Radio Commercials

The life blood of any commercial radio station is of course the commercials. Annoying as they may be to the audience, commercials are what pays the electric bill and back in the day was the source of my own income. As with the songs we played, there were great commercials and then there were some that were not so great.

My first sponsor back at WUSC-AM was Coca-Cola. I must say that I loved those nationally produced spot announcements. They came to us on reel to reel tape and since we did not have cart machines, I got to load the tapes the National Ad Agency sent us onto one of the Ampex 601 reel to reel recorders in the studio four times per hour. Those tapes came on 5 inch reels that contained usually a half dozen 60 second commercials. They were supposed to be played in rotation so once I found the first one on the tape and played it, I immediately would cue up the next cut and it was ready. Easy Peasey as long as the traffic director scheduled the cuts in sequential order. By the way, the traffic director was the person who scheduled the commercials into the shows and created the program log that was used by the DJs to record the time that a commercial (or other show element) was broadcast. We had one traffic director who loved to mess with the on air DJs by scheduling the cuts on the tape in random order. We spent forever after each commercial rewinding the tape back to the head and then counting the spots as we fast forwarded the tape listening to the commercials pass in the cue system. He straightened out after a bunch of us had a discussion with him in the music library one afternoon.

Those old Coca-Cola commercials were examples of great commercials. They were informative and entertaining, usually featuring recording artists who had songs that were playing on the station. I’d find myself singing along with those commercials almost as often as I’d be singing along with a song that was in rotation.

After I made the transition to WCOS I began playing more and more commercials for local businesses. Some of these were great; I knew the Kaminer Heating & Cooling Jingle by heart as well as many others that came out of the local ad agencies. Many more of the commercials we had were for local businesses who bought directly from the station. Our sales guys understood that there was a balance between selling something that was good for the advertiser and not getting content on that turned our audience off. Sue, our copywriter and traffic director, wrote great copy that was fun and easy to read whenever she could. But some sponsors insisted that she insert certain words into the copy that drove our production guys crazy. I think they thought tongue-twisters were cool.

There were a lot more commercials at WCOS than there were at WUSC. But instead of reel to reel tapes these commercials sat on Fidelipac tapes commonly known as a "NAB cartridge" or simply "cart". No not the kind that you roll around from room to room but the kind that looked like 8-track tapes, encased in plastic boxes that could be placed in a machine that played them back on demand. In fact these “carts” were the immediate forerunner of the 8-track tapes that were everywhere in the 70s. We did have reel to reel tapes in the studio that were used to play the Pam’s and Pepper-Tanner jingles that were so much a part of radio back then. Those Magnavox tape machines were also used to play back special show segments such as “Dottie Lloyd’s Swap & Shop” and some of the Sunday shows that aired each week. I still have a reel from the old “The Investigators” show produced locally for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which was then a part of the United States Department of the Treasury, having been formed in 1886 as the "Revenue Laboratory" within the Treasury Department's Bureau of Internal Revenue. Hence the name “revenuers!”

So far, this story has been telling the tale of the pre-recorded commercial. There were also live commercials which came in two forms; those read live from commercial copy and the ad-lib commercial.

I must admit that I cringe a little every time I think of the live commercial read from “copy” that was to be read verbatim by the local DJ on the air. Most of these were great but I remember one for a local bank that contained the word “regularly” in every month’s new version of the commercial. I don’t know why, but I had a “thing” about that word that I just couldn’t get over. I’d fumble it every time. One morning when I was doing the overnight show, our morning man, Bob Fulton, gave me a suggestion; “Break it down to multiple words,” he said, “Regular Lee”. I tried it and sure enough it worked but I still hate that word today.

Some of these “live from copy” commercials were very formal and others were less so. I remember when Hardees and Shoney’s came to town with an introductory schedule of live commercials. The respective Ad Agency Representatives held meetings with the DJs and we were given pretty much a cart-blanche to have a little fun with these commercials. Being the terrible punster that I was, I remember that one time I quipped that Hardees should have named their hamburger a “Har Har” instead of the Husky. Then they could hire Jackie Gleason to be their spokesman and he could say “Hardee Har Har!” Note: you have to be a certain age to understand that one, but I got a phone call from the Ad Rep who told me he almost drove off the road laughing at that one.

When I first started doing The Nightbeat Show from Doug Broome’s drive in, his commercials were all on tape. But quickly they changed to live commercials from copy and then again to “ad-lib” where all I had to go from was a menu. These last commercials were so in line with the rest of the show that many folks didn’t realize that they were actually commercials.

For a while I regressed to mixing pre recorded commercials back into the show lineup. Now, these were not normal commercials but funny skits that my buddy Scotty Quick, our mid day DJ, and I came up with; “Sleepy Man at Breakfast”, “Vroom Vroom – Stop That” and “Tex” were the ones I remember the most. It wasn’t long before we started getting requests for these commercials. That was a win-win!

I’m not saying these were slick, well produced commercials but they got the job done. I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t work in today’s radio environment, but they fit in well with the old 50s, 60s and early 70s radio experience; the golden age of “music radio.”

I feel certain that Wolfman Jack is smiling broadly as he cues up the next 45 in that big blowtorch in the sky. Oh MY!