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Show CBS counts on Olympics to help ratings By TOM HARALDSEN Clipper Correspondent SALT LAKE CITY Whether Salt Lake City gets the 1998 Winter Olympics bid next weekend or not, one entity is hedging its bets on the '92 Games in Albertville, France. CBS Sports, which took a gigantic gigan-tic bath in both its sports and regular network programming last year, is hoping that the '92 Games will be the culmination of a two-year two-year comeback it is trying to make. Michael Mischler, vice president of advertising and promotion for the CBS Group out of Television City in Hollywood, returned to his native Utah this week to discuss the network's net-work's efforts with broadcast executives ex-ecutives and the media during an in terview at Video West in Salt Lake City. Mischler, a graduate of Weber High and the University of Utah, called these "tough times for CBS, along with the other two major networks. net-works. Television has evolved greatly with cable, a fourth network on the air, and general sales revenues down as a whole. Some of the problems we've experienced have been unavoidable, but some were also from friendly fire. We're poised to turn that around." The Albertville Olympics next February will be heavily promoted using the theme "Share a Moment With the World." During his visit to Salt Lake, Mischler played six of the 25 spots his division has developed de-veloped to promote the broadcasts. Some are generic in nature, focusing focus-ing on each of the winter sports of the Games, while others center in on specific athletes such as speed-skaters speed-skaters Dan Jensen and Bonnie The Winter Games will come during the last half of the 1991-92 season which CBS will kick off this fall. As the network has climbed from a deep cellar position to a solid contender (CBS finished within one-half rating point of leader NBC for the 1990-91 season that concluded this spring), its programming pro-gramming has begun to reflect the mainstream desires of the American viewers. CBS' entry into Major League Baseball proved to be a financial disaster last year, multiplied by the fact that the Cincinnati Reds swept the Oakland A's in the World Series. Mischler said the network needed at least five World Series games just to break even. The network has also beefed up its regular lineup with such hits as "Murphy Brown," "Designing Women," 460 Minutes," "Murder, She Wrote," "Evening Shade" and "Northern Exposure." CBS also plans, for the third straight season, to run a fall preview contest in conjunction con-junction with Kmart, with vacations, vaca-tions, soft drinks and a $1 million MasterCard to be given away this fall. Mischler's department, promotion, promo-tion, produced over 8,000 spots for CBS programming last year. To compare that with regular advertising, advertis-ing, had the network needed to purchase pur-chase the time to air those self-promotional self-promotional spots, it would have paid up to $500 million. |