What We Learned During Repack: Tips for Stations

What is the broadcast repack like from a station’s perspective? How should stations gear up to move frequencies? What helpful advice might smooth the transition? To answer these questions, we enlisted the help of Tracy Oliver, creative services director at WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh. Serving an audience spanning three states, and having built a loyal, multi-generational following over more than half a century on the air, WTAE took a proactive approach to communicating the station’s transition to over-the-air viewers. Their experience may help other stations have a (relatively) seamless transition to a new frequency.

Here are Tracy’s tips for stations:

• As soon as you know your rescan date, start planning. Get department heads, engineers and others in a room and talk about the steps you need to take.

• Begin your outreach early. We started communicating rescan information to viewers 90 days prior to rescan.

• The news department has to know what is happening. This is a major event for your station.

• The engineering department has to be involved in communicating your repack across your organization.

• A collaborative marketing effort was helpful. Having the entire Marketing team brainstorm on messaging and ways to get the word out ensured the best ideas came forward. The tools for stations at TVAnswers.org were helpful in crafting our messaging.

• Put yourself in the mind of the antenna TV viewer. Ensure you are satisfactorily answering key viewer questions: what is happening, when is it happening, who is impacted and what do I need to do? Don’t get too in the weeds with your public-facing communications about why this is happening. This may cause viewer confusion and limit the effectiveness of your plan.

• Don’t communicate what’s happening too early. Viewers may believe they need to rescan well in advance of when they actually need to rescan. Find your sweet spot based on your over-the-air viewer percentage.

• We had success communicating to viewers through a multi-platform approach. In addition to over-the-air education, we used press releases, text alerts to app users, and paid and organic social media within the framework of a six to eight-week messaging plan.

• Post-rescan, making sure you are monitoring social media for questions and engaging with viewers through your social applications becomes very important. Once the transition occurs, you can’t reach folks over the air until they rescan.

• It is helpful to remind viewers to spread the word to friends and family who use antenna TV. Even if the repack does not impact one viewer, it may impact friends or family members of that viewer, so knowing how to rescan is useful for a larger audience than just over-the-air viewers.

• Set up a phone bank. While scripts for phone bank staff may be helpful, make sure to be flexible. Different TV and antenna manufacturers use different jargon, some viewers may have old converter boxes and phone bank staff need to be prepared to go off script to handle non-standard questions. Having laptops set up for phone bank staff will help them to search for information on remotes, manufacturers, converter boxes, etc. Engineers should help staff the phone bank to answer particularly difficult questions. It’s a good idea to keep the phone bank operational for the day of rescan and the day following rescan.

• TV Answers will become your best friend. At TVAnswers.org, NAB has provided everything a station needs to ensure a smooth transition. Take advantage of these free resources.