CBC Bumbles Messaging about Hockey Night Theme Song
June 12, 2008 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
You have to wonder how the talk went at CBC the day they decided to play hardball with the author of the iconic Hockey Night in Canada theme song.
“That theme is too recognizable,” one exec said to the other. “Is that really worth a couple of million dollars?”
(Pardon me while I get out my calculator and figure out how much cash the theme song would generate in mobile phone ring tones at $3 per customer…)
Tired of the legal strictures of their expiring agreement with the jingle’s songwriter, CBC decided to play hardball, setting a deadline for negotiations with the songwriter’s agent. They had been unable to reach agreement on an outright purchase of the song (rumored asking price: $2.5 million), or on the extension of an agreement that cost $500 for each use, but limited the CBC to only using it with hockey games.
(For those of you outside Canada who don’t get why this is important, Hockey Night in Canada is one of the strongest TV franchises in the country, the highest-yielding cash cow in the national broadcaster’s barn, and the theme song is fondly thought of as an unofficial national anthem for us canoeheads.)
The dumbest attempt at message hardball came when executive director of sports Scott Moore told the Globe and Mail the agent didn’t understand that the song just wasn’t worth much to anyone other than the CBC.
If this was an attempt to get negotiations back on track, it worked just about as well as CBC’s failed bid to televise the Vancouver Olympics. Rival CTV, which outbid CBC for Olympic broadcasts starting in 2010, also snatched the theme song away from the public broadcaster for “an undisclosed sum.”
As a bargaining ploy, the “worthless” line may have seemed like a good idea.
But as CTV starts planning how to best use a song that not only means HOCKEY to every Canadian, but means CANADA to most Canadians (even more than our actual anthem) CBC must be thinking the word “priceless” might have been a better choice.
Holy crap!
CBC LOST the Hockey Night in Canada theme song?!
That’s like NBC losing its signature three note chime or using a kazoo to play the theme from Dragnet!
$2.5M will seem like a very small price to pay when the country heads to CBC HQ and lynches the guy who didn’t pay up for the HNIC theme.
That’s a disgrace!
Best always,
- Peter
Peter: Yes, a jingle that became ubiquitous will now be used by CTV to add lustre to their NHL games playing on The Sports Network.
A sad symbol of CBC’s wild thrashing in its attempt to figure out what it wants to be.
OK, so here we are, almost a year later. Seems like maybe CBC got it right and CTV got it wrong. It was a BAD BUSINESS DECISION to pay too much for the rights to the song.
CTV over-extended itself by paying too much for the rights to the HNIC theme song, the rights to the Olympics, and CTV GLobe Media has over extended itself by buying up all kinds of media outlets that it can no longer support. I live in an area where two TV stations were recently closed, and several major cuts to programming have been made. Local content has been gutted. Clearly, the money for the HNIC theme song and rights to the Olympics had to come from somewhere, right? Now of course, these companies that made poor business decisions are going to ask for government funding to help cover for their mistakes.
Time to get back back to basics of running their business. CBC made the right call on not over-paying for the rights to HNIC.