Diamonds, dogs and dobros on radio
As radio enters its second week of the holiday season, a number of specialty advertisers hit the airwaves, according to the Spot Ten National chart this week from Media Monitors. Besides the usual year-round ad campaigns from radio's power advertisers like Geico (#1), McDonald's (#2), Verizon (#3), Home Depot (#4), AT&T (#5), Kohl's (#6) and RadioShack (#7), some other unique and heavy ad categories on radio are worthy of note this holiday season:
Rock radio rocked by guitars: The Guitar Center (#8) ran over 12,200 spots in the past week, the vast majority airing on rock-formatted stations like Classic Rock, Active rock, AAA, and Alternative Rock, with only a few hundred of their spots appearing on Top 40 and Urban stations. By the way, "Dobro" was originally a popular generic name among guitarists in the 80s and 90s referring to any type of resonating guitar, but now the name is owned by the Gibson Guitar Corp.
Rocks & other jewelry on radio: Chains owned by Sterling Jewelers ran almost 28,100 spots the past week across its numerous high-profile jewelry stores, most notably Jared (#9) and Kay's (#19), which, when ranked on the Jewelry-stores-only Spot Ten "Holiday Bling" chart are #1 and #3 respectively.
Traditionally a strong advertising category on radio, this year is no exception for Jewelers. Sterling's competitors were also highly active this week as well, with Shane Company (#11) airing 10,000 spots and the Helzberg Diamonds (#33) campaign running 5,200 spots. Sterling also operates JB Robinson Jewelers, Marks & Morgan Jewelers, Osterman Jewelers and Shaw's Jewelers, which together make up six of the top ten) of the advertisers on this week's Holiday Bling chart.
"Holidays rock!" say dogs, cats, birds: Animal supply company Petco (#10) is a relative newcomer to radio campaigning, appearing on neither the 2004 or 2005 top radio advertisers year-end charts from Media Monitors. This year, Petco aired nearly 10,500 radio spots in major and secondary markets in the past 7 days to make sure gifts for Snoopy, Garfield and Tweety are included by holiday shoppers this season. Petco operates over 800 stores in 49 states (not Alaska) and DC.
Other radio advertisers of note this week include over 9,000 spots from Famous Footwear (#12) and 6,100 spots placed by the HD Radio Alliance (#26). Normally eclipsed by spots for ABC, CBS and NBC network television programming, this week's most-advertised TV network on radio is A&E (#28) with 5,800 spots.
Taco Bell (#50) continues to air heavily on radio after making national news recently, running 4,200 radio spots this week.
