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AMization of FM

NightAire said:
QUESTION: If you have to have advertising reps in all the major markets, how do ABC / NBC / CBS / Fox and all the cable channels sell their national avails?
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TV works a little different than radio.

The TV networks sell to national and regional accounts that buy nationwide (all stations) or regionally (All Pacific Time Zone affiliates). The agencies for these accounts are not all located on "Madison Avenue." In fact, a minority of national buys come out of New York City any more. The big buying centers, such as NY, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, San Francisco, LA, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, etc. have many agencies that buy national network TV, and the sales force for the big webs has to have offices in all the major centers to service the accounts.

In radio, stations do not maintain sales offices themselves, but "hire" a sales rep organization to give them a presence and to negotiate buys on their behalf.

Streamers do the opposite. They have a national medium that can have spots delivered only to a local audience in each area of the country. So they need local sellers calling on local merchants and businesses to sell local spots.
 
secondchoice said:
Merlin's failure in NYC is understandable but why hasn't ESPN's FM LMA in NYC generated a big ratings "bounce"? If no one under 50 listens to AM (which a lot of rating numbers and studies support) how come ESPN which is now exposed to the less than 50 in NYC has not taken off? IMHO ESPN is good content.
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WFAN is very highly rated even among 18-34 men. That is because of content. When highly desirable content is only available on AM, there will be AM listening.

While in general, a large majority of the under-55's do not ever listen to AM, some will listen if something they are passionate about is best delivered by an AM station.

Weak AM programming when moved to FM will still be weak programming.
 
DavidEduardo said:
secondchoice said:
Merlin's failure in NYC is understandable but why hasn't ESPN's FM LMA in NYC generated a big ratings "bounce"? If no one under 50 listens to AM (which a lot of rating numbers and studies support) how come ESPN which is now exposed to the less than 50 in NYC has not taken off? IMHO ESPN is good content.
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WFAN is very highly rated even among 18-34 men. That is because of content. When highly desirable content is only available on AM, there will be AM listening.

While in general, a large majority of the under-55's do not ever listen to AM, some will listen if something they are passionate about is best delivered by an AM station.

Weak AM programming when moved to FM will still be weak programming.
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So you are saying ESPN Radio is "weak"?
 
The most important part of David E's post is that content matters. I guess people can debate whose content is better, WFAN or ESPN, but WFAN's is very good, so good that it gets a significant number of under-40-year-old men to listen when there's little if anything else (all news?) that they listen to on AM.

This is what the winners in this age of smartphones and Internet listening will know is most important: content matters. That's why Merlin lost. IMHO, they didn't pay enough attention to content.
 
radiophiler said:
That's why Merlin lost. IMHO, they didn't pay enough attention to content.
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I think HERITAGE matters more than content. I'm looking at format changes in other markets, and when you make a dramatic format change, like flipping from alternative to news, it doesn't matter how good the content is. No one knows it's there. That's why WFAN beats WEPN-FM. Put the Yankees on WEPN, that will trump heritage. But only to Yankee fans, and that's because The Yankees bring their own heritage. Outside of that, content isn't the driving force. It will be interesting to see how much better alternative does in NY now that Merlin has flipped again.
 
Could this be the hole in the armor that ESPN - ABC - Disney uses to financially hold up Cable operators / Direct - Dish and local affiliates who are paying carriage high fees?
 
If you study Fourier analysis, you'll see that a whole bunch of frequencies of sine waves are required to add up to a square wave, and that is why there are so many interfering frequencies produced.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
If you study Fourier analysis, you'll see that a whole bunch of frequencies of sine waves are required to add up to a square wave, and that is why there are so many interfering frequencies produced.
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Square waves are the combination of the fundamental frequency (say, 1 MHz) and all of its odd harmonics (3, 5, 7, 9, etc. MHz).
 
secondchoice said:
Could this be the hole in the armor that ESPN - ABC - Disney uses to financially hold up Cable operators / Direct - Dish and local affiliates who are paying carriage high fees?
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That's assuming one has the resources or available credit to buy your way out of sub fees like Comcast did when they purchased NBC Universal. It's amazing how smoothly retrans negotiations go when you own both sides.
 
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