Shifting Baselines Blog

1/29 - Blah: We Hate You, Hollywood Celebrities!

Every few weeks I get an angry fisherman letter that takes a swipe at us for using "ass face Hollywood celebrities" (as one writer so eloquently put it). All I can say is it sure does work. Our Ocean Symphony PSA has probably played over 20,000 times across the country (we stopped counting at just past 13,000 in March, 2004 when our distribution deal ended, but we still get plenty of e-mails from people saying they have seen it air).

By the way, for anyone who is interested, we have never paid for any air time for the PSAs. Instead what we do is hire a distributor who duplicates, packages, and ships out the PSA to television stations. All stations are required by the government to do a certain number of hours of free "public service programming" each week. The fact is that most of that time is during the middle of the night (12-6), but definitely not all and it probably depends on how much they like your PSA. In our case, CNN ran the Ocean Symphony several times nationally on Headline News during prime time in Dec., 2003 that shot our web traffic through the roof.

The tapes sent out have Nielsen tracking codes which result in monthly reports showing us every time and place the PSA has aired. We had the Ocean Symphony sent to 1000 stations across the country. The Tiny Fish went only to 70 stations in California, of which 43 reviewed it and about 25 have aired it.

Anyhow, apparently there are some people in this country who aren't as keen on the use of Hollywood celebrities. Though I bet if they could recruit some Hollywood celebrities of their own they would find it easier to get their message of hating Hollywood celebrities out.

Hollywood Celebrities: Why do they love to hate them?

Posted by Randy Olson at January 29, 2005 02:33 PM