What are the ad buys for talk radio. How many 20 somethings are listing to AM at 12 noon.
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A reason why advertisers don't target 55+ audiences
- Thread starter davideduardo
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Have you listened to talk radio? Lots of debt reduction, time-share escape, and similar scheme/scam advertisers. Political advertising is strong, too. Hardly any 20-somethings are listening, but most talkers that depend on nationally syndicated programming are running on a shoestring budget, so advertising to oldsters covers expenses nicely.
A lot of the ad buys for talk are either the few national campaigns that can use audio-only (debt reduction, accident attorneys, etc.) or they are from local accounts that do find older customers of value. These can be pain treatment physicians, car dealers selling vehicles that appeal to seniors, banks with mortgage re-fi options or reverse mortgages and the like.
In large markets, stations like KFI and WSB and WLW that have big ratings will get local agency accounts for clients that do find senior customers profitable and, mostly, local direct accounts ranging from mattress stores to car dealers to roofers to senior services like home care providers.
For example, where I live in the Palm Springs market, the Porsche dealer only puts radio ads on a couple of stations that have 45+ appeal as they find most of their customers to be upper income older people or retired folks.
In markets outside the biggest 30, the amount of national or regional agency buys are much more limited. By the time you get to market 100 and below, non-local agency business is minimal. And if you are in market #150 or so, unless you are #1 or #2 in a client's target demo you will never see agency business.
I don't know whether the stations I named stream with their local ads, but if you listen a bit you will see that there are plenty of accounts, but they are significantly more local direct ones and for a different mix of advertisers than you'd hear on the local CHR or Urban or Country stations.
While I understand this fact, another fact is the terrestrial radio medium itself is having an aging crisis.
Younger people aren't listening (much of their music is unplayable on the radio anyway unless the language restrictions go away.) Ad agencies are spending more on digital marketing. Much of today's electronics do not have a radio built in and you can't force manufacturers to include them.
Gen-X (which began turning 55 in 2019) is also the very last generation that needed radio. Most Millennials were the MP3 Generation. Who mostly used digital sites like Napster and Limewire and could get what they wanted easily. Either influenced by the radio. Or much of it, not.)
I'm not saying Millennials don't listen to radio. But to them, radio wasn't really a necessity like it was for Gen-X and Boomers. So I consider them post-radio. It's much more so for Gen-Z.
Lemme blow your mind. See, there are these things called radio edits. You can bleep, blank, or (my favorite) reverse the offending word. Been around forever. It's how Pink Floyd's "Money" got on AM Top 40 radio 51 years ago.
But the dirty words today are largely on hip-hop tracks. That's an audience that demands its music "keep it real," obscenities and all, because that's the language of the urban streets. Pink Floyd, all of whom were solidly British middle class, were just putting b---s--- in that song for the shock value. The listeners couldn't care less whether they heard that one word or not.
If that were true, no hip-hop station in the last 35 years would have succeeded.
KPRS in Kansas City had and may still have a policy of not playing "gangsta rap" songs and they still were #1 in the ratings around 20 years ago and were in the top 10 last November.
And, in this argument, we are assuming that everyone over 18 only likes hip-hop. How about reggaetón, country, most CHR, Regional Me I an, Hot AC and other formats that are preferred by many, even in younger demos?
So do "record companies", to use a possibly anachronistic term, still provide radio edits, a/k/a clean edits - or has radio fallen down so far on their list of priorities that they figure that someone wanting a clean edit can do it themselves ?
In Europe, I've never heard radio edits. They just let it rip, even in countries with a high number of people proficient in English.
Yes, although it depends on the genre. I recently received a version of a song that was marked 'clean.'
What records sell more, clean or uncensored. When the mothers against foul language or what ever it was back in the 90s got parental advisories on everything those records sold like hot cakes.
"Clean" or "Radio" or "Short" often appears in the RDS data of WHDQ Claremont, NH, the local classic rocker, after the song title.
Proof that people who try to legislate morals tend to achieve results that are the opposite of the intended.
The fist name that sprang to mind in this context was Anita Bryant. A long time ago, but to most people she just made a fool out of herself: Anita Bryant - Wikipedia. A certain congresswoman from Georgia seems to be cast from the same mold...
"Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," Bryant used to say. (Assuming that's in the Wiki article, too.) She had her 15 minutes of infamy back in the day, for sure.
Moreover, the ones making an issue of so-called morality tend to have their own challenges in that regard.
Yes, but the row over song lyrics Don's referring to in the 90s was championed by the then-wife of a liberal icon---Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator and soon to be Vice-President Al Gore. Her campaign resulted in the label:
I believe it is called "GREED."
MONEY is the root of all evil..........
Guess it depends. Gene Autry had the highest-billing radio station in America in 1979---KMPC, Los Angeles. $14 million in advertising (about $66 million adjusted for inflation). He employed just under 300 people. So, was he greedy or was he helping all those people feed, clothe, house and educate their families in addition to providing news, entertainment, traffic and sports to the community his station served?
Is the guy who took in less money and could only afford a skeleton staff somehow better?
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