Cable Nets Up Their Marketing Game

Multichannel news reports on three cable network shows benefiting from creative marketing strategies:

• A&E’s Parking Wars has used a flash game and a Facebook app to boost its profile.
• A&E’s Paranormal State combined building-covering billboards and focused speakers to make passers-by thinking they’re hearing ghost whispers from a nearby graveyard. Spoooooky!
• And HBO’s True Blood built a core audience by creating a prequel web series and sending unbranded ARG-style mailers to 1000 vampire-enthusiasts identifying them on boards and blogs.

While big networks seem to be having trouble finding big enough audiences to justify their web-only shows, they are embracing better and better marketing tactics to promote their televised fare. It’s only a matter of time before the marketing and the show content itself are pretty much seamless.

Remember that, as writers or producers independent of the big media studios, you’re competing against this level of promotion. Your stuff has to stand out — not only from the thousands of similarly-produced content — but cable networks as well.

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