[jiggyboy]

I’m not talking about repeating the same topic every couple of minutes for new listeners, I’m talking about the same talking point literally every minute for eight to ten minutes straight. (I happen to have been able to find the very segment here: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/04/09/maybe_sen_mccaskill_can_tell_us_why_we_need_thousands_of_irs_agents_to_provide_health_care , “Find Next Occurrence of” “IRS” until your mouse button stops working to see what I mean.)

I don’t want to hijack the thread, but I have some questions on radio and TV advertising that I’ve been wanting to ask somebody for quite some time.

1) What’s going on with showing the same commercial twice in the same commercial break, or even two times in a row? For a while, I thought my memory was shot, but now I see and/or hear this practically every day. Is this gross incompetence on somebody’s part, or some legal trickery (”you said to run your ad twice during the show, well we ran it twice”)? Is the American attention span now down to the life expectancy of a soap bubble?

2) In the old days, big advertisers (e.g., Campbell’s) wrote their contract so that no competitor’s ad would be on the opposite magazine page or in the same radio or TV commercial break. But these days I don’t know if I could say that there’s any company in the country that has that deal. Over Christmas, I saw TV commercials from four different car manufacturers in a row, then something else, then two more car ads. Why would an advertiser be in that environment?

Re DVR technology for radios, I often find myself lunging for a “rewind 30 seconds” button on my car radio as I immediately remember (over and over again!) that I actually had one. There are radios that let your record what’s being broadcast, but I haven’t found anything that also has that short-rewind button to let you hear it again while it’s recording.

The thread was on radio choice, so it never occurred to me to offer complaints about MSM repetition. That said, one of the things that will get me screaming is when they have only one five-second clip of some new event and play it virtually nonstop while their panel blathers on about the event. Court TV might be the worst — if they have some grainy, telephoto picture of the back of a guy’s head as he’s getting into a car, then that’s the picture they’ll slowly rotate and zoom on five, ten, fifteen times in a row during the segment.

[FrankR]

Actually, running the same commercial back-to-back can be very effective. Many times we sold a 30-second spot, but in actuality it was two, of the same 15-second spot spliced back to back. The listeners say, "Hey, they just played that", but it makes more of an impression, plus it gets the advertisers name out there twice as much. Most of us can probably remember those back-to-back ads longer than the single ones. It's a gimmick, but it works.

In my training - back in the early 60's - the golden rule was that competing advtisers spots not be played within 15-minutes of each other (using 15-minute programming segments. Today, however, with the loosy-goosy FCC regulation, anything goes. Greed and major corporations have taken over broadcasting and it's a mish-mash of confusion. I still do a double-take when I see Ford, Honda, and Subaru commercials all in a row. The ones who need to complain, are the Advertisers - I know I would.

Radio, and TV, rules have changed a lot. We had much better diversity when any one company could own no more than 7, AM stations, and 7 FM stations. That rule was started to keep any one corp from dominating their views in the news, etc., but they dropped it at some point while democrats were in charge of the FCC.

Also, many small stations are being taken over by non-English speaking formats, from Spanish to Middle Eastern...we have no idea what they're talking about and the audiences are so small I would hate to try to sell advertising on them...especially here in the south.

When you get that DVR-type radio recorder invented, let me know...