Sponsor (Nov 1946-Oct 1947)

PERCENT OF PROGRAM AUDIENCES COMING FROM PRECEDING PROGRAMS NBC SERIALS 2 6 PM (Based on One Minute or More of listening) Today's Woman Masquerade light of life Ma Perkins Pepper tight To Backstage Stella Lorenzo Young When Portio Children In White The World (on Be Young Happiness Wife Dallas Jones Widder A Girl Beautiful Brown Marries Block programing is not restricted to independent stations. Proof of its audience-holding is this NBC study based on Nielsen ratings stations present concise object lessons on how successful a block-programed station can be. They are not molds into which program material can be poured and come out an automatic success. Block programing is a big job, just as any showmanship operation must be. W( KY, for instance, abolished the post of program director and hired instead a number of project directors each charged with producing a block segment. Each block is built around a personality, a man who knows the type of program he's mc'ing, a man who knows the audience he's after. Typical is Nelson King, pictured in this report with a skein cf western stars whom lu might present in one evening of his four-hour nighttime block, Jamboree. Km<4 has fan clubs for many of the western vocalists whose disks he spins and the clubs visit him every so often while he's or the air. (It's then that he trots out his western outfit and looks read\ to break out with "Git Along Little Dogy, Git Along.") Each 1 5-minute segment of his program has its own musical star and a single mood. Though four hours seems long foi a westem-folk-music block, V\ ( K Y had ample precedent for devoting the 240 minutes to mountain and range tinier WSM'S Grand Ole 0/>ry frequently runs more than three hours, as docs WLS's Barn Dance. Both have tremendous audiences. Even at New York's WOV one of the more successful blocks is an hour of western music mc'ed by Rosalie Allen. Frank Stanton of CBS was one of the first to realize and stress the importance of block programing. He called it mood programing. With diary forms of research he proved that once a mood is broken by one station, audiences try to recapture the mood on another station. Recently Niles Trammell, NBC president, proposed to restrict the so-called soap operas to a maximum of three in a row. He has dropped the proposal because figures have proved to him that listeners in the daytime want their teardrops strip after strip and will drift away from a station or network that interrupts the mood of the daytime dramas. The tremendous growth of NBC's Tuesday night skein of comed\ programs — Milton Berle, Date with Judy. Amos 'n' Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly, Bob Hope, and Red Skelton — is a perfect example of the appeal of a single program type — a single mood. The CBS Monday night hour and a half of Lux Theater and Screen Guild is another example of block programing. What will happen this year with the comedy program My Friend Irma between Lux and Screen Guild will depend upon how much situation comedy there is in Irma — in other words how near this half hour approaches the listener's conception of drama rather than gag comedy. Some timebuyers feel that baseball and other sports blocks are not a good indication of a station's pulling power. However, astute buyers feel that to discount a station's audience during the 20-week baseball season would be just as illogical as to ignore the pull of a network during the period that Bob Hope, Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen, Jack Benny, or Bing Crosby is on the air. Neither the baseball stations without baseball nor the networks without their star programs would have the pulling power that sponsors want and buy. Many stations this past baseball season have found that through block-programed night baseball they have reached unprecedented heights in audiences. They haven't stopped there but accepting this achievement as a challenge have block-programed with an eye to holding that baseball audience. W'HDH in Boston bought the Harvard football games, which are sponsored by Atlantic Refining Company and are one cf the few series of games not controlled by Atlantic itself. This oil company usually (Please turn to page 43) 18 SPONSOR