Fire the Marketing Guy
I’ve seen this from more than one radio station, but it hit me again this weekend and reallly irked me.
I’m driving around listening to the radio and I’m on a local country station: Thunder 94.5. It’s a station full of new country music which is mostly a rock/country hybrid. During one of their breaks they did one of their little self-promo bits and it went something like this:
You’re listening to Thunder 94.5 where we play New Country! Not the same old stuff as B93!
Morons.
First, B93, 93.7FM, is the top country station in the area. There’s a darned good chance that if you’re listening to 94.5 then 93.7 is also on your radio’s saved stations list.
Congrats, you’ve just insulted a vast majority of your own listeners taste in music.
Second, and this is the one that really gets me, you just mentioned the name of your #1 competitor on the air. While you weren’t playing music. Unsurprisingly this reminded me to change the channel to your competition because they might actually be playing music instead of thumping their chests.
They were, and my dial was stuck there for quite some time.
Your little cunning plan didn’t work out so well, and it never will, because when you mention your competition while you’re not delivering the goods that I want I’m quite likely to put forth the .48 seconds worth the work and change the freaking channel.
Thus ends today’s lesson in shit not to do in the radio business.