Earl Green - Freelance Television Writer / Producer

This campaign launched the fall 1999 season by “upgrading” UPN 32 to the new and improved UPN 32 v2.0! The Windows-inspired interface was an actual still of the new UPN 32 web site, which I designed and programmed in tandem with the on-air campaign to ensure that what you saw on the screen was what you saw online. At this point, it had been decided that UPN 32′s web site was an absolutely critical part of its success, especially since its audience seemed to be an increasing number of followers of “cult following” shows such as Star Trek: Voyager, The Simpsons, Dilbert, and so forth. As you can see from the selection of stills above, the Windows motif was adaptable for any occasion, with “warning”-style windows popping up to inform viewers of special presentations, new episodes, and so forth. The “loading bar” window filled up over the course of each four-second legal ID to give the impression that the following show was being “loaded”; for live events, such as the UPN 32 High School Football Showdown, the program was said to be “streaming.” (At sign-off, another Windows spoof appeared: “It is now safe to turn off your TV.”) Graphics were created on a PC with Paint Shop Pro v5.3, and were imported into the Mac-based Avid Media Composer to be composited and animated. (You’d be surprised how many layers of different elements are on screen with each of the above IDs.) Anachronistically enough, I provided a little bit of a recognition factor by using sound effects from several old video games. The resulting collision of vaguely familiar sounds was actually very amusing.

I felt the Windows campaign was ahead of the curve, and really in sync with the public’s appetite for all things internet, and so did the promotions manager at the time. However, it’s worth pointing out that the management and promotions regime that took over after both my supervisor and I left dismantled the Windows campaign quickly, so it’s just possible that I may have been too far ahead.

But we still had summer to get through in the meantime. To promote our somewhat temporary lineup of Coach sandwiched between two episodes of The Simpsons every night, I came up with the “Summer Just Got Dumber” campaign, leaning heavily on clips of Homer and Dauber, the two shows’ resident nitwits.

Also tying in with the final episode of Deep Space Nine was a contest to send a viewer and some friends to Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas. While the promos for this contest were among the coolest I had done, reviving the “Federation computer graphics” style of some of my earliest KFDF promos, the experience of this contest was not one I’d wish to repeat. At the eleventh hour, with promos already on the air, management yanked the contest and pulled our budget to do it, saying something about Star Trek being niche programming, and how contests needed to be saved for something that would draw a mainstream audience. Paramount Theme Parks was providing the Star Trek: The Experience package for free, and all we had to pay for was airfare for four. Quite a battle ensued, and the contest only continued when it was agreed that the airfare would come out of the promotions budget – and when it was pointed out that the station was already getting calls from viewers who had seen the teaser promos. The contest received a reluctant green light, but sales pulled all support out from under it.

Their loss. It turned out to be the most popular UPN 32 contest during my tenure, with thousands of entries. Our winner couldn’t have been more thrilled. The ratings for Deep Space Nine – despite the fact that it was airing opposite Fox’s X-Files at 8:00pm on Sundays – were solid.

There’s nothing quite like shamelessly hurling oneself onto a passing bandwagon which you know will get attention. In March and April, leading into the May 1999 sweeps, UPN 32 launched the Legends campaign, which consisted of a series of spoofs and homages of the immensely popular Star Wars: Episode I theatrical trailer. The Legends promos were essentially clip promos boosted by an able assist from our in-house voice, Randy Moreau, and references reinforcing the Star Wars connection (i.e. graphics over black stating “Every generation has a legend,” “Every journey has a first step,” etc.). This worked especially well with a campaign building up to the late May series finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, so much so that a few viewers actually called the station requesting copies of the promo. In contrast, the Simpsons promo speaks of a boy with the power to change the universe…but he’s not here right now, so let us introduce you to Bart! Again, graphics were created on a PC with Paint Shop Pro v5.3 and imported into the Media Composer for compositing and animation.

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.

When I arrived at WACY, it was so obviously top-heavy with syndicated science fiction and action shows (i.e. Xena, Deep Space Nine, Earth: Final Conflict, Babylon 5, Team Knight Rider, etc.) that I was stunned to discover that they weren’t milking it for all it was worth. Just prior to the fall launch, I created the “Prime Time Invasion” concept, which would feature IDs, promo tags and interstitials, grouping all of these shows together – including at least one night on UPN prime time programming, which only extended to Wednesday nights at the time – in a single package. And for the first time, it was nice to have some backup instead of running around like crazy trying to do everything myself: Jody Frase provided some cool graphics, and the Invasion tags and IDs were all graced with the thunderingly threatening voice of Bill Lumay.

Our ratings rose dramatically in November, and UPN 32 was one of UPN’s top ten stations in growth from the November 1997 to November 1998 sweeps. I think this means it worked.