Using Radio in Sales Promotion: A Book for Advertisers, Station Managers and Broadcasting Artists
A 1927 McGraw-Hill textbook by Edgar H. Felix, a broadcasting consultant who had worked with the National Broadcasting Company and N. W. Ayer and Son, written after four years of American commercial radio.
What it is
A 1927 McGraw-Hill textbook by Edgar H. Felix, a broadcasting consultant who had worked with the National Broadcasting Company and N. W. Ayer and Son, written after four years of American commercial radio. Its central claim is that radio is a goodwill medium, not an advertising medium. Listeners choose their station, so the sponsor is a guest in the home: he should entertain, keep sales talk out of the program and leave the selling to print and retailers. Across 21 chapters it covers which firms suit radio (cheap, frequently bought goods in close competition, such as cigarettes and toothpaste), how to judge a station's real coverage, seven qualities of a good sponsored program, scripts, announcements and programs for each hour of the day. Examples include the Eveready Hour, the Gold Dust Twins and a $50 WEAF talk credited with $27,000 of apartment sales. It ends on chain monopoly and television.
Why read it now
Felix wrote while a new medium was still being priced, and much of his thinking maps onto every channel since, from podcasts to creator content. What holds: sponsor the thing the audience came for and stay recognizable inside it instead of interrupting it; judge a channel on steady presence over months, because a short burst that is cut for lack of quick returns wastes the budget; and never fund a new channel by cutting proven ones. Binet and Field's work on long-term brand building agrees that fame effects build slowly and are hard to prove from response counts. His warning that letter volume tracks premiums and novelty, not liking or buying, is the same trap as reading engagement as sales. What dated fast is his flat claim that radio could not carry a sales message. Within a few years sponsored radio ran direct product copy at scale, and the soap opera took its name from its sponsors. Use: before buying a new channel, answer his five questions from chapter I in writing, and decide how you will measure it before the first spend.
Passages worth keeping
He does not earn the right to inflict selling propaganda in the midst of a broadcasting entertainment any more than an agreeable week-end guest may suddenly launch into an insurance solicitation at Sunday dinner.
الراعي ضيف في بيت المستمع، ولا يحق له أن يقطع المتعة بالبيع، كما لا يليق بضيف لطيف أن يعرض وثيقة تأمين على مائدة الغداء.
No Eveready Hour has ever ended with an appeal for letters. Yet fully 100,000 letters have been received as a result of this feature.
البرنامج الذي لا يطلب شيئًا من جمهوره قد يحصد تفاعلًا أكثر من الذي يلحّ في الطلب، لأن الامتنان يأتي من تلقاء نفسه.
Premiums, unusual emotional appeal, request programs, and novelty are more important than entertainment value and audience satisfaction in drawing mail.
عدد الرسائل يقيس الهدايا والإثارة والجِدّة، لا رضا الجمهور عن البرنامج، فلا تجعله مقياسًا لنجاحه.
A spasmodic effort, curtailed because it has not yielded quick and definite return, is a total waste.
الجهد المتقطع الذي يُوقف لأنه لم يحقق عائدًا سريعًا يضيع كله، فبناء السمعة يحتاج إلى وقت واستمرار.
Broadcasting which is undertaken at the cost of reducing expenditure in proved and established mediums of printed advertising is better not attempted.
لا تدخل وسيلة جديدة على حساب وسيلة أثبتت نتائجها، فالجديد يكمّل القديم ولا يحل محله.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
Read the original worldradiohistory.com
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