Ready for Your Close-up?
There’s nothing like a little television air time to promote your garden center and tout your own expertise. Everyone loves a star!
Early last spring, I received a phone call from Boston’s CBS affiliate, WBZ-TV (www.wbztv.com). Todd Gutner, the weekday meteorologist, asked whether Pemberton Farms would be interested in participating in a new gardening segment that would air live during the midday newscast. I hesitated for a second; I’d never done television before, let alone live. But how could I pass up the opportunity to help promote gardening and get free exposure for our garden center? My answer, of course, was yes!
Because this was a new segment for WBZ, it was on us to help create segments that would air once a month. They needed to inform, be fun for the viewers and encourage people to get out in the garden. Knowing that it would air during the midday news, we figured that many of the viewers were homemakers, so we targeted that audience with topics we thought they’d find interesting and educational.
Gardening in New England changes not only month to month but also week to week, and each week there is something new to plant and more that can be done in the garden. Selecting topics was as easy as knowing what we had in stock at the time, what our customers were asking about and any current issues that gardeners should be aware of.
Words can not describe the nerves of doing live TV for the first time, but fortunately, each segment got a little easier. By the end of our sixth segment, I was wondering how I could get my own TV show!
Pressure’s On
One of my favorite segments was in June, which was filmed at our garden center. It was informative and fun, and it drew quite the crowd. It was a busy time for customers shopping in our garden center, there was a TV truck parked out front with its satellite dish hoisted 40 feet in the air, and at 12:15, our gourmet foods store was bustling with lunchtime customers. Needless to says, there were lots of people around watching. I thought, “Ugh, my first audience!” I was definitely nervous the first couple of times doing live TV, shot in the studio with lights, cameras and news staff watching. But this time, it was at my store, in front of about 40 people including customers, staff and some family. After a couple of deep breaths, though, they called, “Action!” and it was just like talking to a customer. But with a camera!
We primarily focused on plant care and maintenance. We talked about fertilizing, diseases and insects, all of which are important in June. I showed off some products that viewers could buy as well as some home remedies, which I love. We finished off talking about aphids and broke out the box of ladybugs, and this is where the fun began! It was a very entertaining watching Todd, the host of the segment, release hundreds of ladybugs that flew around and on him. We got plenty of laughs from behind the camera and, we found out later, TV viewers. In the days following the segment, we had more than 100 phone calls from viewers asking if we had ladybugs in stock. Well, we didn’t have that many, so we started taking names on a callback list. Once the ladybugs arrived at our store, we called every single person and told them their bugs were in!
It is such a wonderful experience when you can teach people about something you love. Doing these segments with WBZ-TV has been a great experience and such an honor and privilege. The value of the free press and exposure Pemberton Farms has received is immeasurable: Communicating with tens ofthousands of people in our community about gardening provided us with so many new customers, and it certainly helped make up for the terrible June and July weather that we had in 2009. I hope the station will want to do it again it 2010!
My advice: Pick up the phone, call your local news and see if they, too, want to do a gardening segment. It was a success for WBZ-TV and certainly for Pemberton Farms.
SIDEBAR:In 2009, we covered the following subjects on WBZ-TV.
April: Garden preparation, what to plant now
May: Planting tender annuals
June: A visit to Pemberton Farms
July: Backyard gardening (taped at my house)
August: Fall plant selections
September: Preparing the garden for winter, planting spring bulbs
(You can view these clips on Pemberton Farms & GardenCenter’s Facebook page. Click the “Info” tab then scroll down to the “Recent News.”)
Videos
