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Radio Geezer?

D

DJerrold

I started out in broadcasting as a part timer after high school in 1979. There's is a whole lot of history since then but today I run a 1KW AM with an FM translator in Northeast MN.
 
DJerrold said:
I started out in broadcasting as a part timer after high school in 1979. There's is a whole lot of history since then but today I run a 1KW AM with an FM translator in Northeast MN.
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Tell us how it is to be in that kind of market today! Do you still have many local accounts or are the Big Boxes hurting sales?
 
DavidEduardo said:
Tell us how it is to be in that kind of market today! Do you still have many local accounts or are the Big Boxes hurting sales?
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Interestingly enough, as a sports/talk station rebroadcasting KFAN out of MPLS, MN, we enjoy a great deal of popularity because we also carry the MN Twins MLB, MN Vikings and MN Wild NHL professional teams and, when not in conflict, some local high school sports as well.

The only "Big Box" players we have in the market are Wal-Mart and Menards. Menards has been on the air with me for years and they get a very fair price for a specific schedule of spots....which I would do for any of my clients....but most buy an annual "Pro Sports Package" which includes spots on each pro sporting event we broadcast and those people enjoy their messages used as filler for the sat breaks the rest of the time.

The end result is, for only a few hundred dollars a month, competitive with what the newspapers charge for business card size sustaining advertisements, my advertisers get hundreds of plays per month as "bonus spots" and their billing is a consistent monthly amount. There are a great number of businesses that can still afford radio advertising with this model and it doesn't take much to "sell".

These are mostly image advertising type spots which don't require a lot of updates and I go out of my way to make them interesting or humorous so they age well. The vast majority of my sponsors stay with me for years because they realize that their per spot rate amounts to pennies, compared to the other stations in the market with huge overhead, and they actually appreciate not being pestered to buy this thing or that thing over the course of the year.

The best part is that, because they are getting so many plays per month, the advertising really works well! They have people coming into their establishments commenting on the "humorous" ads and validating that they hear them and that keeps my clients happy.

This is also a situation where the station was the original area radio station, first licensed in 1948, and the big corporate weenies who last owned all the stations in the group I managed sold them off and were going to let this one go dark. (Who wants an AM, right?) Basically, I saved it by buying it, and I play up the locally owned local radio station bit whenever possible.

I am a one-man operation, no employees, no EEO reports, very few moving parts and I never get calls in the middle of the night or on the weekend because someone else screwed up or didn't show for a shift! I am also very lucky to have the engineering background, decades of on-air, sales and management experience and a few bucks put away originally to pull it off.

Good times!
 
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