This reader gives his two cents worth on "Less is More."
A lot has been written recently about Clear Channel's new "Less Is More" policy. Other big groups are also jumping on the bandwagon.
While the big groups deserve praise for decreasing commercial loads, is anyone really doing anything to insure that our advertisers are getting their moneys worth?
Cutting the commercial load will make no difference if all the remaining commercials are grouped into two 4-minute clusters. If you were an advertiser, would you want to be the number 7 or 8 spot in a cluster of eight 30s?
And then there's the habit of putting competitors in the same cluster or even back-to-back, a common practice here in market #38. Just last week, I heard a local station doing a live broadcast at an Infinity dealer. When the remote break ended, they went right into a commercial for a competing Chevrolet dealer. Is that fair to either client?
Another local station was airing a flight for a discount shoe store. The spot poked fun at department store shoes. With only another 30-second spot separating them, the station then aired a spot for a shoe sale at Macy's. I heard this happen dozens of times during the week the Macy's flight was running.
And then there are still stations that air locally produced ads that consist of 30-seconds of drivel - "for all your hardware needs", "all the brands you know and love", "stop in and see our friendly personnel", etc. Chris Lytle has been around for years - you'd think by now everybody in radio would have read one of his books or been to one of his seminars about how to write an effective radio commercial.
"Less Is More" is a nice first step, but unless we start putting emphasis on helping the client achieve results and stop treating commercials like they are something bad that have to be buried in long clusters in the fourth quarter-hour, we'll never recover from the current industry doldrums.
Larry Fuss, President
South Seas Broadcasting, Inc.
KKHJ-FM, KHJ-TV10 & WVUV-AM
Pago Pago, American Samoa
(market #38 refers to his other home in Las Vegas)
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