Living in the 70's (bell bottoms) and hearing music from then are two different enchiladas.
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Classic Hits 80s
- Thread starter AM/FMRAINMAN
- Start date
Living in the 70's (bell bottoms) and hearing music from then are two different enchiladas.
Ah! At least you partially get it.
Tastes change over the years. In your case, your fashion sense continued to update, but your music choices did not. Again, you are an outlier and radio does very well by ignoring you.
Because they don't know any better and don't have the money to pay for research or outside guidance.
And you would loose your investment and all your time.
Yes, there is a way. It is called "The Internet".
As has been explained to you before, there is no ad money going after 55+. A station that programs for that demo will find that there are no major clients out there. And if there are smaller local direct accounts, they will be low rate, slow pay and high maintenance.
This is not a problem caused by radio or fixable by radio. As long as advertisers shun the senior and geezer demos, there will be no money in serving them.
And you think people in their 60's and 70's use the internet as much as young people? They are more inclined to do things the way they always have.....a device known as "the radio".
I knew this would come back to haunt me. What I really meant was Women 18-34. When AC branched out to become something other than MOR's replacement, it accelerated Beautiful Music's death by taking away its younger demos.
A
Avid Listener
Guest
It also need to change because the current generation of over-55s aren't the same people as our parents were. I can remember when I was a 30-something and my parents were in their 50's and 60's. They were stuck in a rut regarding shopping at the same stores and using the same brand names and not being worth attempting to reach through advertising. But that was then and this is now. I'm 62, and I still try new stores, seek out new restaurants to try, try new brands of products, and generally respond well to advertising. I switched my car insurance from the brand the Gecko sold to the one Flo sells! I am not an atypical Baby Boomer. The Baby Boomer generation is going into old age kicking and screaming all the way. We're the "Peter Pan" generation that refuses to grow up. That includes our habits as consumers. I don't much care if the reason for clinging to outmoded, obsolete data about how 55+ isn't worth advertising to is the fault of the suits in radio or the suits in the advertising industry, the reason itself is totally bogus.
Refusing to run ads on stations with large numbers of over 55 listeners because they're "not worth it" is as despicable and loathsome a form of discrimination as refusing to run ads on stations with large numbers of African-American or Hispanic listeners.
It's not bogus and is backed with hundreds of millions of dollars in proprietary research every year by firms like P&G and others. And it about return on investment. Simply, it takes more impressions to sell to an older consumer. That means more expense per sale. In many cases, the cost of making the sale reduces the profit so much that it is not worthwhile. So advertisers instruct their agencies on what ages to target.
If it were profitable to advertise on radio to 55+ consumers, advertisers would be all over those stations that reach them. This is not the case, and for sound reasons.
It seems that older consumers aren't easily 'sucked-in' by many commercials. These age 55+ people have learned to discriminate the 'true' from the 'too good to be true' commercials.
That is why the 55+ consumers are a 'harder sell' .........
That is why the 55+ consumers are a 'harder sell' .........
A
Avid Listener
Guest
Wouldn't that only be true for commercials that are mostly lies? When I hear a commercial that says Kroger has beef tenderloins in cryopacks on sale for $8.99 a pound, I only need to hear that once to know I need to stop at Kroger. BTW, Kroger is selling them for that price, and I went there and bought one. However, I didn't learn about it on the radio.
And, this is still half of a two-sided coin argument. First, there is the bogus claim that only old farts like me want to hear songs by the Beatles, Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, or other classic rock acts from the 1960s on the radio. That's just plain wrong. The other side of the coin is that it's a waste of money to air commercials for old farts like me. That's an equally bogus argument. Then there's the bogus argument that people only want to hear the same handful of songs repeated over and over and over. And then there's the bogus argument that no one wants to hear new songs by the classic rock artists whose older music we want to hear on classic hits radio. It's the bogus argument that we want to hear Paul McCartney's Wings playing "Band on the Run" two or three times a day, but if we hear "Queenie Eye" from his newest album, we'll all switch our radios to the polka station.
How about the radio spots (auto sales or contest promos) where the 'conditions' run so fast that you have no idea what they are saying? Those spots are a good reason why the 55+ listeners are a hard sell.
Where there's a will, there's a way! Anything is possible. It has to be tried in some way...maybe in some way that has never been done before. Besides the point, these people (55+), they have a boatload of beautiful hit music that they cannot hear on the radio, because of the current system. It has to change and frankly, it's an outrage and as Avid said.....it's bogus!
For several decades, the TV network demo has been 18-49 and not radio's 25-54. Shows get canceled if they do not deliver good 18-49, and pricing is pretty much determined by delivery in that demo.
CBS, which has the most over-50 viewers of all the webs has been actively presenting to top agency executives and their clients to try to get 35-64 to also be considered as a prime TV demo. They have not had much, if any, success. In fact, the 2014-2015 show renewals were all determined on the basis of 18-49.
I hope CBS continues to pound on doors and try to make a case for including 50-64 in buying decisions. Perhaps persistence will pay off, and it will benefit radio, too.
For the moment, radio can't find any money in serving over-50 or over-55 listeners because in the larger markets where agency accounts are critical, there is essentially no money against seniors.
The same thing happened to beautiful music, standards and even smooth jazz... and now "oldies". If your listeners are predominantly seniors and you live in a transactional market, you can't make money.
The reason has nothing to do with the creative. It's about the high cost of delivering the additional impressions needed to make a sale with senior demos.
A
Avid Listener
Guest
I never paid any attention to those when I was in my 20's. I don't know anyone who ever really paid attention to those kinds of spots. I can, if I choose to, make out all of the verbal "fine print" and disclaimers, but I never choose to. Not ever in my entire life. Those spots are a good reason why advertisers pull out of radio because they run those kinds of spots and they don't sell products.
The disclaimers are required by law and condensed because clients do not want to buy 120 second spots.
For quite a few years, when mortgage rates came down during the "recovery" most adult stations found refi companies were among their biggest categories. They used radio for many years, and many of them still do. The reason they used radio is that it offered economical frequency and got results.
When did the laws mandating this disclaimers come into being? My hazy memory is that in the late 1980s I was "riding herd" on a big over-grown computer for a big over-grown car dealership we first came face-to-face with disclaimers on automobile financing.
Was radio even doing overly time-compacted disclaimers when Avid Listener was in his 20s?
A
Avid Listener
Guest
The original post mentioned, "How about the radio spots (auto sales or contest promos)". I recall more than a few radio contests run in the 70s and even in the 60s when I was a teenager that included someone talking like that guy in the old Fed Ex commercials. Since I mentally tuned out all such fast talking gibberish whenever it came on, I don't remember the details about what the gibberish was about. That's the whole point of mentally tuning out fast-talking gibberish.
As for whether the fast-talking gibberish was achieved through technical trickery or just some guy talking real fast, I must plead both ignorance and apathy. I don't know and I don't care. However they made the fast-talking gibberish that went along with the on-air contest promos, the end result was gibberish that I ignored.
First, let me make it clear that I know my memory on some of these issues is fuzzy around the edges.
Yes, RATINGS on radio got into some trouble maybe as far back as 1960 or so because stations were creating sham mechanisms so they could claim to be NUMBER ONE, and if they weren't brazen enough to claim Number One, they would quote the mechanism as having declared the station to have THE FASTEST GROWING AUDIENCE in the market. Says who? They never wanted to explain that. Finally the government said: If you are going to quote audience studies..... you WILL INCLUDE the dry, dusty documentation.
My favorite example of the 'crap' of that era was a station in Little Rock, AR claiming to be number one. It was the era when three staff members at just about any station could spend a long week-end creating a new play list, crafting some new promos and liners, and overnight, ON THE CHEAP, turn smaller metro markets upside down! Then a month later three staff members of the previously 'best station in town' when take a case of beer to some motel room and spend the week-end creating a new image and for the next three months, the market would again turn upside down. Here is the example of the 'crap'. The 'weak-sister' station that out of nowhere claimed to be number one had run a contest that you could win only by sending your answer to the question, your entry, via a Western Union Telegraph. (The listener could enter the contest for maybe a dollar or maybe a bit less.) Apparently Western Union would promote this idea because it meant revenue for them, and they would give the radio station a report on how many telegrams were received by each radio station in the market for the most recent time period. Not exactly what we today would refer to as "a scientifically accurate survey".
That kind of covers FCC and/or FTC mandated disclaimers... and my fuzzy memory is that ONLY contests involving listeners required disclaimers.
As time went on some years later the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration began dictating that certain advertising concepts, where presented via newspaper, radio, TV or magazines had to carry "fine print" which we in the world of broadcasting in particular call "disclaimers".
The tobacco industry was required to make disclosures about cancer possibilities. Tell me what year that happened?
The pharmaceutical industry was required to make disclosures about possible side effects of drugs and supplements. Tell me what year that happened?
And the one I mentioned: Both state and the Federal government got into the "truth in lending" issues and that resulted in radio ads by car dealers having disclosures.... but ONLY if they mentioned anything about financing the car. I know when that came about because I had to program on our computer the feature that would also put a disclaimer on the bank loan agreement or the GMAC loan agreement. I also tried to write a PC based program for used car dealers in Indiana who were in the "Buy Here Pay Here" weekly payday loan arrangements. (That went no where for me because some software company created a sweetheart deal with the state where THEIR program decided how the fractions would round up and round down that that because THE STATE REQUIREMENT.... other vendors need not apply. That was in the era of 1987, 1988 or something close to that.
Radio was slow to be impacted by some of these disclaimer schemes because at the retail level, many advertisers chose not to be pioneers and they just avoided talking about finance plans in their radio ads because they knew the public was not ready to deal with the flotsam.
Yes, RATINGS on radio got into some trouble maybe as far back as 1960 or so because stations were creating sham mechanisms so they could claim to be NUMBER ONE, and if they weren't brazen enough to claim Number One, they would quote the mechanism as having declared the station to have THE FASTEST GROWING AUDIENCE in the market. Says who? They never wanted to explain that. Finally the government said: If you are going to quote audience studies..... you WILL INCLUDE the dry, dusty documentation.
My favorite example of the 'crap' of that era was a station in Little Rock, AR claiming to be number one. It was the era when three staff members at just about any station could spend a long week-end creating a new play list, crafting some new promos and liners, and overnight, ON THE CHEAP, turn smaller metro markets upside down! Then a month later three staff members of the previously 'best station in town' when take a case of beer to some motel room and spend the week-end creating a new image and for the next three months, the market would again turn upside down. Here is the example of the 'crap'. The 'weak-sister' station that out of nowhere claimed to be number one had run a contest that you could win only by sending your answer to the question, your entry, via a Western Union Telegraph. (The listener could enter the contest for maybe a dollar or maybe a bit less.) Apparently Western Union would promote this idea because it meant revenue for them, and they would give the radio station a report on how many telegrams were received by each radio station in the market for the most recent time period. Not exactly what we today would refer to as "a scientifically accurate survey".
That kind of covers FCC and/or FTC mandated disclaimers... and my fuzzy memory is that ONLY contests involving listeners required disclaimers.
As time went on some years later the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration began dictating that certain advertising concepts, where presented via newspaper, radio, TV or magazines had to carry "fine print" which we in the world of broadcasting in particular call "disclaimers".
The tobacco industry was required to make disclosures about cancer possibilities. Tell me what year that happened?
The pharmaceutical industry was required to make disclosures about possible side effects of drugs and supplements. Tell me what year that happened?
And the one I mentioned: Both state and the Federal government got into the "truth in lending" issues and that resulted in radio ads by car dealers having disclosures.... but ONLY if they mentioned anything about financing the car. I know when that came about because I had to program on our computer the feature that would also put a disclaimer on the bank loan agreement or the GMAC loan agreement. I also tried to write a PC based program for used car dealers in Indiana who were in the "Buy Here Pay Here" weekly payday loan arrangements. (That went no where for me because some software company created a sweetheart deal with the state where THEIR program decided how the fractions would round up and round down that that because THE STATE REQUIREMENT.... other vendors need not apply. That was in the era of 1987, 1988 or something close to that.
Radio was slow to be impacted by some of these disclaimer schemes because at the retail level, many advertisers chose not to be pioneers and they just avoided talking about finance plans in their radio ads because they knew the public was not ready to deal with the flotsam.
K
K.M. Richards
Guest
Not only that, the station was lucky not to have been cited under the "no lottery" rules. Unless there was an alternate method of entry, the promotion had all the elements: Prize, chance, and consideration (there was an "entry fee" in the form of the telegram cost).
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/broadcasting-contests-lotteries-and-solicitation-funds
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