Frankly Speaking
Before evolving into a marketing executive, R F Timberlake & Company's president began his award-winning media career as a broadcast and print journalist helping the news industry to gravitate towards more in-depth and investigative reporting. Frank Timberlake taught broadcast and advertising, managed numerous political campaigns and operated media outlets with Linda, his wife and business partner. He has never been shy about speaking his mind. Having limited Frank to the subject of marketing, we hope you will enjoy Frankly Speaking, a marcom blog.
AD AGENCY PULLS ALL CLIENT ADVERTISING ON HGTV
Here's a press release on our renouncement of using HGTV for any of our clients' advertising. It is definitely, "Frankly Speaking."
"The Home and Garden TV Network is not what it used to be. It's clogged with old reruns and looks like a dated real estate listing preparation clog, and I don't mean blog," said R F Timberlake & Company president Frank Timberlake. His agency has notified all cable media companies that beginning with the next quarter the agency will remove any and all spots on HGTV local insertions.
"While auditing some schedules on all cable networks, we found HGTV to be guilty of airing constant reruns, most three to five years old. Also HGTV is running shows about real estate listings and home selling and has totally abandoned its original broad-based home and garden timely and relative programs. HGTV's lackluster and highly repetitive programming has no place in the media portion of our clients' proactive promotion," Timberlake added.
He continued by saying that people, especially business people, sometimes forget to stay the course of their core competencies while injecting fresh, relative content, and that is true of any kind of media programming, the agency head commented, "Programming interests and tastes change and it is a puzzle as to why HGTV has abandoned original programming that made the network so popular with gardeners, lawn fanatics, homeowners and homeowner hopefuls."
Back to the business side of television or cable TV programming, a lot of business people also do not realize that just like any other product, a TV program has a product life cycle: Pioneer, Growth, Maturity and Cash Cow. "And so it is with a cable TV network like HGTV," remarked Timberlake, "as it is obviously drawing in the all the cash it can without any new, creative programming. That's when we say goodbye." The agency said that it has found too many instances of old, shelf worn network programs that really were not core or dynamic. There are likely to be others added to the infamous list.