How long have you people been in the business, like two minutes?
I hate to tell you but the small market pinheads are the so-called professionals who are bent out of shape over the Peak web stunt rather than plotting creative payback… sorry boys, but that’s the way it’s done in serious radio.
The Peak stunt is as old as the Web…. Jacor snagged the domain names of their significant competition and set up redirects to their own long before anybody had any clue that the Web even existed. I have no idea how that shook out, some domains I know they sold to the competition later; others they gave up after the redirects had served their purpose.
The stunting to steal another station’s audience goes back … way back, long before personal computers.
The Power Pig (WFLZ 93.3/Tampa) ran Scott Shannon out of town on the rail of their “Screw the Q” (Q 105, WRBQ) campaign and is now being celebrated with tributes for the creative stealing of audience (
http://radio.about.com/cs/1/a/aa051604a.htm).
When WSUN tried a run at dominate NewsRadio 970 WFLA in the same market, WSUN billboards were altered by people who shall remain nameless to read WSUX... guess which one is gone.
Even more common is for a music station to flier every car in a venue, where a concert is being promoted by another station thanking that station for bringing the band to town and advertising that in “tribute” the station that distributed the fliers will be tracking commercial free blocks of the main act’s hits after the concert and through the night.
Every market has a long list of such stunts. The one thing they all have in common is that they are pulled by the most creative group in the market. That creativity in stealing cume only succeeds if the station has the same kind of creative genius on the air. In the cases above, and in the case of Peak they do – even if the stunt is a really, really, really minor one.
No different in TV.... Boston used to be famous as a market where any reporter foolish enough to put a mic flag up on a podium would find his connect "lost"... mostly because another station would cut the mic cord.
Get used to it.... it's part of the business. Can't handle it? Get a job in a corporate office.
