From Feast To Famine!

Christmas week is here and that means most radio stations are in overtime commercial mode. As the holidays get nearer advertisers are loading up with commercials luring that last minute shopper into their stores. So the commercial break stops keep getting longer and longer.

Back in the day, non-programming time, I.E. commercials, PSAs and promotional announcements were limited to 18 minutes in each hour. And during the month of December the blank spaces on the program logs would fill up with last minute commercials.

These blank spaces were left on the log by Sue Jones, out copywriter and traffic specialist. BTW; traffic had nothing to do with automobiles, the traffic specialist was the person who created the program log and scheduled the commercials, news segments, weather and other program elements like “Dottie Lloyd’s Swap and Shop” that went into the daily programming. The blank spaces were for last minute additions. Sue also wrote the copy that was either read live by the on the air DJ or sent to production to be recorded on a tape cartridge with background music.

A sign that a commercial was a last minute addition was when I saw a hand written entry in a blank space amongst the neatly typewritten lines for the other commercials. A sure sign was when Sue would rush into the control room and ask that I give her the log. She would scribble on it for a while and hand it back to me and then she would add some pages to the live copy book. Sure enough another last minute advertiser filled in one or more of the blank lines on the log.

I once asked Sue how she was sure that she didn’t run over the 18 minute per hour commercial limit with these last minute additions and she told me that she kept a ledger in her office of the number of commercial minutes available in each hour. She showed me the ledger and sure enough one could see at a glance if there was room for another spot.

The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas saw more and more of the last minute additions. The challenge for Sue was to keep product separation that is no spot break could have more than one car dealership commercial or more than one bank commercial. And that was something the DJs had to look out for as well since we were the final decision maker as to what commercials went into each spot break. Panic time came when you realized that you had more car commercials in a half hour than you had spot breaks. When that happened you had to create an additional spot break by choosing shorter songs to make up the time. I’ll just leave it right here that we played a lot of shorter songs during the month of December.

Now, getting the commercials on the air was a different story. We had only three cart machines in the studio so if you had a four or five commercial spot break, something had to give. One way to handle that was to read the live copy commercials between the ones that were recorded on the carts to allow for the first cart to stop so you could pull it and place the next commercial in the machine. Every once in a while there would be a lot of space on the tape between the end of the commercial and the cue stop. When that happened we had to manually stop the cart and replace it with the next one. We would place these stopped carts upside down on the desk of the radio console and cue it up during the next record. So we were busy right up to 6 PM on Christmas Eve.

At 6 PM, the stores all closed and all the last minute Christmas commercials disappeared from the log. The Christmas sales rush was over.

Suddenly all that was left on the logs were the sustaining show sponsors. For my first show “The All Night Satellite” it was the Taylor Street Pharmacy. “The Big T” and WCOS were the only businesses open all night so it was a match in heaven. The commercials for the pharmacy were initially all recorded by our morning DJ, Bob Fulton. Eventually, they went on to providing live copy for me to read to add some variety. When I moved over to “The Nightbeat Show” the sustaining sponsor was Doug Broome’s Drive In, the remote location from where we broadcast every night. All of his commercials were live copy spots. They provided a bunch of talking points that we ad-libbed around for 30 seconds twice each half hour. I loved those the most of all. Life was good for the DJ in January!

Christmas time at WUSC-FM means longer shows as the bulk of the student DJs are home for the holidays and those of us who are left get and extra hour for our shows. You can bet there are going to be some extra solid gold Christmas songs on the playlist for tomorrow. This is the fun time of the year for sure. Oh MY!