KEY POINTS:
Prime Television bosses are defending the controversial publicity campaign for its new Sunday night show Mad Men.
That is despite spending $2 for every first night viewer.
The campaign has had limited success introducing the new - and rather brilliant - television show.
It screened at 8.40pm on Sunday - and in mid-winter when the most people are watching. That is the best timeslot you can get in TV.
Ad industry folk estimate Sky, Prime's owner, paid more than $200,000 in pre-publicity and attracted only around 100,000 viewers.
The campaign by Sky's real life ad agency Draft FCB, about a 1950s Madison Ave ad agency, features sexism and racism - all the isms through a haze of cigarette smoking admen.
The most offending element was a billboard featuring the line "Advertising Agency Seeks: Clients. All business considered, even from Jews".
There were others too which were valid in the right era but aimed to be controversial.
The Jewish community - as could be expected - protested at the billboards and they came down.
Sky chief executive John Fellet ran a letter of apology in Time magazine, which ran ads. Media covered the petit outrage with relish. Of course the ads referring to Jews were meant to offend and were surely meant to be forced down.
But if any publicity is supposed to be good publicity that was not apparent on the first night.
Prime programmer Karen Bieleski insists she is happy with the first night audience, which was on a par with previous shows in that timeslot.
Many television folk - including two from the Jewish faith - said that the show was good but that the campaign was too clever by half.
Adman Martin Gillman liked the campaign and thought it would almost certainly win an advertising award.
But for Draft FCB - which has been on a creative high in the past year - it is unlikely to take away any advertising effectiveness awards.
Ku Klux Klan
Part of the problem with these small and specific ad campaigns is that they have to create a buzz by word of mouth.
So in a perverse way this article - panning the ad probably - helps the campaign brief.
The ads - as with the 2005 DDB ad campaign for New Zealand Girl website featuring a hoax injury from a helicopter incident - become built around a publicity stunt and that can become self indulgent.
When the ad campaign is about a TV show about an ad agency you are headed for real trouble.
And jokes referring to Jewish people - however well intentioned - showed Draft FCB were prepared to play a rather dangerous game commercially.
Some Herald readers might remember a decade or so back when a high profile ad agency ran a print ad in Ad Media Magazine for a film processing company that was involved in separation of colours.
The agency showed a mock up picture of the Ku Klux Klan and described the advertiser as "experts at separating colours".
Which is pretty crass.
But must have looked good when the creatives put it on paper.
Light up with ASH
Ignoring the advertising brouhaha, one of the encouraging things about Mad Men is the way that it freely depicts smoking - which was almost required in the '50s. In the US, some lobby groups have tried to sanitise old movies by removing images.
There are some moves to do the same for New Zealand TV shows. But Michael Colhoun, of Action Smoking and Health, said ASH was not particularly unhappy with the smoke-filled scenes on Mad Men.
He addressed some of the ways that smoking had ben marketed. TV3's Outrageous Fortune frequently showed Cheryl West (Robyn Malcolm) fagging away and often trying unsuccessfully to give up. The show depicted the reality of smoking, Colhoun said.
ASH was once incredibly doctrinaire. Nowadays - and in an era when food advertising is under increasing pressure to fit social engineering agendas - that sounds remarkably sane.
A nice surprise PSA union organisers ummed and ahhed over Radio New Zealand pay claims, with staff calling for a 4.5 per cent rise and the union starting negotiations at 5 per cent.
I hear that RNZ chief executive Peter Cavanagh dismissed the claim out of hand, saying that he was not prepared to discuss the offer and that he was sure the broadcaster could do better than that - promptly tabling an offer of 6 per cent.
There may well be some logic to the largesse given that the broadcaster has traditionally been run on the smell of an oily rag and risked losing its best and brightest staff to the glamour. As TV commercials put it, "Now that's a nice surprise".
Melanie Jones to Campbell
Former One News producer Melanie Jones has taken up a role as a part-time producer on Campbell Live. She will be taking over the part-time role held by Janet Wilson, the former producer of TV One shows Close Up and Sunday, and whose company with former partner Bill Ralston is understood to have provided media training for National leader John Key.
Wilson is a contractor at TV3 and declined to confirm or deny whether she did media training or has other unspecified roles at TV3. It could be said to be somewhat ironic that Wilson is to be replaced at Campbell Live by Jones.
Jones won a long bitter personal grievance row with TVNZ after she was dismissed by Ralston, who was then head of news and current affairs. Hiring Jones will be a part of a serious bid to ramp up Campbell Live, which has started to recover after bad ratings earlier this year.
A well placed source said that many of the problems were due to story selection - which has been largely controlled by John Campbell and by the show's executive producer Carol Hirschfeld.
Business models
Political parties have joined the fray calling for more fibre optic networks delivering endless bandwidth so people can download programming to homes. But that raises the question about content to fill that capacity.
Telecom chief executive Paul Reynolds said there was a big need for content, but did not mention that Telecom has walked away from plans to be a content provider itself.
And companies such as Telecom and Vodafone could be excused for being ambivalent about any rapid fibre optic rollout.
Fibre optic can provide almost unlimited capacity and both companies' business plans are built around a shortage of bandwidth that allows them to impose data caps and premium charging.
Another Conchords
TVNZ has missed out on yet another hit offbeat British comedy series that would for years have fitted happily into the TV One brand.
Tommy Saxondale is the latest comedy from British comedy master Steve Coogan, who features as a cock-sure English pest control contractor, a bit like a work class version of Jeremy Clarkson. The show screens on pay TV channel UK TV on Sky.
Raising the question why did TVNZ - which turned down Flight of the Conchords - not try to get it. TVNZ's Megan Richards said: "We haven't bought Saxondale.
"I'm told we couldn't find an appropriate place in the schedule for it as there are limited potential slots and we already have a bit of a backlog of employed British comedy."
Richards said the programmers for TV One are aiming for steady consistency in scheduling so people know what to expect. Either that or they just don't get it.
