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Amazon Prime - unlimited streaming PR4 & PR5 Pages for Advertising
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This Is The Place To Be
This time the stars were a part of the special effects, their images flying toward viewer amid the hypnotic mirrored animation. The music was warmed-over schmaltz, but the visuals remain modern, grabbing and dynamic - meant to lull audiences into a trance, I suppose, no longer able to reach for the remote. The results were mixed. ABC's ratings (with the exception of sports programming) for 1972-73 slipped to the lowest point in a decade. The net's only bright spot came with a '73-'74 mid-season sleeper, Happy Days, and that show would change the net's fortunes forever. For 1973, it was CBS that dominated the top Neilsen spots, promising viewers that "CBS is easy on the eyes," a tepid endorsement at best.
In another overblown '74 spot, workers talked about the ABC shows they watched the night before in the most unrealistic way possible (like two construction workers suspended hundreds of feet in the air on a steel girder talking about how frightening The Night Stalker was). Every one of the new shows in that overblown, clearly desperate 1974 promotion was a great big flop. And no wonder - ABC's mediocre line-up that fall could never have lived up to the hype. The alphabet net knew they had the best promotion guys in the business, what they needed was a new quarterback. Fred Silverman, CBS' programming whiz, was recruited in 1974 to perform the same ratings magic for ABC that he delivered for CBS in recent years.
The network's stategy was finally paying off, just as they were undergoing a regime change. The slogan for Fred Silverman's first season as programmer in 1976 was "Welcome to the Bright New World of ABC". The network stayed on top for the next few seasons thanks to still-hot hits like Happy Days, Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch and Rich Man, Poor Man, all primarily developed under Eisner and/or Diller.
('Still the One' songwriter John Hall made the news in 2004 when he demanded that the Bush reelection campaign stop using the tune at their rallys.) We're the One in a Million - ABC
By 1979-80, Fred Silverman had moved on to NBC, but ABC was Still The One (yet again) with a jazzy, modern rearrangement of the 1977 promo tune produced by Jam Productions in Dallas .
But it was ratings that were falling from the sky. ABC was bleeding viewers because the Silverman regime failed to come up with enough renewable programs - ending up with only 6 (rapidly-aging) shows in the top-twenty by the end of the 1979-80 season. |
In
1971, ABC utilized a fresh approach with 
This was
the same kind of graphic innovation the network was employing on its
highly successful 
The same
In
1974, the graphic effects were minimized and a warm and fuzzy visual
approach was embraced for a brand new slogan - 
But
until Silverman's CBS contract was up and he could start at ABC, interim
programmer Michael Eisner (Disney's current president) was given an
impossible task - create 6 midseason hits for January, 1975. Rising
to the challenge, three of his entries hit and hit big - Barney Miller,
S.W.A.T., and Baretta.
By
the 1978-79 season, 
This
time the ABC stars were seen congregating at a big family picnic, meant
to bring the net's celebrities down to earth a bit.
In
contrast, CBS was gaining ground and 
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