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commercials on hd-sides

H

hangman

I noticed listening to WIP-HD-3 (wysp) and WOGL-HD-2 there are many commercials mostly for Geico, in fact almost 5 minutes worth every 4 or 5 songs, WOGL has more than WIP-HD-3. It can be annoying at times, I thought the HD-sides were commercial free. Its just on the CBS stations the other company sides do not air commercials. Why is this? if nobody listens to HD, like the so called arm chair PD's say then why air commercials.
 
Radio stations are in the business to make money. They make money by selling spots. I don't have an HD radio, but sometimes listen to various stations online if I can't get their station clearly [usually at work or if not a local station I can get with a radio]. They sell spots for the online listener too, just as they apparently are doing for HD listeners. Makes perfect sense to me. If a station can get advertisers to buy time on their online and HD broadcasts, why not do so? Online listening via computer, smartphone, I-pods, Kindles, etc, is radio's future. From what I've been told online listening is a growing trend be the station AM or FM. For AM wow, how much better it sounds online, like listening to it on FM. For FM its just another way for folks to get your station without a radio. So sure any station will probably be trying to sell spots for both their Online and HD service.
 
Commercials that you hear on HD-sides and online streams are generally there because of creative selling on the part of the sales team. It goes something like this. The big bosses at corporate want to see their "other" stations (HD/online) generating some revenue. The sales managers charge their salespeople to find some revenue for these stations. The salespeople then come up with the creative ad buys where 95-99% of an advertiser's revenue goes to the main station and 1-5% gets thrown in as extra spots on the HD/online station. Everyone's happy. The salespeople only had to juggle their order a little bit, the sales manager and big bosses see the revenue on the little stations, and the advertiser doesn't spend a dime extra and has all of the extra spots floating around in the atmosphere.

No one is rushing to advertise on HD/online streams.
 
hangman said:
I thought the HD-sides were commercial free. Its just on the CBS stations the other company sides do not air commercials. Why is this? if nobody listens to HD, like the so called arm chair PD's say then why air commercials.
Click to expand...

When HD Radio was new, several groups formed the HD Radio Alliance, and they agreed not to air commercials on HD multicast programming for a couple of years. The policy allowed for exceptions for station simulcasts and, after the first year, sponsorships of a limited duration a few times an hour. That was about 10 years ago, and that agreement is long over.

As for why people buy HD multicast channels, there are tons of reasons. As another poster mentioned, creative selling usually is behind it. A friend of mine, for example, sponsored an entire HD multicast channel because he got all the mentions on the channel plus a handful of spots bonused on the main channel. He got spots on the main channel for less than the going rate plus a guarantee he'd have the only mentions on the HD channel.
 
Kent said:
When HD Radio was new, several groups formed the HD Radio Alliance, and they agreed not to air commercials on HD multicast programming for a couple of years. The policy allowed for exceptions for station simulcasts and, after the first year, sponsorships of a limited duration a few times an hour. That was about 10 years ago, and that agreement is long over.
Click to expand...

That's the general idea. The HD Alliance was made up predominantly of all the broadcast companies that had contributed seed capital to the creation of iBiquity.

The Alliance was put together to promote HD (the dreadful "stations between the stations" campaign among others) to consumers, offer incentives in the form of on-air promotion to retailers stocking HD radios, and to "suggest" within the restraints of avoiding outright collusion the formats that ought to be on the HD-2 and beyond channels.

Since the HD-1 channel has to "simulcast" the main analog channel, there was no discussion of that aspect of HD as the FCC was rigid in that respect.

Nearly every one of the top 12 to 15 group owners was part of the original Alliance. At least one, HBC (later Univision Radio) dropped out due to those old "philosophical differences".

The idea of not running commercials was a suggestion, and was for the first year. It was not a written policy as, again, that could have been considered collusion. Since there was no demand for advertising on the HD channels, there was no need for the limitation... few stations have ads on the HD-2 channels today unless those HD-2 operations are being used to feed an FM translator... where all the audience is on the FM.
 
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