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Obscure 70s music & more!

Because ABC was a much younger network than NBC and CBS, (they both started out with the advent of radio in the 1920s) the fledgling net had to play catch-up both in prime-time and daytime for years because they didn't have the resources (money, stars and long-established relationships) that their competition had access to.

ABC had a limited success in prime-time throughout the fifties and sixties. Bolstered temporarily by scattered hit shows like The Rifleman, 77 Sunset Strip, Ben Casey, The Real McCoys, and Batman, the network never seemed to have more than one or two shows in the yearly top ten at any one time during its first two decades.

Still, the alphabet net produced some of the best on-air promotions in the business, like this pop-art psychedelic piece from the 1967-68 season. Flashy graphics with star-laden quick cuts were the order of the day for ABC promos in the sixties.

Despite strong promotion, ABC was in last place as the sixties ended, the butt of cruel jokes like, "Want to end the war in Viet Nam? Put it on ABC, it'll be gone in 13 weeks!"

The net's strategy to turn things around was visionary - aim for a younger audience than the competition. Energetic ABC programmers like Michael Eisner (now head of Disney) and Barry Diller (QVC) pioneered the idea of using demographics to target audiences - selling the largest number of 18-49 year-olds to advertisers instead of the largest overall numbers. Shows like The Brady Bunch, Nanny and the Professor and The Partridge Family carried the network into the seventies.

Moving into the polyester decade with that momentum, ABC began to regularly beat its rivals in key demographic ratings with hits like The Movie of the Week, The FBI, and The Mod Squad.

To compliment (then ultimately replace) their annual hour-long Fall Season Preview Shows, ABC commissioned three-minute jingle-driven videos to sell the network's new offerings.

On the next two pages, we'll look at some of the best examples of these slickly produced, cutting-edge advertising gems - films that led to the development of music videos as we've come to know them.

1970 promo - Let's Get Together

NEXT: GROOVIN' IN THE 70s
Audience bonding,
bizarre marketing and huge success
- then stunning failure!

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