Holding through the Break

I seem to get a lot of emails about teasing, so I'll write a bit about holding viewers though the break.

The first thing I would do is have someone sit down in front of five tv sets and have them watch your programming and your other main competitors. Are you in commercial breaks when everyone else is not? It may be something as simple as adjusting your break times. When I used to produce shows, I think my first segment was up to 12 minutes long, but then I HAD to be back in programming by 15:00.

So that's one thought. The second thought is maybe finding a way to put a tease INSIDE your commercial break so that if a viewer is flipping around and they come upon it they see that--- AHA--- there is something good coming up-- I better stick around. This may not be possible depending on how your breaks are structured.

A third thought is maybe it's not the writing of the tease... but what are you selecting to tease? Your story placement might be what's off. Sometimes most of the effort is focused on the top of the show and then there is nothing sexy left at the bottom of the show-- it's a throw away. No matter how good a writer you are, if the story you are teasing is a dud, your tease will be a dud. Have you see EXTRA, ET? They do a really good job of getting something good at the top.. and then stringing you along through the end of the show. Some of the magazine shows have really nice tracked teases... sometimes they'll even just take the first few seconds of the pkg they will run and use that in their tease. Experiment and have fun. If it's a complete flaming disaster, you'll know not to do it again.. but maybe you'll also stumble on to something that works for you.

To help select which stories to tease, I'd check to see what's trending on google and twitter. Is there an obvious tie-in? Is something so overplayed on the web that by the time you get to it in your show, it's hackneyed? ...If your station has a good website-- what's getting the most clicks? Or what types of stories do best? That might help you select the strongest stories to tease.