c. 2005 Religion News Service
NEW YORK _ Giant TV screens in Times Square barrage shoppers with hundreds of advertisements. Drink Diet Pepsi. Shop at Victoria’s Secret.
Come to church?
This holiday season, some religious groups are broadcasting their messages to the 1.5 million people who pass through Times Square each day in the bustling “crossroads of the world.”
The dazzlingly bright ads flash 60 feet above the crowds on the NBC/Panasonic Astrovision screen, a 30-by-40-foot video screen at One Times Square, the building famed for the New Year’s Eve ball drop.
Slick, clever commercials feature slogans like “Everybody matters” and “Where to go when you don’t know where to go,” hoping to reach “seekers” _ church-speak for those looking for a spiritual home.
“It’s to let folks know that if they are searching, we are there,” said Tracey Robinson-Harris, spokesperson for the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Spots for the self-described “liberal and creedless” denomination ran eight times a day during Thanksgiving week and will repeat that schedule from Dec. 23 to Jan. 1. “Imagine a religion where people with different beliefs worship as one faith,” read the words on the screen, while an ethnically diverse group of people talk and laugh together.
“We wanted to get our name and a very simple expression about our values out,” said Robinson-Harris. The 220,000-member UUA _ known for attracting converts looking for less-structured worship _ raised the $60,000 for the campaign from donors.
The United Church of Christ, whose ads that feature gay couples were deemed “too controversial” by the major television networks, ran a similar ad on the Astrovision screen in November.
Using the slogan “Open Hearts, Open Doors, Open Minds,” the 8.2 million-member United Methodist Church also hopes to catch the attention of seekers. “They are the target audience,” said the Rev. Larry Hollon, head of the church’s communications agency, which spent $1.89 million of the church’s annual $500 million budget on its holiday Astrovision and cable TV ads.
When a Methodist court ruled last October that pastors can deny membership to gays and lesbians, critics called on the church to reject the four-year-old slogan. But Hollon and other church officials denounced the ruling, and said keeping the motto was important. “Christ rejected no one,” he said in a memo. “Neither can we.”
The Methodist Astrovision ad encourages selfless giving by depicting a woman depositing boxes wrapped with a blue ribbon in a park, on a front porch and with a homeless person.
“There’s no commercial pay-off at the end,” said Hollon.
The expensive ads are worth church dollars, he said, because “they offer an alternative way to see the world and your place in it, and that’s a valuable form of ministry.”
First-time attendance in 160 Methodist test churches has grown by 19 percent since the denomination began its targeted ads in 2001, said Hollon. When Reuters cited a policy of refusing all religious advertising for its Times Square video screen in 2003, the church protested. Reuters later changed its policy and allowed the ads.
But these churches can’t take all the credit for the idea to advertise in Times Square this year. Marketers of the NBC/Panasonic Astrovision billboard specifically targeted religious groups and nonprofits, offering discounts of up to 20 percent.
“We suggested it to NBC, and they were amenable,” said Ron Walker, CEO of O’hsin Technology, a Toronto-based company with exclusive rights to sell the ad spots for the holiday season.
Walker said he marketed to churches because he felt it was “the right thing to do” during the holiday season.
“The whole theory of Thanksgiving is based on thanking God, or the universe or the spirit,” said Walker, who is Baptist. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with its extra 2.5 million spectators and 44 million television viewers according to Macy’s, was a particularly appropriate time for the ads to run, he said. “It’s a family-oriented type of event.”
The holidays also provide an opportunity to reach those facing depression, increased temptation to drink and dysfunctional family woes, said Steve Watters, a spokesperson for the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family. The group advertised its Troubledwith.com advice Web site on the Astrovision screen after O’hsin called with “a pretty good offer.”
“Research has shown that at a time of change, challenge or crisis that people are more open to a new worldview,” Watters said. Troubledwith.com offers mental health advice and referrals to conservative-Christian-friendly counselors.
But Watters estimates that of the 1,000-2,000 more daily hits that Troubledwith.com has received since the ads began running Nov. 14, 1 percent of those visitors have also spent time on Focus on the Family’s other Web pages. The ads ran on the billboard until Nov. 27, and have run during “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Dr. Phil.”
At first Watters was hesitant about the Times Square ad buy. “We didn’t know how much people in New York bothered to look up,” he said. But he thinks the buzz about the ads is sure to pay off.
The Associated Press published a story on the ads in early November, and gay rights groups and gay newspapers have attacked the ads as anti-gay. The Troubledwith.com site encourages homosexuals to “change” their behavior. “You’re not simply `wired that way,”’ it states.
“You can get more on the word-of-mouth on the spot,” Watters said, than on the ads themselves.
KRE END RNS
Editors: To obtain photos of the Times Square billboard ads for the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Methodist Church, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.
