That is not going to win any of the local advertising creativity awards. I can picture a naked guy covered only with of those sandwich advertising boards with this on them...
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770 WABC Number 1 ?
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What do you expect from a supermarket guy?
That example is not even a good price/item flyer. I know, the stations I managed for nearly a decade in Puerto Rico was owned by the largest market chain and I was on their ad committee.
Of course, it is hard to put pictures of fresh veggies and sliced ham on a radio station print ad.
I’d enjoy week old veggies more than anything on that ad!
Totally agree there, KMR.
In my opinion, posters who, in the words of Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, “can’t handle the truth” shouldn’t be allowed to post here if they keep insisting that they’re “right” and that you and the others on here who have actually worked in radio are “wrong” and continue engaging in these circular arguments and blame games about why radio works the way it does.
I don’t like reading those types of posts any more than you like wasting your time and energy responding to them, only for such posters not to learn to face/accept reality and move on. Those posters don’t have the humility to admit when they’re wrong.
It reminded me of when some conservative hosts called the 44th President of the United States by his full name, with extra, exaggerated emphasis placed on his middle name. Bill Cunningham at WLW did this repeatedly. Demeaning, disrespectful, and dishonest. ---- Gotta scare those WASPs! Truly pathetic.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I had to chuckle at that, actually. In 2021, I had to undergo a roboscopic operation to break up and remove a stone from my left kidney which had attached itself to the inner kidney wall in a position that hindered the flow of waste product to the urinary tract. In post-op, when I came out of anesthesia, the nurse asked me the usual "do you know where you are?" and "what year is it?" questions ... when she got to "who is the President of the United States?" I answered "Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr."
They had to go look it up on Wikipedia to see if that was correct.
Well, as one of the few 18-25 year olds on this website, I do use radio often. And I listen to 1950s/1960s/1970s oldies or country stations from places outside the New York City area.
But I agree there is no format targeted at 18-25 year olds (except for current pop music or CHR).
And CHR stations target 25-44 women, and have for about three or four decades or more.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
And Classic Hits stations are starting to get significant listening from 18-34s.
And that's interesting because I thought CHRs targeted both men and women 18-40s. But it looks like I'm proven wrong.
Share, yes. But no so much AQH persons. That is because most of the CHR and HipHop/Churban audience has gone online, only leaving the tail ends of older formats.
@ johndavid237
I figure I've got several decades on ya, J.D. So If you don't mind some thoughts from a former street corner punk from back in the days of pay phone booths and mailboxes who marginally matured and did radio work for 30 years ....
Seems like some quarter century ago, a Bob Smith posted a blip on the 'ratings' chart that he noticed. Now, Bob was quite 'adult', a soft-spoken gentleman talk-show host adult on WXXI Rochester NY (1370 AM, a station run by TV's 'XXI" -- channel 21). He posted to a radio board an observation of his. I reposted about it a few times -- Bob Smith passed away -- and have never seen a single word of explanation or rationale to debunk it in over 20 years.
He posted that he'd spotted a dropoff in 12-17 listenership. IIrc it was a decline in time spent listening (it was that long ago; permit the memory burp). That erosion takes on two things to a cynic such as I: 1. the decay most likely had begun even earlier for it to suddenly show up that vividly.
2. the stirrings of apathy had very, very little to do with what is now a huge supply of modern options.
In any case, teens were not attentive as they'd been.
The thought here is that the last music to grab the whole of teens -- male and female -- was the AoR format of the mid 70's. Consultant Lee Abrams told his stations not to be surprised at all to find that his 18-34 format was also attracting tsunamis of teens (which they did). There were markets with three AoR stations back then -- major markets.
The females' discovery of Disco following the end of our military in Southeast Asia more or less signalled the end of any unified youth voice. Punk, Rap, Hair Bands and MTV separated and fragmented 12-17's even further.
Anyway, one gripe of mint for decades (the weather never stopped my complaining) is that alarming numbers of 12-17 no longer listen -- while radio insists on jettisoning over 55 like the demo was already in an old-age home. So with the young demo not replenishing things at one end of the burning candle -- failing to feed the cycle in increasing waves of apathy -- and the candle fated by marketing to expire at the older end ......
WTG on your listening to stations outside the market. 50's Oldies, 60's, 70's and Country are good sources per se of songs to turn into an mP3 library.
I figure I've got several decades on ya, J.D. So If you don't mind some thoughts from a former street corner punk from back in the days of pay phone booths and mailboxes who marginally matured and did radio work for 30 years ....
Seems like some quarter century ago, a Bob Smith posted a blip on the 'ratings' chart that he noticed. Now, Bob was quite 'adult', a soft-spoken gentleman talk-show host adult on WXXI Rochester NY (1370 AM, a station run by TV's 'XXI" -- channel 21). He posted to a radio board an observation of his. I reposted about it a few times -- Bob Smith passed away -- and have never seen a single word of explanation or rationale to debunk it in over 20 years.
He posted that he'd spotted a dropoff in 12-17 listenership. IIrc it was a decline in time spent listening (it was that long ago; permit the memory burp). That erosion takes on two things to a cynic such as I: 1. the decay most likely had begun even earlier for it to suddenly show up that vividly.
2. the stirrings of apathy had very, very little to do with what is now a huge supply of modern options.
In any case, teens were not attentive as they'd been.
The thought here is that the last music to grab the whole of teens -- male and female -- was the AoR format of the mid 70's. Consultant Lee Abrams told his stations not to be surprised at all to find that his 18-34 format was also attracting tsunamis of teens (which they did). There were markets with three AoR stations back then -- major markets.
The females' discovery of Disco following the end of our military in Southeast Asia more or less signalled the end of any unified youth voice. Punk, Rap, Hair Bands and MTV separated and fragmented 12-17's even further.
Anyway, one gripe of mint for decades (the weather never stopped my complaining) is that alarming numbers of 12-17 no longer listen -- while radio insists on jettisoning over 55 like the demo was already in an old-age home. So with the young demo not replenishing things at one end of the burning candle -- failing to feed the cycle in increasing waves of apathy -- and the candle fated by marketing to expire at the older end ......
WTG on your listening to stations outside the market. 50's Oldies, 60's, 70's and Country are good sources per se of songs to turn into an mP3 library.
And thank you Steve for writing this and giving information about an opinion you heard 25 years ago, even though there has been no explanation since then and Bob Smith died.
It is surprising to hear that 12-17 year olds were listening less 25 years ago (before online streaming, and when radios and cassette tapes were the 2 main options for music). I don't have an explanation for why that is. But I do understand how punk, hair bands, and rap separated teenagers because they are obviously very different genres.
But I don't see how MTV has anything to do with it. Because as far as I know MTV (even in the 80's when it started) never produced music of their own.
They were just a cable TV channel showing music videos of (as you said) hair band, rock, or rap songs that were the most popular on radio, or newly released songs.
And as for listening to stations outside the market, there are many great stations that play oldies and country music as close as Pennsylvania and Upstate New York. And that keeps me satisfied because there are no options left for that in the New York City market (with the exception of WRSK-LP, WMTR-AM, and WHTG-AM).
I'll admit I can't listen to WMTR-AM on a radio anymore because I get weak reception from where I live in Ocean County, NJ. But before that, I lived in Morris County, NJ until 2019 and got great reception. That station was my introduction to oldies.
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K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
But they were the first serious threat to radio in terms of audience erosion. What fragmentation that happened because of their existence had a lot to do with when after August 1981 any particular community's cable system added it. It didn't suddenly appear everywhere in the U.S. at the same time, because cable systems themselves were just beginning to add channel capacity, and not surprisingly, the earliest use of what were called "midband" channels were for pay services such as HBO and Showtime. After that, it was a case of what satellite-delivered networks would bring in the most households ... and since it was the adults in the family who were paying the cable bill, CNN, ESPN, WTBS, USA, CBN and Nickelodeon/ARTS were the obviously most attractive channels to entice them. Give up a then-scarce channel for a channel that was "radio with pictures", which only the kids in the household would watch? It could wait ... and often did.
It wasn't until more systems expanded from 22 to 35 channels by adding "superband" to their systems (an expensive undertaking as it generally required the replacement of all the amplifiers along the trunk cable) that MTV started to find greater penetration. This is important in the understanding of their effect on audience fragmentation because some teens got MTV sooner than others, and radio stations' playlists didn't take MTV into account until they were forced to by the channel's addition in their market.
So those who grew up having MTV sooner will have memories of lesser songs that were not getting current airplay in markets outside of their own. That's the fragmentation.