Brown Media Blog

Were you in the biz when we were playing THESE?

Most any research study you see will reveal that the biggest tune-out in radio is commercials.  Since radio station managers still have this funny insistence on their stations making money, chances are, you’re going to be playing commercials whether you (or the listeners) like it or not.

Indeed, some commercials are not bad.  Some are even rather entertaining.  But let’s face it, there’s not a commercial you can play that listeners will want to hear as much as the songs you play or the talk shows you air.

But there is a way to get those commercial breaks to go by a little faster.  Or at least make them seem to go by a little faster.  It’s a trick we first started using back in the 1970s, so it’s certainly nothing new.  Yet I am often reminded — and consistently shocked — that so few people in radio today know of this little trick.

It became standard operating procedure at every station I programmed from 1973 until the last station I programmed in 1990.  And I was even asked to implement the same system at the last radio station where I worked (but wasn’t its PD).

Now, before I explain this little trick, let me preface my remarks by pointing out that when we used this system, we were playing commercials (and most everything else) from carts.  You know, those little 8-track-tape-looking things that radio stations used until the digital revolution rendered them obsolete.  (I know most of you know quite well what these archaic things called “cartridges” were.  Some of you — as much as you may hate to admit it — probably still have a few around the station even now.)  The need to convey the information you are about to learn in a consistent and succinct manner gave rise to a whole system (some would argue it was an art form) of labeling carts.  Indeed, the KNUS (Dallas) “production manual” first printed in 1973 became a template for dozens of stations that came later.  I adopted the policies at at least six other stations, and I know there were others from the ’72-’73 KNUS staff that fanned out across the country and spread the gospel to other stations.  So to some who read this, this will merely be a refresher.  But to many, it will be new.

The system called for the jock to sequence commercials in his/her stop sets based on a coding system that we developed and was implemented on our cart labeling system.  The two main variables that were in play were (a.) the spot’s composition (I’ll explain what that means in a minute), and (b.) the spot’s tempo.

Note that we did not factor in a spot’s length into how it fit into a stop set’s sequence.  Some stations insist on playing 60s first, then 30s.  Or 30s, then 60s.  This is lunacy.  And you’re about to learn why.

A spot’s composition could be simple or complex, but it was denoted on the cart’s label by one or a series of colored Avery-brand dots (you know, those dots the size of the holes a hole-punch punches out of paper).  The dot system worked like this:

COLD VOICE:  BLACK DOT
VOICE OVER SFX (no music):  SILVER DOT
VOICE OVER MUSIC:  YELLOW DOT
SINGING (jingle or artist, like in a concert spot):  RED DOT

Now a spot might have one dot, or it might have a dozen dots.  The jocks were instructed to put however many dots were needed on the cart label to indicate the composition of the spot.

An all-cold-voice spot (no music, no sfx, just dry voice) would be represented by a single black dot.  (A later enhancement to this system called for TWO black dots if it was a totally dry two-voice spot.)

A musical donut spot with an announcer in the middle would look like this:  RED-YELLOW-RED (three dots).  If the voiceover in the middle was really long (and the singing was really short at the beginning and end of the spot), jocks were encourged to position the dots on in such a way to reveal this.

A spot that started with voice over sound effects (like traffic noise), but then had a music bed come in with an announcer VO over it, would be SILVER-YELLOW.

Are you getting the idea here?

So the trick was simply this:  We always wanted the stop sets to build back toward music, so there was always forward momentum inside the spot cluster.  So the jocks were instructed to sequence spots in the sets so that the cold voice spots went first, the voice-over-sfx spots were next, then vo over music, and singing spots last.

Always build back toward music.

And I mentioned earlier that we also coded tempo.  This was done with arrows.  Up to three arrows on a cart label.  One for how the spot started, one for the tempo in the middle of the spot, and one for how the spot ended.  So you might have one arrow pointing up (if the spot started uptempo), then an arrow pointing to the right (to 3 o’clock, if the tempo was medium), and a third arrow pointing down (to 6:00, if the tempo dropped to a really slow pace).  If there were no tempo changes, one arrow would suffice.

Tempo was used as a tiebreaker.  Generally, we’d build from less-produced to more-produced (composition), and from slow-to-fast (tempo).  But the composition (dry to singing, work toward music) was the first rule.  Tempo simply broke any ties.

Of course nowadays, there are no cart labels, so there are no colored dots, and no arrows drawn on cart labels.  So stations wishing to use this technique to add forward momentum to their stop sets will need to find some other way to code commercials.  Whether this is done in the traffic software or in the music sequencing software, well, I can’t advise you there.  But here are some suggestions:

COMPOSITION:  You could go with a 1 to 4 numeric coding, but as you’ll see below, I’m going to recommend a numeric coding for tempo.  And I think using a numeric coding for both parameters is begging for confusion.  So let’s go with letters here.  In the interest of keeping it simple, let’s code the composition as follows:

V = Cold voice
E = VO over Sound Effects (no music)
M = VO over music
S = Singing

I call this modified system “VEMS,” for obvious reasons.

TEMPO:  A simple 1, 2 and 3 coding (1 for slow, 2 for medium, 3 for fast) should suffice.

If this coding were made available to the jocks and they were properly trained to sequence commercials with these guidelines, I guarantee you your commercial stop sets will SEEM shorter, because you’re always building up, from least produced to most produced, from dry voice to music, from voiceover to singing, from slow to fast.  Always working forward.  And forward momentum is half the battle of getting folks to sit through a spot break.

Now this dry-to-music, slow-to-fast system assumes you’re a music station.  I could argue that reversing the sequence might work better for all-talk stations.  Music to dry, fast to slow.  But that’s your call.

One other variation on this system that I’ve used, and it can work, especially if you’re running LONG stop sets (4, 5, 6 minutes).  Start the stop set with the most produced or most “sung” spot.  People will tend to sit through those.  Then, with the second unit in the cluster, start the sequence as you normally would (black dot, slow tempo) and build back up to the end of the stop set.  The idea here is to get folks to sit through the first spot.  Then maybe they’ll stay longer.

But ultimately, the idea is to build momentum, moving from dry voice to voice over, to voice over music, to singing…always building back toward music, always building from slower to faster.  Always riding the wave of momentum.

Try it.  You’ll like it.