Sometimes an idea looks good on paper but doesn't turn out so swell in practice.
Channel Nine provided us with a case study this weekend by splitting the premiere of Happy Feet across state lines as counter-programming to the AFL on Friday and Saturday night.
As a counter programming strategy, I've heard of worse ideas, and certainly the strategy helped them out somewhat, but the overall result really came up short.
In the 5 OzTAM cities Happy Feet averaged 970,000 viewers, a acceptable figure, but given the pedigree and genre of the movie, a really flat result.
Thinking back on the week that was from my own observation of the Melbourne market, I don't recall seeing one single promo for the network premiere of this movie, not one.
You have to wonder what would have happened had the movie been shown (and promoted) across the network on a Saturday (perhaps away from opening round) whether it's audience would have been greater - I reckon in excess of 1.1 million at least, instead we had a fragmented promotion and presentation for an increasingly fragmented audience, written off as cannon fodder against the football.
What should have been a national premiere was reduced to local programming and unfortunatly the individual stations in the network don't seem to have the promotional mojo of the network as a whole.
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