Re: Rates (was Silly legal IDs)

[Dib9@aol.com]

In a message dated 9/20/98 9:20:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time, shel@big68.org
writes:

<< I am dead serious.  The fact is, radio stations can make big money with
 "national" buys.  And while not every major corporation would want to
 advertise on just one station in a market, they might be more attracted to a
 bunch of them at once, for maximum saturation. >>

The product being sold is advertising, not radio so even if you own all the
stations in a market you do not have a monopoly.  Just look at all the one
newspaper towns all over the country.  There may be only one newspaper, but
the newspaper does not have a monopoly in the advertising market.  Newspaper
advertising is very important to many businesses but newspapers can't push
their rates out of sight because at a certain point advertisers will decide
that another medium is an appropriate alternative.  The same would be true of
radio.  It's simple economics.

You are correct that radio sales have gone up with consolidation.  I would
attribute that to two basic reasons:
1.  Consolidation has made it easier for people to buy radio efficiently.
2.  The larger companies have brought more professionalism to the sales
effort.

I would also say that generally, over the years, the problem with radio has
been that advertising rates have been too low, not too high.  There are too
many stations in many markets for all the stations to be economically viable
and this saturation has driven down rates,

Dan Billings
Bowdoinham, Maine

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