By SCOTT FYBUSH
Welcome back to the workweek, and to the fall season in radio! If you missed it over the long, lazy Labor Day weekend, there’s a full NorthEast Radio Watch column this week, available for your reading pleasure right here. Better yet – this column is free in its entirety for everyone. Our readers are our best marketers, and one of the best ways you can support what we do here is to share NERW with your colleagues and friends. Let ’em know what they’re missing!
As a NERW reader, of course, you’re not missing anything. Here’s what’s breaking this post-Labor Day morning:
*In Buffalo, Townsquare and PD Dave Universal have completed their rebranding of WJYE (96.1). After freshening the music on the former “Joy 96” a few months ago, Tuesday morning brought a 7 AM relaunch as “Mix 96,” with new calls WMSX.
“Mix” goes right up against Entercom’s hot AC behemoth, “Star 102.5” WTSS, as well as a former “Mix,” Cumulus’ WHTT (104.1), in search of the office-and-minivan crowd.
The airstaff stays largely intact, with the exception of afternoons: Trevor Carey is out, replaced by former production director Dan Rinelli. “Bobby O” O’Brian is the new production director, and veteran jock Dave Gillen adds some weekend shifts to his day job in sales at WGRZ (Channel 2), reports the Buffalo Broadcasters.
*Our content partner, RadioInsight, is tracking an impending format flip at WKZF (92.7 Starview) in the Harrisburg market, where the Hall station has changed calls to WLPA-FM, apparently ahead of a switch from rock to a sports simulcast with WLPA (1490).
There’s also a new callsign at WWBZ (700 Orange-Athol) in north central Massachusetts. After some false starts with branding earlier this year (it couldn’t be “Legends” or “WBZ,” as it turned out), the standards station is now WFAT.
And we’ll have full obituaries in our next column for two NERW-land broadcasters we lost over the weekend: Hank Yaggi, the former general manager of WTNH/WCTX in New Haven, was 69 when he lost his battle with Alzheimer’s disease on Sunday; in Philadelphia, they’re remembering Dan Donovan, one of the on-air legends from the heyday of WFIL (560) who went on to a long career in Minnesota.
The 2020 Tower Site Calendar will soon be off the press, but you don’t have to wait to order it.
For the month of September, you can order your copy in advance for 20% off the regular price.
Note to our regular buyers (and our irregular buyers — we love every one of you): This is not this year’s cover, as this year’s calendar is still in production. We promise the real cover will be just as beautiful, if not more.
Have a suggestion for a cover photo? Look through our Tower Site archives, and if you see a beautiful photo we haven’t featured yet, suggest it to us!
Visit our store to buy the new calendar and check out our other products.
Prime ad space that’s easy on the eyes
More than half a million impressions from one calendar? How is that possible?
Here’s how an ad in our calendar has better exposure than one in a magazine:
1. Magazines issues are designed to be looked at for a period of weeks or months. Calendars are designed to be looked at for a whole year.
2. Magazines are read or glanced at, then placed in a drawer or in a pile. Calendars are hung on a wall.
3. Magazines usually don’t get read more than once. Calendars are looked at between four and eight times each day. (Promotional Products Association International; Advertising Specialty Institute)
Plus, people don’t usually walk into someone’s office, pick up a magazine and start to read it. But they do walk into someone’s office and see a calendar hanging there.
Let’s do the math: four impressions or views a day (conservatively), five days in a work week (at minimum), 260 work days per year. That’s just over 1,000 impressions per year. We sell around 600 calendars each year. That’s 600,000 total impressions for the year!
A 4-by-1-inch banner ad on each month’s page costs only $2,500. That’s less than one penny for each impression your ad makes on a broadcast-industry professional.
The Tower Site Calendar has become THE prestige print product of the broadcast industry. Since 2002 it has become a must-have for engineers and engineering managers in stations big and small, all over North America.
Give us your layout and we’ll give you the exposure.
We’re ready to work with you! Call us at 585-442-5411 between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. ET, or email lisa@fybush.com.
