Sponsor (Oct-Dec 1964)

women-drivers and so do housewives, doctors, students, executives, farmers, and secretaries in the 25 counties surrounding Albany, Schenectady, and Troy. Ask Henry I. Christal. A GENERAL ELECTRIC STATION WTRF-TV STORY BOARD Buying*? VOLUPTUOUS GAL to vast audience of Marines: "j don't know why you boys get so excited about sweater girls. Take away their sweaters and what have you got?" viUf-tv Wheeling ADVICE TO BACHELORS! Don't settle down until you can settle up! Wheeling wtrf-tv DOCTOR: "How much drinking do you do?" PATIENT: "Not much any more, doctor. Lately I've been spilling most of it." wtrf-tv Wheeling TOAST TO POVERTY ... it sticks to a man when all his friends forsake him! Wheeling wtrf-tv ESSO HUMBLED! "Where did I get all scratched up? I had a Tiger in my car but not in the tank!" wtrf-tv Wheeling PROFESSOR: "Name the outstanding accomplishment of the Romans?" STUDENT: "They understood Latin!" Wheeling wtrf-tv FAIR AND CLOUDY! If a local weatherman resigns, it's generally because the climate doesn't agree with him. wtrf-tv Wheeling PONDERING! Calling a man in his sixties a sexagenarian may be a slight exaggeration. Wheeling wtrf-tv COLLEGE BOUND! "Son, I want you to become a skin specialist. Your patients will never get you out of bed at night, they never die, and they never get well!" wtrf-tv Wheeling ♦SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE is the programming offered to the big WTRF-TV audience in the Wheeling/Steubenville Market. Have Rep Retry arrange your WTRF-TV spot schedule to get that particular audience segment you're after. CHANNEL SEVEN WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA Publisliez^'s Xlepoirt Radio can be different Over the years 1 have often expressed the opinion that timebuyers should consider radio stations by categories in the same way that spacebuyers consider magazines. In the magazine medium, buys are made in the shelter field, the sports field, the teenage field, the young housewife field, the general field, the fashion field and many others. These buys are logically predicated on the fact that selective categories permit advertisers to reach selective readers. But within the individual field there is often a world of variation between magazines. Some are slick; some are pulp. Some command prestige; others command nothing. Some go in for high-grade research and writing; others are so much pap. As a rule, a national advertiser of substance who habitually uses one book in a field wouldn't be caught dead in another. There are 4000 AM radio stations and perhaps another 800 FMers. To say that they are all alike is nonsense. Yet one of the factors that holds back the advance of radio is the tendency on the part of some agency buyers and others to condemn many stations to national spot pergatory by category rather than by calibre. The fact remains that there are good radio stations in every category. There are bad radio stations in every category. The good buyer learns who does the quality job. Perhaps the man who has done most to lick the stigma of radio buying by category is Gordon McLendon. In three top Texas markets he built three top-40 stations which for years have commanded top audiences. Then he startled the advertising world, several years ago, by going to the opposite extreme and establishing KABL in San Francisco— a good music station devoted in large measure to album music. When he bought WYLS Buffalo, he followed the same format. More recently he struck out again, scrapping a highly popular Negro audience station in Chicago and replacing it with WNUS, a 24 hour all-news station. It's just as though Mr. McLendon decided to tell the world that you can be successful with any format — providing you have the market and potential audience and turn out a quality product. It's still too early to tell how WNUS is doing (it's been operating only a month) but if it emulates the audience impact and penetration of XTRA NEWS, which operates out of Tijuana, Mexico and booms into Los Angeles, it will do fine. WNUS programs its news in 15-minute blocks with four mike men on the air every hour. It permits a maximum of 16 commercial units an hour in keeping with the NAB Radio Code. It uses 10 news services and employs about 16 news men on the air. Its beeper phone hot line connected with other McLendon stations gives about 10 outside news feeds a day. Years ago I was imprssed by Gear Mestre's Cuban operation which broadcast news 24 hours a day with two news men in a glass studio in midtown Havana alternating with one minute of news and one minute of commercial for a two hour stint, then being replaced by another crew. WT*«IUS is not too far away — but a better service. VT-^m/ 10 SPONSOR