Global Television has launched a new ad campaign promoting its 5:30 p.m. and 6 p.m. Toronto newscasts using the tagline “Global News believes in a greater Toronto.”
Parent company Shaw Media is supporting the broadcast and out-of-home campaign with a social media component that asks people who spot one of its ads to tweet a picture of it along with the hashtag #AGreaterToronto for the chance to win a $100 gift card.
“We’re trying to extend our marketing dollars,” said Buffy McGaw, director of news marketing at Global News in Toronto. “We don’t have a lot of dollars for marketing, but we’re doing our best at lengthening it as best we can.”
The new campaign promotes Global News’ suppertime newscasts featuring co-anchors Alan Carter and Farah Nasser. Nasser joined Shaw Media from Bell Media’s 24-hour news station CP24 in May 2015, and returned to the channel last month after being away on maternity leave.
Global is supporting the campaign’s out-of-home component with video ads featuring the co-anchors writing their email address and phone numbers on a whiteboard and asking viewers to contact them directly with stories they feel Global News should be covering.
The campaign underscores the anchors’ commitment to their community, said McGaw. “They are working anchors – they don’t just show up and read,” she said. “They’re actually going out on stories and making calls and setting up interviews. I’ve worked in other local newsrooms, and that just doesn’t happen.”
McGaw said the long-running soap opera The Young and the Restless has provided a consistently solid lead-in to the Global News telecast.
However, appearing at the CRTC’s review of the policy framework for local and community television programming last week, Shaw Communications’ executive vice-president and chief operating officer Jay Mehr, said advertising, not audiences, is the biggest challenge facing the company’s news operations.
“It’s not really a viewership problem it’s fundamentally an advertising problem,” he told CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais during Shaw’s presentation in Gatineau, QC.
While local newscasts have been repeatedly targeted for cost-cutting measures in Canada, the malaise impacting the TV news industry doesn’t appear to be universal. In Buffalo, for instance, the CBS affiliate WIVB-TV is said to be launching a 4 p.m. newscast next month.
“It’s just so opposite to here, where we seem to be really struggling and cutting,” said McGaw. “The great part about Global in particular is keeping it local, even if we have to do it in a different way.” That, she said, could involve coverage of local high school hockey as opposed to the city’s professional sports franchises.
