Sponsor (Nov 1946-Oct 1947)

programing has now reached the stage where sports enthusiasts can dial the station any night and find it airing sports from an 8:45 p.m. warm-up to an 11 p.m. afterpiece. Monday, Gillette sponsors boxing. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday Old Gold and Nedick's sponsor basketball, both college and professional games. Schaefer Brewing sponsors amateur hockey on Wednesday and pro games on Sunday. Thus through both a horizontal block booking (every night at 8:45 p.m.) and a vertical block booking (from 8:45 to 11:15 p.m.) WHN gathers the cream of the regular sports fans. Block programing of sports produces wherever it's used and as long as it's given time for dialers to develop the habit. An almost perfect example of how it collects audiences is the experience of WHDH in Boston. Managed by Bill McGrath (ex-WNEW) the station blockprograms music and news in the daytime, sports at night and Saturday and Sunday afternoons. With this combination it has created a listening habit that gave it, in the July-August City Hooperatings, an over-all rating of 27.9 per cent of the available audience (sets in use), with Boston's next station rating only a 19.8. Its Monday-throughFriday daytime rating during the same period was 27.7 of the sets in use, with the second station having a 20.2. Station WCPO in Cincinnati achieved top position during the summer through its baseball broadcasts and is seriously considering plans to hold the audience which it won through baseball by sportsblock-programing plans. For Sunday afternoons during July-August (Hooper City Ratings) WCPO had 42.8 of the sets in use and its Saturday daytime rating was almost as good, 42.1 of the sets in use. Its evening audience during JulyAugust was 29.5 per cent of the sets in use with the next station having 24 9. and that next station is the established number one network station in the Queen City. Aside from WCPO, station WCKY in Cincinnati with a straight block-programed (sans baseball) schedule was second in the mornings only to the NBC outlet in the area, WLW, during the July-August period. WCKY had 22.9 per cent of the sets in use, WLW 24.5. In the afternoons it's the third station in the area, WCPO being first with baseball, WLW second with the NBC blockprogramed schedule of soap operas. Its relative position in the evening is also third with the share-of-audience standing like this: WCKY WLW WCPO Share of Audience 17.3 24.9 29.5 Many timebuyers still refer disdainfully to block-programed independent stations as "record .players." They feel that these stations do little more than toss on a few consumer disks and a little assorted gab and let them ride. Actually that's furthest from the truth. Stations like CKEY, in Toronto, Canada's foremost exponent of block programing (see page 15 for typical schedule), has double the number of employees of many other stations not only in Canada but in the United States. The Daily News, which supplies the five-minute news continuities for WNEW, spends a small fortune ($225,000) every year on its broadcast news desk and it knows just who is listening at each hour so that it can edit the news for the exact audience tuned in. Proper programing of disks for extended musical blocks is not routine; Muzak, the wired music service, discovered that years ago. Listeners do not want to hear at 8 p.m. what they enjoyed at 8 a.m. It isn't easy to take the pulse of an audience. How true this is is demonstrated in the case of the New York Times' "good" music station, WQXR, and its FM affiliate, WQXQ. To all intents and purposes WQXR is the only station in the country which has caught the mood of dialers who want good music— and held that mood so that it pays off in sales for advertisers. Periodically another station tries a variation of the WQXR block-programing formula but up to now no other broadcaster has been successful with it. How definitely this station is mood-programed for its listeners can be noted in a recent personalinterview survey conducted by a record retailer of good music. The survey indicated that in certain sections of Manhattan more than one-third of the radio dials in the homes surveyed were set for 1560, the WQXR spot on the dial. While WQXR and WQXQ are successful in New York and are perfect examples of block programing, the fact that block programing in itself is not a pat success formula has been proved by stations trying to follow their lead. Stations in Washington, D. C, Chicago, and San Francisco have tried a "good music" formula only to find that virtually no one was listening. There's no magic in the words "block programing." Stations don't collect listeners simply by following a CKEY, WNEW, WHN, or WCKY program schedule. All of these