| Subject: What you always wanted to know about TV |
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By CARLOS BANAAG
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Date Posted: 13:03:17 08/03/05 Wed
Author Host/IP: 202.69.162.187
What you always wanted to know about TV
By CARLOS BANAAG
You’ve been watching TV since you were interested only in cartoons.
Your favorite shows have come and gone. Some came back, but by then you had moved on. The stars you followed dipped below the horizon, and new ones rose up in their places. You monitored the nation’s political upheavals on television, and through television you shared in the people’s triumphs. You saw Vic Sotto and Joey de Leon stay young on the air and Kris Aquino get progressively sexier over the years. And throughout those years, you’ve had all these questions about TV bugging you, gnawing at you, keeping you awake at night, but you just couldn’t get anyone to give you any serious answers. Well, here at last are some semiserious answers to a few of the questions you’ve been asking since you first got control of the remote.
Why don’t TV shows start on time?
Because the TV networks don’t care about you! They only really care about 1) inserting as many commercials as possible; 2) getting higher overall ratings; and 3) making work easy for themselves. When the networks started calling themselves "Kapamilya", "Kapuso" and "Kabarkada", you should have abandoned all hope that their shows would ever start punctually. How many times have you heard "Okay lang ma-late. Utol/Asawa/Kaibigan ko lang naman ang naghihintay." What are friends and family for, but to use and abuse?
There is a workable solution for the poor individual viewer like you, however. You can throw away all your clocks and wristwatches and tell time by the TV instead. Wake up when "Magandang Umaga Pilipinas" starts. Finish lunch when the "Bulagaan" portion comes to its usual piethrowing end. Enjoy dinnertime Chika with Pia Guanio. Go to bed after the dramas and drift off to sleep to the soothing sound of the comedy laugh tracks. Rest assured that a majority of Filipinos have, like you, structured their lives around television shows; and, therefore, while you may not know what time it is, you are in fact in synch with the world.
Okay, I tried organizing my life around "Extra Challenge" but they moved it to late night, then moved it back to early evening. Nakakainis! Why do they keep changing the schedules? Apparently because, unlike you, most Filipinos don’t seem to care. A top-rating program might start early or late, end early or late, run long or short, move to an earlier or later slot and it will still be a top-rating program. The networks don’t even have to apologize, either sincerely or insincerely, for being sloppy or careless. On the contrary, since the networks know they won’t be punished, scheming programmers and heartless consultants deliberately fiddle around with the schedules of the top-rating shows to try to squeeze out even higher ratings. Since "Meteor Garden II" does well before "TV Patrol World", for instance, maybe it will do better after the newscast and help pull up the rest of primetime. If not, well, it can always be put back in its old slot. Another example: maybe moving Jessica Soho to Sundays in between Bitoy and Mike Enriquez will improve the flow of viewers from program to program to program, never mind that the change wreaks havoc with our weekend routines. It’s all about the ratings.
Ratings, ratings, ratings.
What the heck are these Ratings anyway? Several hundreds of homes in Mega Manila and in a few other key cities are equipped with data recording and transmission devices. When Papa sits down to watch basketball, he is supposed to press a button on a remote control-like-thingie to announce his presence to the rating meter, and unpress the button when he stands up to drink away his sorrows after Ginebra loses. Papa, Mama, Boy and Baby each have their own buttons. The data recorded on the devices is collected, collated, tabulated and extrapolated to give us The Ratings which essentially are percentages purportedly representing the number of people watching particular TV programs out of all people who have television sets. When you think about it, however, The Ratings are only telling us how many people pressed the buttons on their thingies. There is no guarantee that these people were actually watching, much less enjoying what the networks were showing.
It’s a lot more complicated than there is space for here, but a simple illustration goes like this: Since practically every household has at least one TV set, a 30.0 rating for "Kampanerang Kuba" means that a shampoo advertisement within that show has the potential to be seen by 30 percent of all the people in Mega Manila. If we assume that there are 12 million souls in Mega Manila, then the ad could easily be seen by 3.6 million. Extend the calculation to the nationwide population of 80 million and 30 percent comes to 24 million. Each additional rating point translates into another 800,000 pairs of eyeballs that could be attracted by the long, black and incredibly tangle-free hair in the commercial. Big ratings are what advertisers pay the big bucks for.
So how much does it cost to put an ad in a top rating show?
Advertising rates vary from network to network, from client to client, and from program to program; and the actual so-called "negotiated rates" paid by major advertisers is a closely guarded secret. Without blowing the lid off the whole thing, however, we can say that a 30-second primetime spot on GMA-7 costs from R175,000 to R250,000. Yes, that’s a quarter of a million pesos for every half-minute commercial. In other words, one second of commercial time brings in enough money to pay one production assistant for one month, or something like that. Theoretically, therefore, assuming that the network abides by the KBP rule setting the maximum commercial load at 18 minutes, a one- hour primetime newscast can gross a cool R9 million a day. By the way, GMA-7 is no longer a member of the KBP; hence, it can—theoretically—rake in even more because it can air loooooong commercial gaps with impunity.
Thatsalotapesos! How much does a newscaster earn then? Even the wiretappers of the ISAFP might not know the answer to this one. Reasonably credible sources with access to second-hand information tell us, however, that the top news anchors and hosts make seven figures a month. (Dear Reader, if you are a newscaster on channel 2 or 7 and still getting only 5 or 6 figures, you should get yourself a talent manager immediately.) Of course, these guys don’t get paid millions just for reading the news for 15 minutes a day. Most of them have several programs. The topnotcher is Mel Tiangco who headlines "24 Oras", "Mel and Joey" and "Magpakailanman". Mike Enriquez’s distinctive voice can be heard on "24 Oras", "Imbestigador" and on DZBB.
What about Kris Aquino? Ask another question please.
(The author is an astute media industry observer with extensive contacts particularly in the TV networks. For questions, e-mail carlosbanaag@yahoo.com).
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