After reading this post here, a reader (who prefers to remain anonymous) sent this to me…
Up until last November, I spent nearly a decade working for one of the big companies that provides TV listings for print, newspapers and cable guides. I edited listings for hundreds of stations, everything from small, local independents to Top 10 network flagships and I can assure you that the Big 4 networks all still produce a half-hour promo program in the fall, and for spring as well.
They are not aired as part of the network schedule, but are optional programs that we only listed if the local stations included them on their schedule. That varied from station to station, with some rarely or never airing them, many airing them only once and usually on a weekend timeslot that could be overnight but more often was in the afternoon on a slow sports day or in prime access. And some local channels will air them multiple times, either because the network or the local station is really excited about the new lineup, or more likely (just a guess) because the channel needs some filler programming.
These programs are part of optional programs all the major networks produce, which also includes religious specials (both holiday ones as you'd expect but usually one or two a year that stations always air on a Sunday morning, if they choose to air them at all) and sports specials that are optionally available virtually every week, especially during NFL season. In the system we used, these were called O (for Optional) channels and each network has one in the database. These are not actual channels but rather a place in the database that the data and metadata is stored as if they were real, and if a station listed an optional program from the network, that is where we would pull it from to add it to a specific station's listings as a one-time only (OTO) addition to regular programming.
That's all interesting but the promo stuff I worked (briefly) on wasn't formatted for that kind of broadcast…or at least, it wasn't when I worked on it. It also wasn't prepped, as some other e-mailers suggested, for the network upfronts to show to affiliates or potential advertisers. I suspect the material was for reporters who might be writing articles about the upcoming season but that's just a guess. Nobody told me exactly what I was doing. This is not an uncommon situation at TV networks.
About the only thing they told me — and this seemed to be true of all three networks at the time — was that the main thing they were selling was the concept of Family. Think of the network as part of your Family. Watch their network with your Family. If you believe in America and the concept of Family, you have to watch their network. But they had somehow resisted working the word "Family" into their slogan for that season. Instead, the slogan was "That Special Feeling" — which of course describes many a thing you can't do on television.
By the way: My old pal Pat O'Neill recognized the voice of the narrator of the ABC video. It was William Schallert, who at one time or another seemed to be on every TV series of the sixties but was best known as a professor on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis or the father on The Patty Duke Show. There may have been some sort of F.C.C. regulation requiring every show to hire him, Dabbs Greer and Burt Mustin at least once. Burt Mustin was probably especially good at giving you That Special Feeling.