of time and/or money producing their own “You’ll find yourself on UPN [insert channel number here]” campaign, only to find that the network had hung a sharp right and zipped off down another road. That included WACY. But I made the best of it.
Over Christmas 1998, we ran an on-air contest featuring a cute little elf with a high-pitched voice (actually my voice sped up on a reel-to-reel), and the object of the contest was to find your elf on UPN 32. I would randomly insert the four-second Elf ID into prime time on the log, and viewers were supposed to write down when they saw the elf, and what show he appeared in.
If network comes up with something dumb, I can turn it into something even dumber. The contest was quite a hit.


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