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Known for its senior-friendly shows, CBS hardly seems like the place for a hit summer show featuring 16 castaways -- many of them in their 20s -- munching on worms and roasted rats on a deserted island in the South China Sea. Even Leslie Moonves, president of CBS Television, had serious doubts when a producer brought him the idea for Survivor earlier this year. "You're crazy. We can't put this show on. This is CBS," Moonves recalls saying.
So what won him over? An impassioned pitch by producer Mark Burnett, a former British Army parachutist who discovered prototypes of the show on Swedish and Dutch TV, where they were earning hefty ratings. Now, for the first time in years, droves of younger viewers are tuning into CBS, eager to see the group's latest exploits, as well as the savage elimination-by-voting ritual that will winnow the crew down to the ultimate survivor, who will take home $1 million. In its third episode, more than 23 million folks tuned in to Survivor, 1.3 million more than were watching the other five major networks combined during the same Wednesday, 8 p.m., time slot.
Moreover, it delivered CBS's largest number of under-50 viewers in years, outdrawing the five other networks combined in the 18-34 age group coveted by advertisers. For a network whose median viewer age is just under 52, that's demographic nirvana and gives CBS the opportunity to broaden its viewership by promoting shows that an under-50 crowd probably hasn't seen.
For years, CBS has been struggling to bring in younger viewers without turning off its core audience. With a few changes to its nightly lineups (see BW Online, 6/09/00, "Wow, Is That the MTV Crowd Peeking at CBS?"), CBS has managed to nudge its median age downward, to 52.9, from 54 last year, according to Nielsen Media Research. At the same time, ABC, NBC, and Fox have seen their median ages creep upward.
HELPING OTHERS.
But nothing compares to the ratings boost CBS is getting among younger viewers from Survivor, whose median age for the most recent airing (June 14) was 42. Survivor also helped deliver hefty ratings for the movies that aired in the two-hour blocks after it, helping CBS blow away the competition in both overall ratings and younger demos. And the show has also boosted the ratings of The Late Show with David Letterman and CBS's shaky morning offering The Early Show, both of which get first dibs on just-departed Survivor castaways.
Creating a blockbuster out of Survivor meant getting the word to a younger crowd. To do that, CBS seeded the Internet, whose users are usually younger and more affluent, and advertised for applicants on the Web. Later, it culled the list of folks who had applied to win money on the CBS-backed Iwon site, sending out more than 30,000 e-mails in expectation that the messages would be forwarded several times over.
More than seven months before the show first aired, the network also gave an exclusive to USA Today, the nation's second-largest daily newspaper, which has 1.8 million subscribers and a heavy under-50 readership. To further tease viewers the week before the show's first episode, CBS gave Newsweek an exclusive interview with four of the survivors.
Meanwhile, CBS trolled for younger viewers by offered titillating tidbits to outside news sources and using every available outlet inside the company and its soon-to-be parent, Viacom. "Sumner [Redstone] and Mel [Karmazin] are always preaching that one and one should equal three," says Moonves. "We were shooting for a four." To host Survivor, CBS selected Jeff Probst, host of Rock and Roll Jeopardy on Viacom's music channel VH1, which is popular with people in their 20s.VH1 and MTV gave the show cut-rate ads, says Moonves. CBS also sent Burnett out on almost 500 interviews. On his itinerary were more than 162 radio stations owned by Infinity Broadcasting Corp., in which CBS has a 64% stake. Those stations include such highly rated rock stations as WBBM in Chicago and KROQ in Los Angeles. The biggest convert was super-schlock DJ Howard Stern, who made talking about Survivors a daily part of his risqué antics on his morning show.
By the time the show debuted on May 31, Survivor was already a phenomenon, attracting 15 million viewers, only 2.6 million fewer than the ABC juggernaut Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Many mainstream media critics panned Survivors, but it outdrew Regis by nearly 1 million viewers in the prized 18-49 demographic.
Ads are going for the kinds of prices NBC's top-rated ER commands
The buzz also got older viewers to tune in. In its second week, Survivor handily beat Millionaire, prompting ABC to drop the head-to-head competition. "It has become a legitimate water-cooler show," says Alan Berger, who heads the TV management group for Michael Ovitz' talent agency, Artists Management Group. "It has been a while since you could say that about CBS."
CBS, which owns a half-interest in the show with producer Burnett, was virtually assured of a financial success even before the first episode aired. It had sold half the ads for each hourlong show to eight sponsors, including Bud Light, Reebok, and Ericsson cell phones, which agreed to buy ads on both the show and CBS's Survivor Web site.
Sponsors also get the right to work plugs for their products into the show. Castaways wear blue shirts with Reebok logos and use an obstacle course constructed by the U.S. Army, another Survivor sponsor. CBS has been getting as much as $250,000 for the two 30-second commercials an hour it retained, and is asking as much as $600,000 for a 30-second spot during the Aug. 23 finale. "Those are ER prices," marvels Andy Donchin, senior vice-president for broadcasting at media-buying firm Carat/North America. "And in the summer, too."
VACATION.
CBS's goal is to keep the momentum rolling through the fall, when it will launch seven new shows. In May, the network enjoyed one of its strongest upfront sales seasons in years, collecting $1.6 billion for its fall schedule. That's a hefty 11% hike from the previous year. And advertisers gave CBS high marks for its upcoming shows, including a sitcom by comedienne Bette Milder and a special-effects-laden remake of The Fugitive that stars Tim Daly, formerly of Wings.
With folks starting to head out for vacations, getting huge numbers will become tougher as the summer continues. Still, while viewers are around CBS, intends to pitch them its fall lineup. It's flooding Survivor episodes with commercials for other shows, offering up three spots alone during one recent episode for struggling mob drama Falcone. And on June 28, it intends to put reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens, two of its highest-rated comedies, on after Survivor."In the summer, when all you have are reruns, a rerun of a show like Everybody Loves Raymond will look new to viewers who might not even know it exists," says David Poltrack, CBS's executive vice-president for research and planning.
Although CBS executives are already making plans for a second Survivor, to be set in Australia, it's still unclear whether the network has found the magic formula that will work for other reality-based programs about ordinary people in unusual circumstances. But give CBS credit for trying. It's got another peep-and-broadcast, Big Brother, in which 10 strangers will be stuck in a house for three months and have their every moment recorded by 28 hidden cameras and 60 microphones. That show will likely get a boost from Survivor when CBS airs it the day after the July 5 Survivor episode.
But when CBS airs the final episode of Survivor, it can safely count on a large audience, giving the network one of the largest promotional vehicles in the history of TV.
By Ronald Grover in Los Angeles
EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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