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hurt by ad flight
Advertisers return in droves. Insurance, anyone?
By Gabriel Spitzer
As events unfold overseas, Americans are stuck to news like glue.
Sadly, many advertisers are sliding right off, reluctant to see their messages framed amid death and destruction on television and in magazines.
There is one exception, though: news/talk radio. Radio generally appears to be a medium that's been less affected by fleeing advertisers.
"Talk radio stations are really, in one regard, the least affected," says Mark Lefkowitz, executive vice president and media director at Furman Roth Advertising in New York.
"I don’t think you have many people saying they don’t want to be attached to radio. It’s different from TV, where you’re watching pictures of Osama bin Laden, bombs falling, people starving."
Like all media, radio has seen some of its business drift away since Sept. 11, most notably retail and consumer-goods advertisers.
"Many older, adult-male-oriented advertisers have pulled out because they don’t want to be in that environment," says Bruce Heim, vice president and director of network operations at Initiative Media.
"That includes investment, travel, vacation/resort, all the transportation, airlines, and also the people allied with those industries who are doing corporate branding campaigns. If you’re a multinational airline manufacturer doing a branding campaign, you’d probably divest yourself."
At the same time, for categories like insurance, now could not be a better time to advertise on radio.
"The weeks following the attacks, when stations were running a scaled-back number of commercials, the stations got a huge demand from insurance companies. Stations in New York were writing million-dollar orders for insurance companies," says Lefkowitz.
"Radio is the best medium to be factual and quick, to write a script and have it on the air that same day."
In more evidence that advertisers consider news radio "safer" than TV, one media buyer reports that Toyota pulled $800,000 out of local television in New York and put it into radio.
Like most other news media, radio’s news stations went ad-free for about five days following the terrorist attacks and had less-frequent commercials for days after that.
The effect was to build up demand among advertisers who had been bumped, and now stations are booking all that business.
"There were a lot of people who pulled out short term because they figured news/talk was the strongest area where commercials were no longer appropriate," says Karen Agresti, senior vice president and director of local broadcast at Hill, Holliday in Boston.
"So there was a short-term crunch on inventory, because everybody that pulled off the air had to be rebooked. October is actually feeling a little bit of pressure because of that."
However the fluctuations came so unexpectedly that ad rates didn’t have time to adjust.
"It happened so quick, the rates didn’t move," says Lefkowitz.
"Until this week, stations weren’t even talking about selling out. As of this week, the news stations are beginning to measure things against a sellout situation."
But once the artificial strain on inventory eases, news/talk radio might find itself where it began—in the red, along with most other media.
Moreover, with airstrikes in Afghanistan beginning last Sunday, the news media could be in for a long and bumpy ride, with preemptions disrupting ad schedules.
"There’s a possibility that a half-week or a week will be wiped out, so advertisers are jumpy about that. If that happens more than once or twice, how is that going to impact the ad market?" asks Heim.
"They’re jumpy, they’re on edge, they’re questioning. We have no firm answers on this."
Barring cataclysmic news events that would force news/talk stations to go commercial-free again for an extended time, radio is already having an easier time getting back to normal than, say, television.
"It’s not the way you find Fox News or MSNBC, which are really still living on it," says Lefkowitz.
Radio, unlike 24-hour cable news, has a certain structure that gives news/talk stations an air of normalcy, says Lefkowitz.
"Certainly the news stations have a program set where they have to play the traffic, they have to play the weather. Even in New York, people have to know what roads are still working, what tunnels and bridges are still in order. And sports is still something people want to get."
October 12, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.
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