Calling Attention To The Commercials
Written Nov. 5, 2007 by Sean Ross in Content + Internet Radio with 2 Comments
I've heard it at least twice in the last week. A jockless station has one of those jaunty Jack-like stagers going into the stopset to announce that the station is going to play commercials and will be back soon. The only problem is that there are no actual commercials there. In the first case, the station was too new and the stager was followed by various times that morning by another song or a "now back to music" stager. In the second, the "more music next" stager was followed by another song (which, as it turned out, was the Internet stream fill song, which became clear when it was cut off halfway through a minute later by a PSA).
"Creating a stopset where none exists" has been a problem for stations for a long time--usually for stations that are too new to have a lot of commercials, or on their last legs. DJs in the '80s and '90s would dutifully end the 10-in-a-row sweep to go into the weather jingle and back to more music. But it becomes a different problem in an era of jockless stations and stations that use production to do what the jocks used to do. And it became exacerbated a few years ago when Bob- and Jack-FMs began calling attention to the stopsets in an effort to be cheeky and anti-radio.
As stations become better about replacing Internet stopsets with actual songs (as opposed to the same handful of endlessly repeated PSAs), we probably need to rethink what the stopset is and how to go into it. If as much of a fith of the audience is going to keep hearing music, why tell them that they're not? And in a PPM world where stations are (for better and worse) going for being unobtrusive, the stopset hardly seems to be the right place to break that policy. Beyond that, the whole calculated roguishness of calling attention to the stopset has become enough of a cliche over the last 3-4 years that it no longer establishes you as different.
Reader Comments
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I've heard "empty" stopsets treated as you write many times over many years and don't quite understand why that happens. The log -- and the imaging elements that surround it -- just need a little TLC from someone who cares.
It isn't brain surgery. It's looking at the finished log once music, spots, promos and imaging are loaded and fixing it so it sounds right.
With internet spot substitution, I am hearing more "fill songs" (some timed better than others), but still run across stations running the same handful of PSAs filling six minute stopsets.
Streaming is still an afterthought by too many stations -- with a product that would never be acceptable on the terrestrial signal.
Dan is right! It just means that the PD should be proofing the log after commercials are loaded in for the day. I had to do the same thing for voicetrackers when I was at Clear Channel. A lot of the time the jock would come out of the song promote the station with jock talk then go into a stop set. If I saw that the stop set was light and had NO commercials I just changed his outcue
as it rolled over the intro of the song. Tightens up the sound of the station!