Sheron Bellio Voice Overexposure on KFI

[sharonnkat]

Is it just me, or is KFI totally overexposing Sheron Bellio's voice on air?

It seems like it is becoming the Sheron Bellio station with the HUGE amount of voice over work that she is doing for commercials, promos, etc.

She has a great voice and persona, but enough! I am tired of hearing her voice non stop, every hour for her quick commercials.

Except for the "main" commercials, her voice is on EVERYTHING else. What happened to variety? Now she is announcing her name on a few of the commercials to give them "credibility" (Sheron Bellio here.... blah blah blah).

Then, if you listen to Handel in the PM, you get her non stop there for 2 hours.

When I hear her voice now, I just want to stick forks in my eyes.

 

[gcreedle239]

Agreed. Especially on the KFI Internet feed. I've heard her do a Kia spot, immediately followed by Honda read. If the reads were more generic (like a KNX sponsorship read), that would be one thing, but Sharon's voice connects so well that she seems insincere voicing so many personal sounding commercial appeals. Recently, she starts doing personal endorsements. I had no idea who she was other than an in-house VO person, but after googling, realized she is a host on another CC station. Don't think the KFI audience is familiar with her for her to do meaningful endorsements.

On a slightly different bent, its funny how the PSAs on KFI's internet feed seem to fly in the face of KFI's libertarian audience (my take). Really bad government produced PSAs funded with money that could be spent better elsewhere. Examples: "Ouch. Down. Slow. You can rearrange any of these to tell your friend they're driving recklessly", "Teacher: How does Becky take the bus, get her pregnancy counseling and make it to home room by 7:30?", or "Go to a website to register to win $1,000 to find a career (CA program)".

Between the awful commercial switching on the web feed and the mentally painful repetition of spots that have little to do with the KFI audience, I thin no one at the station ever listens to it.

 

[davideduardo]

On a slightly different bent, its funny how the PSAs on KFI's internet feed seem to fly in the face of KFI's libertarian audience (my take). Really bad government produced PSAs funded with money that could be spent better elsewhere.

A lot of PSAs are produced and distributed by groups like the Ad Council. Even those that are not don't cost anything more than the production costs. Stations run them free, of course.

KFI is hardly libertarian (which I take to mean fiscally conservative and socially liberal). The station leans conservative... very conservative for CA.

Between the awful commercial switching on the web feed and the mentally painful repetition of spots that have little to do with the KFI audience, I thin no one at the station ever listens to it.

The web feed, like all larger market feeds, is the victim of the poorly-reasoned AFTRA contracts of recent years which charge the client (agencies, mostly) more money for talent fees if a radio commercial also runs on the internet; no mind that radio needs to move to other distribution channels... AFTRA has dug in and would rather see radio killed, and encourage the existing model to expand into new channels (which is less disruptive to the talent market than forcing a whole new model).

So, stations have to remove from the stream all spots with AFTRA talent per the requirements of the advertisers. And they use a computer to insert PSAs and whatever other fill they can find.

 

[gcreedle239]

Funny, listening to John and Ken, who have voiced support for gay marriage and legalization of pot, don't give me the sense of being socially conservative. Bill Handel regularly calls Rush's opinions to task and has as many conservative views as liberal. George Noori seems libertarian to me. Brian Suits may be conservative, but I don't listen to him well enough to know for sure.
IMHO, any station putting out a right-wing (morals, not money) talk will not be very successful in LA. To me, KFI is about truth-telling whether from the right (Rush), center (J&K) and soft-left (Handel).

Aas far as web streaming, totally familiar with AFTRA issues. My points are these. The national PSAs are totally lost on the audience. They would be better off running local causes, both from a service standpoint and listenability. The concepts for national PSAs are generated by ad agencies that want to win a CLEO and come up with the worst high-concept radio ads one will ever hear. Then KFI runs them into the ground. I'd rather hear locations for the bloodmobile or cat adoption drives. However, KFI seems to be doing an EXCELLENT job of selling spot on the web stream, the quality of the cliente has increased dramatically over the last year AND many of the ads are interactive and present graphics. My guess is the web stream revenues are becoming more of a factor for them.

My other beef is the switching (I used to work in network TV integration and network radio in the 70's). I don't know if its a problem with traffic lining up the web commercial pods with the broadcast ones or the board op, but MANY, MANY times, the web stream JIP's a minute or two into the segment. Its better than last year when the web stream would get stuck and literally run 12-15 spots in Handel, rolling over an entire program segment, but it is better. Quite a few people I know now listen to the Web Stream, KFI should clean up the presentation.

 

[nmoore6676]

On a slightly different bent, its funny how the PSAs on KFI's internet feed seem to fly in the face of KFI's libertarian audience (my take). Really bad government produced PSAs funded with money that could be spent better elsewhere.

A lot of PSAs are produced and distributed by groups like the Ad Council. Even those that are not don't cost anything more than the production costs. Stations run them free, of course.

KFI is hardly libertarian (which I take to mean fiscally conservative and socially liberal). The station leans conservative... very conservative for CA.

Between the awful commercial switching on the web feed and the mentally painful repetition of spots that have little to do with the KFI audience, I thin no one at the station ever listens to it.

The web feed, like all larger market feeds, is the victim of the poorly-reasoned AFTRA contracts of recent years which charge the client (agencies, mostly) more money for talent fees if a radio commercial also runs on the internet; no mind that radio needs to move to other distribution channels... AFTRA has dug in and would rather see radio killed, and encourage the existing model to expand into new channels (which is less disruptive to the talent market than forcing a whole new model).

So, stations have to remove from the stream all spots with AFTRA talent per the requirements of the advertisers. And they use a computer to insert PSAs and whatever other fill they can find.

First, Libertarians are basically in favor of small government and greater personal freedom so though KFI's hosts for the most part could fit somewhere in that spectrum they tend more conservative in their rhetoric. As a benchmark both Glenn Beck and Neal Boortz claim to be Libertarians but their tone is vastly different on air. I think Handel is probably Libertarian while John and Ken are just showmen. Suits is abysmal no matter where you place him on the political spectrum and Rush is a right wing nutcase. I am not sure where you place George Noory but out of this world comes to mind. KFI lost their only clearly conservative local host when they cut Ziegler loose.

Second, I agree with you on the AFTRA stand. Eventually producers of spots will move to non AFTRA talent, some stations I listen to online have already done so for local commercials and thus can run them on the stream. The problem there is that someone in Kansas wouldn't go to a store in Ohio so this isn't good for the advertisers.

On a slightly different bent, its funny how the PSAs on KFI's internet feed seem to fly in the face of KFI's libertarian audience (my take). Really bad government produced PSAs funded with money that could be spent better elsewhere. Examples: "Ouch. Down. Slow. You can rearrange any of these to tell your friend they're driving recklessly", "Teacher: How does Becky take the bus, get her pregnancy counseling and make it to home room by 7:30?", or "Go to a website to register to win $1,000 to find a career (CA program)".

Between the awful commercial switching on the web feed and the mentally painful repetition of spots that have little to do with the KFI audience, I thin no one at the station ever listens to it.

KFI, contrary to the poster who said their online commercials have nothing to do with the audience, in my opinion they do as they tend to businesses who are marketing to computer users. So spots for businesses such as Carbonite, Got To My PC make perfect sense for streaming audiences. More stations should market that way. The PSA's can be a bit different but I think they take from what they have available. A station I listen to from Ohio to hear Glenn Beck runs annoying snippets of Classical Music to fill the gaps or some broadcasters just go silent. The silent ones make me think I've been dropped and I go always to reconnect just as the program resumes. So I'd rather have noise coming out than dead silence.

Their switching is actually pretty good. As someone with experience in local cable ad insertion I understand the glitches. Few 30 second or 60 second ads actually time out exactly (in the digital realm). When you are covering material from another source you get clipped off on the long ones or you get a snippet of the base feed if you are short. On KFI however they do have a kind of random cut off of the initial banner ad that appears when you first log in. A lot of other than streamers just play the entire spiel before letting you get to their on air programming.

 

[calguy]

Actually I think Sharon does some pretty good voice work and not nearly as overexposed as Robert Show. I think that's his name. He's on a ton of stuff back to back and unlike many VO guys all of his stuff sounds the same. None of his reads seem to vary. Don't get me wrong, he's not bad, but nothing special. The weird thing is that Clear Channel has a lot of talented people that could be doing spots, but most of them are air talent and only seem to be on endorsement spots. They also have a production guys who do nothing but, spots, but you still don't hear them much. In the 80's and 90's when KFI was owned by Cox it seemed that most of their production was voiced by the KOST air talent. Mainly Mike Sakellarides and Bryan Simmons with Karen Sharp doing all the female voice over.

 

[Rudy Canoza]

Is it just me, or is KFI totally overexposing Sheron Bellio's voice on air?

It's just you. Anything to keep Handel off-mike. Talk about over-exposure. Geez...