Advertising Scheduling Hacks

Yesterday, I shared my Common Sense Advertising Scheduling principles I usually use with my station, WOWO Radio in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Today I couple of methods to create an alternate perception of reality.

That sounds almost scary, “create an alternate perception of reality,” but it’s not.  It’s simply a method to help you stretch your advertising dollars if you need to.

As a News Talk radio station, WOWO listeners are active listeners.  They are less likely to mentally tune out when advertising comes on the radio.  We are accustomed to hearing talk and the news talk format is brain food, not escapism entertainment.

I have discovered that with a tight advertising budget, it may not be possible for some businesses to buy the ownership schedule a mentioned yesterday.  That option is one ad per hour during a 3 hour radio program on WOWO, 5 days a week.  15 ads per week.

If those 15 ads per week were priced at $100 each, that ads up to over $75,000 per year.  If we were to only use my secret sauce of shorter messages at 1/2 that price and we are still pushing $30,000 annually.  That may be too much for a young start up business. 

So besides varying the length of the message, there are a couple of Advertising Scheduling Hacks that I sometime recommend:

• 3 weeks per month.  Instead of every week, we may be able to knock 25% off by scheduling an off week each month.
• 4 days per week.  Instead of every day, 5 days a week, what if we did 4 out of 5 days? This would reduce the cost by 20%.

Loyal listeners who are listening daily or nearly every day, are not going to notice this.  I recall talking with a friend who swore he heard one of my advertising partners every day, 4 or 5 times each day.  That was his perception.

Reality was that they advertised 4 days a week, 12 ads each week, 3 weeks each month.  However we created an alternate perception of reality with this loyal listener.

Now before we wrap up this subject today, I want to warn you about an Advertising Schedule Hack that you don’t want to try.

The same software programs that take the listenership data from the ratings companies are often used by advertising agency media buyers to craft the perfect schedule.  They use terms like Gross Rating Points and other criteria that ignores the human relationship principles and habits and they come up with some really weird schedules.  When I worked for another group of radio stations and worked with a lot of media buyers, I would have to play their numbers game, but I usually would send them a Common Sense Advertising Schedule too.

Beware of media salespeople who can’t explain in simple terms you understand the advertising program they are recommending.