COVER STORY: Court TV Details New truTV Brand Network Makeover Sentences Brand of 16 Years to Obscurity
By Anne Becker -- Broadcasting & Cable, 10/29/2007 12:03:00 AM
Starting Jan. 1, one of the best-known cable networks in the business is demolishing a 16-year-old brand that took hundreds of millions of dollars to build -- all in a bold bid to become even bigger. Court TV, home of Dominick Dunne, COPS and lawyer cum TV personality Star Jones, will become truTV in one of the biggest marketing makeovers in cable history. The swap, say its owners, is long overdue to identify the channels programming.
The network will abandon Courts logo and its primetime Seriously Entertaining tag line in favor of a new insignia -- the word tru in bold (true didnt test as well) attached to an encircled TV and the tag line, Not Reality. Actuality.
TruTV will keep its live trial coverage during the day in a block newly named In Session, but it will drop its Nielsen Media Research ratings for that daypart. In primetime, it will bolster the genre that has fueled 18 months of year-to-year ratings growth: unscripted, adrenaline-packed, male-skewing joyrides such as Beach Patrol, Hot Pursuit and Speeders.
When I worked the graveyard shift, CourtTV was my daytime viewing of choice when I wasn't wrapped up in whatever was happening on CNBC, but I gave up on them in prime time when they stopped airing "Homicide: Life on the Street" - but Kim's a big fan of Dominick Dunne and seemed to watch one of those autopsy shows a lot.
Also, that logo kinda looks like "court" spelled backwards, so that's brilliant.
TruTV will keep its live trial coverage during the day in a block newly named In Session, but it will drop its Nielsen Media Research ratings for that daypart.
I would assume it is like Cartoon Network/AS sharing a channel. The TruTV ratings aren't going to be lumped in with the CourtTV stuff (although why they don't just split the channel instead of confusing the issue by using one brand and splitting the ratings off...)
I would assume that it is like when you run infomercials all weekend on a cable channel - it doesn't go into the ratings for your regular broadcasts.
It's in the story if you read far enough - they don't want to count those ratings in their overall because (1) they feel that including so many nonprime hours would drag down the overall (2) the demographic watching the trial stuff is older, isn't as desirable (3) they presell the time to mostly direct marketers anyway so it's not as if they need the ratings to justify any ad rates. Because they never know when the breaks are going to be during live trials, they can't really go with traditional advertisers, or something. Eh, just click on the link. ;-)
This isn't a split, though - it's going to be truTV 24/7 but they're still keeping the live trial programming after the brand change.