Features
Tours de Farce: The Big Broadcast
“What’s that?” you ask. “Radio commercials? For Pollstar.com? Surely, you jest.”
No, we’re not jesting, and we won’t even say “Don’t call me Shirley.” But we recently launched a multimillion-dollar radio campaign to boost our brand line and increase our product profile on the Web. We’ve embraced the original electronic medium so that we may spread the word throughout the latest channels of communications.
Unfortunately, there’s just one, small problem. All of our call-out research indicates that, despite repeated airings for the last three weeks, nobody has actually heard our radio commercials, and snappy, highly tested slogans, such as “You deserve some Eric Clapton dates today!” or “Pop! Pop! Fizz! Fizz! Oh, what a relief Sting is!” have fallen on deaf ears. Even our “I just saved a ton of money by switching to John Mayer!” slogan has failed to register on the collective concert psyche of your average radio listener.
Furthermore, we can’t understand why our radio advertising campaign has gone unnoticed among concert fans. We studied the demographic population base of all single parent Wishbone Ash fans, and we scrutinized the personal hygiene habits as practiced by followers of The Dead and Ozzy Osbourne. In fact, we’ve personally interviewed each and every person who has seen at least one concert during the last month, such as Bob Dylan, Phil Collins or Rush, to determine their radio listening habits so that we may target them with the appropriate Pollstar.com message.
But we came up with zilch, nada, a big zero. We were hoping for total recall and we ended up with bogus recall. Regardless of how brilliant and entertaining our radio ads are, not one of you has been able to associate the ad with the product. Not even our “I’m stuck on Britney, and Britney is stuck on me!” commercial managed to elicit one positive response. It’s as if every man, woman and child in America has grown disgusted with radio. Can that be?
However, we’re not giving up yet. We spent a lot of money on our radio ads, and we’re going to give them a second chance. We will break through the audio clutter, the chatter and static, until every radio listener instantly recognizes the Pollstar.com brand. Someone must be listening, and it’s our job to figure out who that someone is.
And we’re going to start by doubling our advertising buy on the new Air America Radio Network. After all, Al Franken promised us there would be listeners. It’s just a matter of finding them.