Some edgy commercials for a newly launched blackjack TV series have proven too much of a gamble for some major broadcast networks.
Commercials that were to air early last month for “The Ultimate Blackjack Tour,” a reality-style elimination tourney for blackjack, were pulled from CBS the network on which the show appears last month due to concerns about the controversial nature of the ad content.
Other networks, including NBC and ABC, also turned the ads down, UBT execs said, but UBT didn’t make media buys on those networks. More ads are already in the works.
One of the commercials showed poker star David Ulliott drawing a syringe full of liquid from a bottle labeled “steroids” and injecting an Ace of Hearts and a Jack of Spades with a needle.
The second showed UBT player Phil Hellmuth a World Series of Poker winner and UBT series regular loading a pistol and referencing the series’ “quick elimination” format.
The unaired spots were replaced by a tamer ads featuring Antonio “the Magician” Esfandiari, while others were distributed to UBT licensees.
“CBS is far and away the most conservative network, so we knew there was a chance they wouldn’t run them, though they’ve been great to us for the show,” said Larry Kopald, chief marketing officer for UBT. “We did these spots knowing they were going to be somewhat controversial, but if you play it safe nobody notices you. The idea was that it was important for us to make a statement about this form of blackjack being different and more outrageous that what people have seen.”
The tour was picked up by CBS Sports this summer, and began airing at 11 a.m. on Saturdays in mid-September.
The show has 13 contract players, known as Team UBT, who signed five-year deals to play on the tour. The team includes professional poker players Phil Hellmuth, Annie Duke, actress and 2005 Ladies World Series of Poker winner Jennifer Tilly and her boyfriend, poker pro Phil Laak.
The Ultimate Blackjack Tour LLC is based in Century City and owned by poker pro Russ Hamilton and his partners, including entertainment attorney Jon Moonves, the brother of CBS Corp. chief Leslie Moonves, former MTV executive Houston Curtis and Chief Marketing Officer Larry Kopald.
Ratings Knockout
It’s official. Cable network ESPN has scored a unanimous decision victory by picking up the boxing reality series “The Contender” after it was dropped after one season on NBC.
The Sugar Ray Leonard-hosted show posted its highest rating of the season with last week’s live, two-hour finale from the Staples Center.
The telecast of the title bout earned a 1.9 rating representing more than 1.7 million homes and 2.3 million viewers a 56 percent increase over the its performance on NBC in 2005.
The season finale was the highest-rated boxing telecast on ESPN, a division of the Walt Disney Co., in nine years and also the Staples Center’s biggest boxing event of the year in terms of tickets sales.
Staples Center, ESPN and Mark Burnett Productions, which co-produced with DreamWorks Television, shared the gate.
Grady Brewer captured a 10-round split decision victory over Steve Forbes in the title bout, after Cornelius Bundrage scored a seventh-round technical knockout over Norberto Bravo in the third-place matchup. Champion Brewer was awarded $500,000 and a new Toyota Tundra truck.
The program scored via Internet video-on-demand, too. More than 12,500 users downloaded the bouts and two other undercard fights from the Web site ESPN On Demand.
Crowning a CEO
Crown Media Holdings Inc., which owns and operates the Studio City-based Hallmark Channel, has named Henry Schleiff, as its chief executive and president.
Schleiff, who stepped down as CEO of Court TV in June after the network was acquired by Time Warner Inc., will face some familiar challenges. He’ll be trying to turn around an independent channel getting little financial support from its cable distributors.
Schleiff said Hallmark’s greatest strength is its brand.
“It stands for family-friendly programming; it stands for values,” he said.
To achieve the network’s goals of lowering the older-skewing median age of its viewers and taking advantage of advertisers’ growing interest in the baby boomer generation, Schleiff said he’ll add cost-effective, nonfiction lifestyle programming into Hallmark’s mix.
Schleiff praised Hallmark’s senior executive team, which has survived the network’s being for sale by its parent company, then taken off the block, and working without a CEO. “These guys have been through every possible storm you can imagine,” he said.
While Hallmark’s ratings and ad revenues are growing, its current agreements with cable operators pay only a few cents per sub per month less than other networks that generate similar audiences. Several of those agreements are about to expire, which means Hallmark Channel will have to negotiate new deals at a time when operators are taking a tougher stance against programming cost increases.
“Piece of cake,” Schleiff said. “These guys are smart at the end of the day. I’m very sanguine negotiations will come to a fair and appropriate conclusion.”
Schleiff said that selling the network to a larger programmer isn’t his target. His deal with Court TV gave him a share of the increase in the value of the channel when Liberty Media’s 50 percent interest was sold to Time Warner for $865 million.
Staff reporter Anne Riley-Katz can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 225, or
[email protected]
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