Off-air factors clinch or sweeten the deal for many underwriters

Originally published in Current, Sept. 5, 1994
By Steve Behrens

As candid public TV fundraisers admit, many corporate underwriters are buying those 15 seconds of airtime to put their brand names in front of demographically desirable eyeballs.

But in other cases, a broad range of sometimes ingenious "value-added" benefits are the critical factors that bring in the corporate support, according to development executives.

The clincher for GTE, for instance, is that its message and its name goes out to high school students through off-air taping of Scientific American Frontiers and through related print materials.

For Citibank and other major local underwriters at WNET, the underwriting deal is sweetened with a variety of services by the station that meet selected communications needs off the air.

And sometimes the underwriting money comes in because public TV is part of a larger communications plan, in one of those partnerships that PBS President Ervin Duggan likes to talk about.

Case in point: Microsoft, one of the bigger recent catches in corporate underwriting, decided to support Magic School Bus on public TV because it wanted to work with the publishing company behind the show, not to get its name on public TV.

Education "drives our interest"

For the corporate underwriter of the science program Scientific American Frontiers, the major targets are young eyeballs in the classroom.

"The educational component drives our interest in funding the program," says Maureen Gorman, v.p. of the GTE Foundation, which is backing the monthly show for its fifth season this fall (and underwrote Discover: The World of Science, before that). "The value of the program is not just in the value of airing the program but in the fact that we can make it available to 50,000 educators, with a pass-along to 20 million students."

The program reaches teachers in three-quarters of middle schools and high schools, she says. In 12 states, more than 40 percent of science teachers are signed up.

"Signed up" is an operative phrase. Teachers who want the 16-page teacher's magazine that comes with each episode of Scientific American Frontiers have to send back a request.

This assures GTE that the free materials are being delivered directly to the end-user in the classroom, and also facilitates regular polling to evaluate how the series is doing, says Karen Stefanelli, v.p. of Media Management Services Inc., of Newtown, Pa., the firm that handles print materials for the series.

By comparison, many other series distributing classroom materials "drop them from a sort-of cropduster," says Stefanelli.

To increase the program's reach, in the chronological dimension, GTE clears schools' off-air taping rights in perpetuity, not just for a year or a few years.

"We hear from people that they're using pieces that are five years old, that have become part of their curriculum." says Stefanelli.

GTE recently renewed the series for three more years at the cost of $7 million, on top of the $10 million invested in past years, says Jerry Franklin, president of Connecticut PTV, the presenting station. Chedd Angier Production Co. makes the show for Connecticut PTV.

"The continuing rationale has not changed," says GTE Foundation's Gorman. "GTE is a technology company, the fourth largest telecommunications company in the world. We have a great interest in the future of technology in this country. . . . The more scientifically literate a population, the better it is for a company like ours." For GTE, that population includes not only future customers but also future employees and future stockholders.

GTE wants Scientific American Frontiers to give students a role model of "scientists having happy or productive lives," Gorman says. The program also usefully supplements science textbooks, which are often out-of-date before they're published.

"We also like to associate GTE's name with a quality educational resource, one that is respected," Gorman adds.

But the company doesn't push to promote its brand, perhaps because it isn't a marketing-oriented consumer products company. Mary Byrne, a consultant to GTE, says she has "precious little success" persuading the company to engage in events to raise its profile in the corporate world.

That kind of restraint is unusual for an American organization of any type, of course, and contrasts with the promotional thinking that drives decisions by many underwriters.

Microsoft wanted a partner

Microsoft came aboard The Magic School Bus to partner-up with the Scholastic Corp. publishing complex, with its best-selling line of six Bus books and its enormous capacity to reach children and families through children's magazines and other media.

"We were very intrigued at the potential of working together with Scholastic," says Monica Harrington, group marketing manager at the Microsoft Home consumer software division. "That was the primary attraction." The message of Scholastic's entire Magic School Bus product line is that "it can be fun for kids to learn about science," she says.

Harrington acknowledges that underwriting the PBS cartoon version of Magic School Bus is a good fit for Microsoft because the company also will be collaborating with Scholastic on CD-ROM software using the Bus title and characters.

Microsoft's alliance with Scholastic "is part of the strategy it announced last October to publish 100 new education and entertainment software programs by April 1995," the Wall Street Journal reported this summer.

Though Microsoft is a key sponsor of all the Magic School Bus spinoffs, its money was crucial in pulling off the TV show, says Deborah Forte, executive v.p. of Scholastic Productions. While the National Science Foundation and other donors backed the half-million teachers' guides, the 4 million science magazines to be given away at McDonald's and the 16-city traveling museum exhibit, there was an "enormous shortfall" in funding the cartoons for PBS. And TV production required three-quarters of the budget. Microsoft's money went into TV.

"It's basic client service"

"Value-added" became an advertising buzzword in the 1980s, and to some salespeople it still means keeping clients happy by giving them choice football tickets and various other chachkas. At its most effective, however, the added value is in fulfilling genuine marketing objectives for the client.

"In my view this is not something new," says Victoria Devlin, v.p., marketing and development, at WGBH, Boston. "It's basic client service. 'Enhancing your investment,' we used to call it. 'Value-added' is a term that has cropped up in the last five years."

A moderate-size company may spend all or half of its national ad budget on underwriting a public TV how-to show, says Devlin. "They want to be able to use the series as the platform on which to build a lot of other public relations activities. Whether that means they want to reach out to stockholders at events or send viewer guides to their major clients, the added value is extraordinarily important."

In this market, public TV producers find themselves competing against sports teams and museums seeking corporate sponsors. But public TV "can do more than anybody else in providing corporations with partnerships that really matter," says Audrey Koota, director of marketing at WNET, New York.

WNET has done several events the in past year with Citibank, the local underwriter of MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, according to Katherine Schultheis, a local corporate underwriting director. The station gave the bank a value-added benefit, which served their mutual interest: the bank wanted to hold an event for customers with big bank accounts, and the station wanted to meet just that kind of people.

Last September, for instance, the station invited a list of the bank's big depositors ($250,000 and up) to tour the MacNeil/Lehrer set after the broadcast, see how chromakey works and sit in MacNeil's chair. WNET development officials also made an appearance.

In November, another group of 400 adults and children important to the bank had free run of the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store, arranged by WNET, which brought forth somebody to dress up as Thomas the Tank Engine. And in March, big Citibank customers were invited to a WNET wine auction in the bank's atrium.

Similarly, an accounting firm sent its major clients customized transcripts of Adam Smith's Money World, which it underwrites locally. And the local BMW dealers underwrote a WNET dance event keyed to American Masters and invited local dealers and other VIPs. Seven tri-state dealer groups have projects going with the station, says WNET's Jeanne Wigand.

To support the image-making efforts of a local health maintenance organization, the station gave schools a how-to guide on how to organize a health fair, and featured the HMO as an information resource.

Ultimately, any underwriting deal may bring in off-the-air benefits for the funders. "They may begin to talk about the air, but they are all into value-added," says Jonathan Abbott, PBS's senior v.p. of development.

Abbott sees an opportunity for stations to help sell national underwriting by fielding their "army" of local staffers, volunteers and lay leaders for value-added projects.

"One of the the things PBS would like to do is work more closely with producers in crafting their proposals and benefits for funders, finding new creative ways for stations to create value for funders," he says.

"We're not asking stations to do things out of the goodness of their hearts," says Abbott. "It's a win-win situation, because supporting national underwriters helps stations. Those national underwriting monies are 'local money' because they defray the costs of the program to the stations."