Saturday Morning Meeting Making Move to KNWA-TV

A locally produced talk show currently airing on the video-sharing website YouTube will soon be reaching a much wider target audience.

Local NBC affiliate KNWA-TV has agreed to broadcast the weekly talk show “Saturday Morning Meeting,” a property of Bentonville-based company 8th & Walton, which provides training on how suppliers do business with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

The show will debut on KNWA on Saturday, Jan. 11, at 6:30 p.m. Jeff Clapper, CEO of 8th & Walton, said the 30-minute program — taped a couple of days in advance — will continue airing initially each Saturday at 10 a.m. on the company’s website.

“We started ‘Saturday Morning Meeting’ as a way to share insights and best practices within the Walmart community,” Clapper said. “We’re thrilled to be deepening our reach in Northwest Arkansas with KNWA as our local partner.”

Derek Ridenoure, a consultant with 8th & Walton and a national account manager for The C.F. Sauer Co., will continue hosting the show, interviewing retail experts, Walmart executives and various retail suppliers about Walmart news and stories relevant to the supplier community.

“It will be the same content, filmed at our offices; We’ll just put more resources into it,” Clapper said.

Sarah Gillmer, innovative projects coordinator at KNWA, said the station has agreed to air the program through the end of 2014. It will replace paid programming.

KNWA will manage commercial sales and production of the show, which will be closed captioned.

Clapper said the show has booked guests through the month of February. An upcoming program of note, he said, will focus on an analysis of Black Friday — the heavy shopping day after Thanksgiving — and feature DataRank CEO Ryan Frazier. The show will air Nov. 30 and Frazier will use real-time data from social media feeds to reveal retail winners and losers and actual category trends from the busiest shopping day of the year.

Scheduled guests in December include Drew Collom of Diamond Foods (Dec. 7); Theresa Warren of 8th & Walton (Dec. 14); Cameron Smith of Cameron Smith & Associates (Dec. 21); and Julie James of Hillshire Brands (Dec. 28).