Radio showmanship (Jan-Dec 1947)

music and occasional shopping hints to tie-in with the grocery store sponsorship. Friday's musical offering is music made up of eight Honor Roll hit tunes of the week, as determined by listeners who send in either musical requests or their votes for the hit tunes. Five commercials are ordinarily featured on the 30-minute feature, each short, concise and to the point. Price is an attractive Triangle feature included in the item commercials. Each commercial is devoted to an individual item on the Triangle shelves. Format names as sponsor the "99 Triangle Food Stores in the Tri-State Area," but on each broadcast a specific independent grocer is singled out for featured mention. Combination of dealer tie-in and item merchandising is designed to impress on the radio audience the fact that the independent grocers who are members of the Triangle association have more and better products at lower prices. Direct appeal is to the homemaker. A Crosslev, Inc. sinvey made w^hen Triangle Time was relatively new on the air gave it a rating of 9.0 with a 66.1 per cent share of the audience. AIRFAX: First Broadcast: April 8, 1946. Broadcast Schedule: Monday through Friday, 1:15 1 :45 p.m. Preceded By: Baukhage Talking. hollowed By: Across the Desk. S port tor: Triangle Food Stores, Inc. Station: WSAZ, Huntington, W. Va. Power: 5,000 watts. Population: 101,768. COMMENT: This coordinated advertising promotion and the popularity of the program itself point to an effective use of broadcast advertising to achic\e specific objectives. Home Furnishings WHAT DO YOU KNOW C:an a low-budget quiz program with broad general apj^eal be successfully developed for the local sponsor with a minimiun advertising budget? For the Armond Fiirnhure Company, in connection with its weekly series broadcast over W'FPCi, Atlantic City, N.J., the answer is delniilely in the affirmative based on results to date. Gimmicks to insure listening interest and studio participation are part of the 8:30 p.m. program package. For the benefit of WFPG listeners, a letter written in colloquial idiom with a touch of humor is read on each broadcast by Boardwalk Ben. Each letter centers around a historical vignette of early South Jersey history. After the letter is read, a question based on some aspect of the letter is directed to the radio audience. Listeners mail their answers to WFPG, and a fnc dollar prize is given to the writer whose correct answer has the earliest postmark. Cash inducements for What Do You Know studio audiences include a typical quiz program, with the six contestants chosen by drawings from the ticket admission box. Those whose ticket stubs are drawn from the box face a barrage ol questions from quizmasters Earl Keyes and Bob Brown, with six dollars in prize money for correct answers allotted for each of the six contestants. Money lost by contestants during the show, plus any carry-over from previous weeks, goes into the jackpot, for which there is a five dollar base. Jackpot cjuestion is announced early during the show% with the answer announced in the last three minutes of air time. What the entire cost of the half-hour* quiz show adds up to in terms of prize money inducements: $46.00. That it's enough to insure a full studio attendance and all-out listener interest is indicated by (1) mail response to the historical vignette gimmick, and (2) listener demand for studio admission tickets. AIRFAX: First Broadcast: February 18, 1947. Broadcast Schedule: Tuesday, 8:30-9:00 p.m. Sponsor: Armond Furniture Co. Station: WFPG, Atlantic City, N.J. Power: 250 watts. Population: 66,000 (winter). COMMENT: When advertisers first discovered the advantages of audience participation as a means of capitalizing on the opportunity for j^ersonal contact with customers and prospects, the tendency was to concentrate on the studio audience, in many cases, almost to the exclusion of the listener. Such programs may have entertained the studio audience but they weren't good radio. Program here, i • 206 • RADIO SHOWM ANSH IP