Father’s Day at Hallmark Cards is generally a solid revenue-generating occasion, but the company has an unusual promotional partner helping goose sales even more: its own cable television network, the Hallmark Channel.
Hallmark parent Crown Media has successfully leveraged its famous brand with a completely different business. In a contest that ends on Father’s Day, Hallmark Entertainment is offering a walk-on role in a made-for-television movie as a sweepstakes prize. And guess where you can enter the contest? Why, any one of Hallmark’s 4,200 Gold Crown stores. You can also head to HallmarkChannel.com and enter there, on a page that also promotes “Fielder’s Choice,” an original Hallmark film scheduled to air the night before Father’s Day, and the Gold Crown Card loyalty program.
“It all starts with the brand,” says Bill Abbott, the Hallmark Channel’s executive vice president of advertising sales. “Hallmark as a television production company has a 50-year track record producing quality movies and as a 100-year-company has a reputation for quality and a place in consumers’ hearts.”
The network receives promotional support from the stores, especially for its holiday programming. Plus, Abbott says, advertisers like being associated with the Hallmark name largely because of the solid, high-quality tradition of the “Hallmark Hall of Fame” specials.
nature of the Hallmark brand. But David Kenin, the network’s executive vice president of programming, insists that “we don’t consciously think about ourselves as a ‘family’ channel.”
Far from relying exclusively on its library of “Hall of Fame” specials for programming, the With its mix of movies and off-network reruns, the network has grown to almost 68 million homes with a mix of movies and off-network reruns such as “Walker, Texas Ranger” and “Magnum, P.I.”. “Advertisers understand the difference between us and a network that strictly programs just for family programming,” Abbott says.
In the first quarter of this year, Hallmark ranked 21st in viewership in primetime with an average of 870,000 viewers, even though it is only the 41st largest cable network in terms of total distribution into homes. Its audience grew 22% during the past year, and its late-2004 introduction of a “Friday Mystery Movie” franchise proved so successful, the network moved up the second season debut from January 2006 to this month. Ad revenue has kept apace, climbing 38%, to $106 million in 2004.
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