Belly Up to the TV
New on-premise satellite system is a Big Fat deal.
Big Fat, Inc. is getting into the TV business.
The New York City-based company, home to the promotions group that executes the Brown & Williamson “Strike Force” guerrilla marketing program, is launching a satellite TV system for drinking establishments that president Jonathan Ressler hopes will become a major advertising and promotion vehicle for alcohol brands and more.
Nightlife TV, an on-premise network for trade education and consumer promotion, is expected to launch in first quarter 2001. The service is being backed financially by digital-satellite company EchoStar, Littleton, CO (which will provide the satellite dishes), and Redmond, WA-based Microsoft Corp. (which will handle content distribution through its Web TV technology). The service will be free to establishment owners and subsist on advertising and sponsorship revenues.
The idea is to give bar, restaurant, and nightclub owners and employees educational programming by day, and offer patrons promotionally driven entertainment by night. Bartenders will be able to take service-training courses or order P-O-P materials; consumers can participate in promotions or watch sponsored programming like music concerts. (Big Fat already operates a similarly structured Internet community at bigfatbartender.com.)
While the system would seem to be an obvious channel for alcohol brands, Ressler says there are opportunities for other categories as well. Film studios, for instance, could offer advanced screenings to bartenders (who have more word-of-mouth power than the average consumer).
Ressler knows from bars, because he spent 10 years owning and operating multiple Manhattan venues before launching a self-named promotion agency that he sold to Gotham shop B-12 in 1998. After a brief stint with Dallas-based TLP, Inc. in 1999, he talked that agency’s parent, Omnicom, into backing the launch of Big Fat. (He has since bought the operation back.)
The promotions side of Big Fat specializes in programs for 18-34 year olds “because that group influences up and down,” Ressler says. The shop has 90 full-time employees in 79 markets.
