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Media

Wal-Mart And P&G To Make “Family Friendly” TV

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) and P&G (NYSE:PG) are fed up with the violence and sexual content in television programs. The Wall Street Journal reports that they have joined forces to create a two-hour TV special that will run on NBC in April. The title of the program is “Secrets of the Mountain.” The paper reports that be based on characters and plot will be based on themes which include “generosity, honesty and togetherness.”

Wal-Mart will sell DVDs of the program in its stores. If the test is successful, two of the world’s largest marketers will create similar content.

The real risk in the project is cost. Network television time is expensive, although the cost of a few programs per year will not burden the marketing budgets of the two giant companies–at first. If Wal-Mart and P&G elect to continue creating  feature-length content in any volume, the costs could go well into the tens of millions of dollars.

The other risk that companies face is that TV viewers may believe that the two companies are “manipulating” programming and taking time away from producers who create content based on the interests of the broader public. Wal-Mart and P&G could hurt their reputations by taking time that would otherwise go to programs that the network approves based on commercial appeal.

Wal-Mart and P&G may well be able to get large numbers of programs on the air, but they do so at the risk of “sanitizing” network  TV.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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