Tele-Visions
The average household, Jacobs explained. And most households didn’t have television.
“We’re in the wonderful position of selling a good product. Now I just have to get eight million people to remember the phone number.”
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“We” is Jacobs and his partners in this caper, Norman Langill of Seattle and John McGowan, a Chicago marketing whiz. Dial 976-8080 and you’ll hear the time, and the weather, and a plug for Channel Two–which hasn’t invested its own money but did give Jacobs a space to set up shop. From 5 AM to midnight his people are in there, reading the weather wire and scripting and taping a new 30-second forecast each hour.
“This is a benchmark,” he said about 976-8080. “You’re really looking at the telephone becoming a computer terminal. That’s five years down the road. That’s not possible now so we wanted to start with what is possible now and this was the most advanced thing we can think of.”
“We’re running this a little like a radio station,” Jacobs was saying about 976-8080. “You can wake up to Dan Lee, whom we refer to as our morning anchor. Dan Lee is a calm, steady, reassuring view of the weather ahead, unflappable, which you have to be if you’re giving weather at five in the morning. Lynette Lewis, whom we refer to as our afternoon drive-time anchor, I’d say is the world’s most optimistic forecaster.”
