Concept creators: advertising agency Friedland Jacobs specializes in making sure viewers think TV is good.

Stepping from a nondescript lobby of a Burbank office tower into the ground-floor offices of Friedland Jacobs Communications is a jolt to the senses.

Tile floors and 90-degree angles give way to concrete floors and white walls with perforated metal dividers that lean crazily, separating the reception area from the main offices. A triangular room with massive angled sliding wood doors serves as the company's conference room.

If the interior design is creative, it's reflective of the firm's approach to television promotion. Friedland Jacobs is known best as the place networks, producers and studios turn to when they're looking for "high-concept" advertising.

When it comes to on-air television promotions, "high-concept" is a term used to describe spots that don't rely on film footage from a show, instead involving the production of an original 30-second commercial.

The commercials the agency created for Steven Bochco's new police drama "Brooklyn South" on CBS serve as an example: Viewers see a target on a shooting range, only the bullet holes morph into the two letter "O's" in the middle of the word "Brooklyn." Other spots present the viewer with a black background, as words fly onto the screen and a voiceover describes the heart-pounding pace of the coming show.

"Brooklyn South" opened last week with a higher audience share than Monday Night Football, a rarity that company President and Chief Executive Scott Friedland attributes largely to his agency's promotional campaign.

"These spots set an attitude and a tone for a show," Friedland said. "They create a memorable impression for a show. And they have to compete against all that high-concept, high-dollar brand advertising for other products."

Friedland and Ray Jacobs, the firm's executive vice president and creative director, have only been in business together for two years, but in that time they have attracted many of the biggest players in TV as clients including all the Big Three networks (CBS, ABC and NBC), along with Warner Bros. and King World Productions.

In the firm's first year of operation, it pulled in about $8 million in revenues, according to Friedland. In 1996 it had revenues of more than $10 million, and is projecting $13 million this year.

"Friedland is our primary supplier for high-concept campaigns ... they have extremely creative people, excellent writers and excellent directors," said Don Prijatel, senior vice president of advertising and promotion at King World, who hired Friedland Jacobs to do the ad campaigns for game shows "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy," and news magazine shows "Inside Edition" and "American Journal."

There is a reason why Friedland Jacobs prefers high-concept jobs: They are some of the most lucrative in the promotional television business. The company generally charges between $250,000 to $500,000 for its high-concept spots, while trailer spots range from $150,000 to $350,000.

Friedland, 41 and Jacobs, 54, are not newcomers to the television advertising industry.

The two men first met in the early '80s when Friedland, then in his mid-20s, started his own commercial production company. At the time, Jacobs was at his own ad agency, Jacobs & Gerber, which he co-founded in 1973. The L.A.-based firm has since changed its name to Air Creative Inc.

Friedland started his Imagine One Productions Inc. with plenty of chutzpah, but few clients. His only experience in commercial production was writing and composing jingles for television and radio, and his film experience was limited to doing a handful of corporate training films, so it was little wonder that at first his phone seldom rang.

Jacobs gave Friedland one of his first breaks by hiring him to produce a commercial for his agency, and they began working together on numerous projects

When they finally went into business together in 1995, their timing couldn't have been better. The television promotion business is booming - with increasing competition from cable channels, networks are spending more than ever to advertise themselves, and the new cable networks are also throwing large sums into self-promotion.

Even public television station KCET-TV Channel 28 is reinventing itself On Sept. 7, the Los Angeles public broadcaster unveiled the first redesign of its 20-year-old logo. Friedland Jacobs was hired to re-brand the station, creating new on-air graphics and coming up with new fund-raising strategies, among other things. One of the first things the company told KCET to do was lose its old palm tree and add a tagline that reads: "Infinitely more."

"What we did was take KCET apart, basically. We went in with the attitude that KCET has got to wake up the audience to the fact that they are a progressive station," said Jacobs. "There was a lot of resistance to us getting rid of the palm tree."

Spotlight

Friedland Jacobs Communications

Year founded: 1995

Core business: Full-service advertising agency specializing in entertainment branding, marketing and promotion.

Top executive: Scott Friedland, chief executive and president

Revenues in 1995: $8 million

Revenues in 1995: $10 million

Employees in 1995: 8

Employees in 1997: 31

Goal: To expand into broader-based consumer branding and marketing and create the leading full-service agency in the industry.

Driving force: Growing demand for TV promotion due to the increasingly crowded television landscape.