David Eduardo wrote:
"K Isham" wrote in message news:46dfc84a@kcnews01...
I remember reading the Arizona Daily Star newspaper article when KTKT
expressing surprise that it had reached #1 again in 1979, when most of the
country were already listening to FM. Well that is old news.

In fact, by 1980, KTKT was down to about 10th in the market and falling, due
to competiton form FM Top 40 stations. By the time it changed format, it was
hardly billing anything.

For example when I was listening to the oldies station, I believe
Billboard stated that there was over a thousand #1 songs in the decade of
the sixties alone, but they recycle just about fifty songs total for the
whole day. 1950's thru the early 80's. I realize that the selection is
made by market research, but don't you relies that most people can't
remember the title, artist etc, when you ask people to fill out the
survey.

"People" don't fill out a survey. They listen to extracts of each song and
score them based on how much they would like to hear them on the radio
today.

Finally, as a radio marketing executive, it should be your job to convince
the advertisers that life doesn't stop at age 55, and there can still be
money to be made in selling to our aging population.

These decisions are made by the clients of agency accounts, based on
hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer research and
through which the client determines the prime sales demographics for their
goods and services and tells the ad agency who to advertise to. Radio
stations do not visit ad agency clients.

The main reason advertisers do not target 55+ customers is that the return
on investment is low; it takes so much more advertising to convince older
consumers that the cost of the sale is less than the profit on the sale.

Old people still buy cars, appliances, gas, insurance etc. Not just the
crap that the info-mericails try to sell now. You should take the leads in
changing the mind set, that people stop changing at 55+ and more
importantly, the stop buying at 55+.

As I said, these decisions on agency accounts are set by the client of the
agency, and no medium has access to the client to "get on the buy" when the
client has made a highly researched marketing decision.


FM stations


Mr Eduardo:

I noticed you ignored my rant about my visit to Radio Shack to demo a
"HD" radio.
It seems the HD is going go the way of the "New Coke" of the 80's if you
cannot get a affordable decent receiver. As a marketing man, I'm sure
you remember when Coke decided to change their formula because their
survey people claimed that the youth of America perfected the taste of
Pepsi over Coke and stopped product of the original formula. Well, I
remember the great sales at the stores, as they attempted to unload the
unsold "New Coke." I will admit that that I read a couple years ago
that "New Coke" sell well as a fountain drink at some trendy rester
aunts, but Old Coke is the leader at the supermarket, where most of the
profit is for them.
While HD may be improved, if you can't receive it while jogging, at work
or in the car where most of the people listen, how are you going to sell
it? I have HDTV and am very satisfied, but I can see and here the
difference in quality, as well as the extra offerings on most of the
channels here in town with my old antenna much better than the analog
reception. While at the Radio Shack with their professionally installed
antenna, the HD radio signal did not lock on. Now I have at $300 Ten
Tec 320D receiver and the DRM decoder software plus Open source "Dream"
software, and with its own whip antenna, I could receive "Radio New
Zealand" some 6000 miles distant from my location with very few
drop-outs, and even better reception than there more powerful analog
signal, when I hooked it to my 25 foot homemade inverted-vee. The nice
part about that system, I didn't have to junk my radios, just to receive
it. My JRC535D was able to decode it also with out modification.
Once, when European signals where coming in my location, I picked up the
DRM signal direct from Germany, and saw how a Digital signal could be
set up, They had to voice channels simultaneously plus a web page that I
was briefly able to decode.
Maybe you could interest the power that be, to utilize the HD signal to
download web - pages such as detours, traffic jams that would be
pertinent to the user, plus you could set it up for the user to
interface with the computer for products etc, not just a replay of the
morning drive time show. This will not happen unless your industry can
come up with a more flexible system.
Ken I