Been listening to a lot of unscoped airchecks from the 80s and 90s...
I've always lived in smaller to medium sized markets so I'm coming to the conclusion that perhaps movie trailers on the radio are STILL a thing...just in much bigger, more trendy markets.
I also wonder if they just went away entirely. If they did...when and why? Was there any rhyme or reason?
Keep in mind that lifestyle change has a big part to play here. Back in the 80s, VCRs and the like were coming into being, but decent "home theaters" that were affordable and uncomplicated to install and operate back in the 80s and 90s were still relatively non-existent. Also, back then a console CRT TV could cost more than a 100" flat screen costs today, and things like video streaming and 'binge watching' series on providers like Netflix and similar were not even heard of. Going to the movies was a somewhat regular thing for many people back then. For the past few years, many of the better movies and series that are getting the most 'water cooler buzz' are on streaming services and only really available to viewers at home. Last week when the new Top Gun movie was opening in theaters to huge numbers, there were articles released almost immediately, explaining when it might be available for home viewing, and where.
You speak of the 80s and 90s; I can think of a lot of advertisers who were heard often back then, especially in advance of weekend holidays and Christmas time, that one never hears a peep from anymore or that are simply no longer with us. Again, consumer trends have changed. One example - in the 1980s, K-Mart was still a growing brand. In the 1990s, there were more than 2,400 K-Mart stores at its peak and at least where I lived at the time, they advertised fairly heavily. As of last month, there were only 3 remaining K-Mart stores in the entire USA. I still remember working a weekend shift at a CHR station in the early 1990s, where a 2 hour block on Sunday mornings was bartered programming with local commercial inserts every 15 minutes. One of the programs we ran was Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40. One of his regular sponsors that ran ads at least twice an hour was Musicland record stores...Because consumers were buying CDs and cassettes back then, often still buying an entire CD just to get the 1 or 2 singles they liked, they maybe wanted to buy the music they were hearing on Dees' countdown show, and Musicland was one of the national stores they could get them from (along with Sam Goody, National Record Mart, Suncoast, etc.) Those stores haven't really existed since the early to middle '00s.
