Ad Rates

[lglavin@lycosmail.com]

Since I'm not in the "biz" but an interested observer,
I'm not privy to to some data like radio-station ad 
rates.  When I was in the service at McChord AFB in
Washington State, I used to see the Standard Rates and
Data book at the Seattle Public Library, but it's not
available here in the Merrimack Valley. I have a 
question for some of you in the business end of radio:
are Saturdays, especially saturday afternoons, the
the lowest revenue-raisers for stations?  The reason 
I bring this up, on Aug 6th, T.J. Medreck interviewed
William Campbell, the CEO of WCRB-FM.  One subject 
brought up was the elimination of the Saturday after-
noon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera.  He claimed
that the station was forgoing $330- to $400, 000 in
revenue in past years by carrying the Met.  For one
thing, he claimed the Met took up 5 hours of time, but
a typical broadcast runs from 1:30 to 5:00 pm excluding
Wagnerian works and a few rare longer pieces.  That's
only 3-and-a-half hours.  WCRB usually programs relat-
ively short compositions in the daytime hours and 
let's say for the sake of argument, they can squeeze
in 15 minutes of commercials per-hour...that would
amount to about 52 minutes of commercials over that
time.  Multiply that by 22 weeks and you get 1,144 
minutes of ad time they could sell.  That means ad 
rates of about $260/min for $300,000 or almost 
$350/min for #400,000 in revenue.  Does this sound
right?  Do giants like WBZ and WBCN charge that much
for a commercial on Saturday afternoon? When I'm in 
small stores or my local laundromat on Saturdays, I
hear mass-market stations broadcasting 30- and 60-
minute commercial free sweeps.  Furthermore, Dean 
Johnson ran an article on radio station billings on 
Friday Aug 13 and WCRB was not in the top-10 of 
annual revenues, so we know they do less than $10-
million a year.  If you annualize alleged revenue of
$400,000 for 22 weeks, you get $1,000,000 on Saturday
afternnons!  I don't think it adds up...help me here.

Laurence from Methuen


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End of boston-radio-interest-digest V3 #481
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