After doing the show for 15 years, HLN is finally going to start a marketing campaign to promote morning Anchor Robin Meade.

I guess they wanted to see if she was going to stick around, before they started investing money in her.

It's hard to believe, but outside of Matt Lauer, Meade has the longest tenure in morning television.

Meade has deliver impressive ratings year after year with little or no promotion. Well, now she's going to get some. HLN is rolling out a new marketing effort will tout the anchor in local ads and on billboards in various cities, first in Cleveland and Atlanta, and then spread out to other cities in 2016, said Albie Hecht, executive vice president and general manager of the Time Warner-owned outlet, which is part of CNN Worldwide.

Meade will likely to go on the road to visit markets where HLN wants to raise her profile, he said, and HLN will play up the fact that she is not based in New York City, where all the other national sunrise programs perch.

“This is a real alternative to the other shows,” said Hecht, who arrived at HLN in the fall of 2013 to shake up its programming. Meade’s show has been luring new audiences in big cities like Dallas and New York, he said, and even Los Angeles, where insomniacs must be tuning in for the earliest read of the news at 3 a.m. His mission? Giving Meade more resources to build a better show without getting in her way. “She’s an engine that has been running, and you don’t want to screw with that.”

Meade doesn’t want to be like the other daybreak anchors or even hew to an archetype of what a news anchor ought to be. “There was a time in my career when if there was anything a consultant said, I would take it to heart. I tried to be so perfect to make viewers like me,” she recounted during a quick stop in midtown Manhattan. “I thought if you’d like me, then you’d watch me. If they said, ‘Cut your hair,’ I would lop it off. If they said, ‘Don’t wear red lipstick,’ then I would throw it out. If they said, ‘Don’t laugh,’ even though my laugh is my signature thing, I would not laugh. But what I became on the air was boring. A stuffed shirt. Voice of God. That’s not fun to watch.” Following others’ dictates also led Meade to have panic attacks, she said, something she had to work through before she came to HLN.

These days, Meade is comfortable in her own skin, and to good effect. “Morning Express with Robin Meade” ranks second among viewers between 25 and 54 and viewers between 18 and 49 in both the third quarter and in 2015 year to date as of early October. Viewership among audiences between the ages of 25 and 54, the crowd coveted by advertisers in news programming, rose 24% in the third quarter.

It seems that HLN is just now figuring out what FTVLive has been saying for the past 15 years.

Robin Meade is awesome

H/T Variety