NBC's Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff at TCA: It's All About Cars and Stars - Ed Martin Live at TCA

The broadcast network portion of the Summer 2008 Television Critics Association tour has run surprisingly smooth these last eight days, given that three of the five networks - ABC, The CW and NBC -- had no pilots to show the press prior to sessions with the producers and casts of their new shows. The critics have been good sports about it, conducting interviews and filing stories with far less information than usual to go on.

Come to think of it, that's how advertisers did business with NBC last spring, or so one journalist realized during an appearance here yesterday by NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studio's Co-Chairmen, Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff.

NBC has been very forward-thinking and boundary pushing these last few months, partnering up with advertisers and finding new ways to involve them with program development and execution. The reporter wanted to know: What was the reaction from advertisers to making commitments to pilots that NBC had not yet cast or shot?

"It ended up working out really well because they were able to get involved in the profound way they wanted to," Silverman replied. Taking immediate note of the mumbling in the room over his unusual use of the word "profound," Silverman continued, "In terms of profound way, I mean [the advertisers' interest in utilizing] those shows as marketing platforms. One of the best examples would be [the upcoming Christian Slater drama] My Own Worst Enemy. We brought in General Motors based on their response to what we presented them in April. The first things we actually shot were for General Motors with Christian Slater. [They] are going to air [during] the Olympics. [GM] is also an Olympics sponsor."

GM got involved, Silverman noted, "Because they could see it and read it as opposed to just getting a pilot of it and talking about what we were doing." GM was also involved in the decision to hold the premiere of Worst Enemy until October 13 (at 10 p.m.), because "they're launching a line in mid-October that they wanted the show kind of launching right around. In that case, without us being locked into something, they were able to influence the process and be part of the process," he explained.

Apparently the marketing executives at GM are more perceptive than critics at TCA, many of whom had trouble grasping with absolute clarity the ambitious concept of Worst Enemy, a complex tale about a man with a chip in his brain that turns him into a super government agent by day, then provides him with false memories before he returns home at night to his wife and kids. His life is further complicated when the inoperable chip begins to malfunction, blending his two personas, or something like that. The producers and stars of the show had a devil of a time clarifying its narrative during their session, which came several hours after Silverman and Graboff's on the second to last day of this crazy busy tour.

Continuing with the whole cars and stars thing, one TCA member brought up last winter's critically lambasted TV-movie Knight Rider, which will become a series on NBC this fall. "Is there a point at which this kind of deal can go too far?" the critic wanted to know.

Silverman was direct. "Absolutely," he replied.

"It doesn't do anybody any good – the advertisers, [the network] or the viewers – if there's too much product integration," Graboff added. "We don't even like calling it product integration. What we're trying to do here is integrated marketing in this new day and age where the 30-second spot isn't as effective anymore. We're trying to integrate it more organically with the show … something that the advertisers are comfortable with and the show-runners, more importantly, are comfortable with, and then hopefully the viewers will be comfortable with as well."

"Did Knight Rider go too far in that respect?" the critic continued.

"It's about a car," Silverman explained. "You could easily see, if it was about a romance and it looked like that, I may have an issue. But the star of the show is a car, so that was a case where it felt like low-hanging fruit to bring in an automotive partner on a certain level, because you know they're going to be part of that show no matter how you look at it.

"I think when [the movie was telecast] we may have activated too much," Silverman continued. "We ran [a sweepstakes] in every single commercial. We made sure you knew that there was an automotive partner in that show. [Ford's Shelby GT500KR Mustang was featured as KITT, the talking car.] We may have hammered it too much, actually. It's all about degrees. There's no question that the reason we're building these platforms and engaging the advertisers is just so we can fund and finance the highest level of content that we can."

Silverman returned to the topic a while later. "It's absolutely not tied to how many images of a car or [a tube of] toothpaste are inside a show," he said. "That's something we're trying to limit because that was kind of the old clunky way to do [it]. It's much more, how does this entertainment vehicle match up to this brand's initiative? How do they leverage the access to this entertainment brand and the distribution and exposure we can give it across our channels and where we push it?

"Is it really about how many people have been exposed to that brand message?" he continued. "It's much more, how many of those toothpaste tubes did we sell and how many of those cars did we sell. As technology is driving transformation and how content is consumed, it is also going to drive transformation and research and how we quantify success. Is it more valuable for an automotive brand to be exposed to 100 million people or is it more valuable that they sold 100 cars?"

Despite innovations and the implementation of new concepts, "the flatline this Upfront for all [the] broadcast networks still had elements of guarantees," Silverman said. "We're still negotiating based on CPM at the core, still have a scatter market built in for the spring. It still follows the pattern. It's just slowly evolving as new elements of those deals require additional work by us on the content and broadcast side."