Sponsor (July-Dec 1955)

TIMEBUYING BASICS the best of other so-called purely local media — network programs are released over local facilities. When you want to really localize though, it is spot radio that gives you that wealth of long-established local personalities who can slant your product message today in a way to meet local competition; or take advantage of local weather conditions; or just use local jargon to give the product that extra push. Most important, to give your product that benediction that they — who come into a home 250 times or more a year — can provide. Fifth, one of the most important concepts in all advertising is to insert your product in the right framework. It will one day be automatic — if I may venture a prophecy —a great deal of advertising will be run only in those media that relate to the general field of the item, and at those times when the product is being used or considered for use. Obviously, in the latter area spot radio is six feet tall and everyone else is a pygmy. You can reach the man in his automobile for your tire, motor oil, or gasoline message. You can reach women in the kitchen as they are actually preparing food or eating. You can time your message's arrival better with spot radio than with any other medium. I can tick off some other advantages: The one of getting your message in just before the woman goes to the store is a clear advantage to spot. The one of building up the really huge circulation you need to influence people in these days when someone politely yawns after you announce you told half of all Americans about the advantage of that sensational new product Boozits. With spot you can tell half of all the people in a city your message in 36 hours with only 20 announcements. Another advantage is the far lower cost of spot than comparable selective media; one-fourth and one-fifth the cost-per1,000 of newspapers. The advantage of out-selling other media, actually bringing people into stores in greater numbers and extracting more dollars from them despite great rate advantages to the competition. I see three significant trends — I don't know whether they are short or long-term — that are building in national spot. Two of them will make spot radio more productive, one will complicate your life. First is saturation as a standard national advertiser tool. For a half dozen years the concept of a great many announcements poured into a relatively short period has been growing. During the 40 's a few advertisers would use more than one strip of five announcements per week but they were very few. Now that pattern is slowly being erased, although it will always be an important one. Now the concept of 40, 100 or even 800 announcements per week for relatively short times is growing more and more important and justly so, because it capitalizes on one of radio's great advantages — the ability to reach all the people repetitively for low cost. I think the next five years will see dozens of advertisers using radio almost exclusively that way. Second, I detect a growing willingness on the part of all national advertisers to let local personalities take liberties with their sales messages when those liberties mean more impact and more sales. The continuing campaign by Life in which local radio personalities are allowed complete freedom in selecting the features of the magazine they wish to promote is the extreme example of this trend to allow proven personalities absolute latitude in advertising products to the market they have the best grip on. Third, the increasing competition of retail advertisers to dominate the medium is going to be a harrassing one for people buying time. Retailers were a negligible source of revenue for radio up until six years ago, and it is only in the past year that the largest retailers have become convinced that dominance— saturation — is the method. When a single retailer comes in and takes 18,000 anPAGE 27 nouncements annually on only five stations out of those available in a market, and when his competitors gobble up another 10,000 annually, the competition not only for good times but any time is considerably sharpened for national advertisers. Especially when these schedules are superimposed on local advertisers and retail schedules that have been steadily expanding for six years. We — the Radio Advertising Bureau — are helping to complicate this problem because this is the kind of problem we enjoy, the problem of the seller's market. Since we, like those radio stations who support us, like all money, whatever the source, we will be happy to help you cope with the problem this poses for the national advertiser. THE SPOT TELEVISION STORY NED M IDG LEY: It would be very easy to start off by saying, "television, too," to everything that Kev has said about spot radio. They are very similar in a number of ways. In their flexibility: The same concentration of markets exists for television advertising that exists for radio advertising. Spot television is available for national advertisers as a complete national campaign or as a supplementary campaign and is available for regional advertisers. It is the only method in which local advertisers can possibly use tv. The units of time are the same pretty generally. There are exceptions of course. You can't buy football locally on television due to some rules of the NCAA in recent years. The I.D.'s in television are a new development which radio didn't have. I think announcements in radio were pretty well confined to one minute and to station breaks. Then some person with fiendish glee decided when television came along that the station should reap the benefit of two announcements at the chain break and invented the I.D., to get half again as much for the I.D. as he gets for the chain break. I like to speculate every once in a while about the five minutes around each half-hour, especially in the evening. The average television station will conclude, let us say, a half-hour evening program somewhere short of five minutes of the hour with a closing announcement. Then they will unravel a long line of credits for everyone who had anything to do with the production — the producer, the director, wardrobe mistress, hats designed by, make-up, script writer, assistant script writer, fourth assistant script writer, all backed with some very dull music on the calliope or something. After this reel is unrolled, you get your chain break announcement followed quickly by an I.D., followed quickly by some identification of the station. It is like Times Square in the rush hour when you stop to think about it. I say I only speculate on it, because, after all, it is our bread and butter, and try and buy an I.D. or a station break on any station that is worthwhile. However, there is congestion there, and maybe some day with increasing competition in the field some of the log jam will be broken. One thing that always strikes me very forcibly about spot radio or spot television is the concentration that there is in the United States; concentration of people, concentration of buying power, retail sales, gasoline sales, drug, food sales. Actually, in 162 markets you can hit 56.7% of the total population of the United States. Those markets are very clearly defined geographically. You don't have to use 162 television stations, nor 162 radio stations in each of the 162 cities, because you cannot build a fence around radio or television signals at the city limits. Of course, you have to admit that radio signals get out further than television signals, especially at night on clear-channel stations, but I think that we are underselling spot television coverage. For the past four or five years I have marveled each time I go through a town called Red Hook, N. Y., which is about 86 or 87 miles from New York City, and, practi