LATE NIGHT MOVES: The promotional blitz for Letterman's switch to CBS uses his snide-guy persona to maximum effect By BARBARA LIPPER

What's smart about David Letterman is the knowing way he mocks the conventions o

Given that CBS payed Letterman serious, Nike-style money to jump ship ($14 million a year for three years), and hasn’t yet cleared the show on all of its affiliates, this is a risk. So the irony can’t be lost on Mr. Irony himself that he’s now the object of a Jurassic Park-sized promotional campaign, the largest the network has done since the Olympics. And that he’s got to do the nearly impossible: sell the hell out of that thang without subverting the basic snide Dave-osity factors that made him successful in the first place.
So let’s review the set-up: networks, scary dinosaurs, hardball sales against Leno, and the stress of being the subject of an even greater number of TV promos than the talk shows run for ‘The New Lesbians.’ That’s one tough assignment. But actually, Letterman and CBS have pulled it off. What’s most surprising (for those who remember the cranky Dave days at NBC) is how game Dave is to mug for the camera, to make bad jokes, to be a CBS mascot.
In-house, CBS created two different kinds of commercials. In one version of letting Letterman be Letterman, he stands against a backround of admirable graphic simplicity (a white wall and the black CBS eye) and pops up, like a technicolor Jack-in-the-Box, in between a ponderous network announcer’s introduction and a few modular graphics (‘Same Dave, Better Time, New Station’). Squinty-eyed, gap-toothed, and smiling maniacally, he comes right up to the camera and delivers snappy one-liners like ‘Is your name Bob? Hi Bob!’ or ‘Love songs, nothing but love songs.’ Other favorites: ‘You can’t spell Scuba without C.B.S.,’ ‘That’s Quality, with a capital K.’
The backdrop of the black CBS eyeball, one of the few remaining corporate symbols of the ’50s, is very smart graphically. But Dave even needles the orb that romanced him. ‘Don’t you think that CBS eye-thing is a little creepy?’ he says. (It was designed at a time when big business was venerated, and TV was the newborn king.)
In the other series, Dave sits in a director’s chair, smokes a cigar, drinks from a CBS mug, and holds forth informally, like Bill Cosby or a guy who owns a mortgage company. The off-camera interviewer is Bill Zehme, the journalist who profiled Dave in Rolling Stone. In a Don Johnson style T-shirt and jacket, Dave addresses several issues: his hair (not a rug), his pants, and women.
Given man’s-man Dave’s past awkwardness in interviewing women (the one exception is Terri Garr, and she took a shower), CBS is making an obvious attempt to market the new, more sensitive, introspective Dave to gals. While I resented the heavy-handed re-formulation, what he says is funny. He discusses his sisters – the older one kept telling him ‘When you go into the bathroom, close the door.’ In another spot, he perfectly satirizes burnt-out TV stars who talk about getting back to their ‘theater roots.’ Of his new venue, he says he’ll be able to hang out with ‘the kids from Cats . . . ‘ The best, though, is the 20-second spot in which he talks about having done shows that were ‘so bad . . . they would not stick to the videotape.’
Compared to NBC’s sad and hokey Leno spot (‘America is standing up for Jay’) and Fox’s brain-dead throwback ones for Chevy Chase (he pours a glass of water down his ear instead of turning off an alarm), these are inspired. Of course, by the time the 80th one rolls around, you’ll probably be glad that they saved the funny stuff for the show.
Copyright Adweek L.P. (1993)