Kittens, Cats & Radio

This 1957 post card comes from Russia, and it's one of a very few examples I've seen combining the subjects of cats and radio sets. This GE advert below is from 1961 still sticking with the cat theme.

How fvar back thsi goes I can't say. This one below is undated but I have seen similar real photo post cards for RCA Victor going back to at least 1945.

WRTI AD

It's a rare day that I find a radio advert in a print publication.When I do I like to scan and post, collating the data slowly looking for a pattern...

WHYF Placemat Ad

Under a plate of home fries, eggs and bacon I found this. Between ads for Sport Fishing, rental tools, and certified wood fence installers was this ad for 720 WHYF-AM. It's a is a Catholic religious station serving Harrisburg, PA. It's a daytimer, which only signed on in 1985, with that glut of AM Class D licenses scraping the bottom of the barrel.  it's owned by the sat-fed religious network Holy Family Radio, Inc.

Radio print ads continue to mystify me. This ad was on a paper placemat in a diner well outside the station's city-grade signal contour.  The use of print advertisement is dubious for radio in general. While billboards arguably target drivers at peak listening times, newspapers, magazines, fliers and other print venues sweep up the dregs. their virtue is in being cheap. But placemats... words fail me. I hope it was really cheap.

Ad-Free Weekends!

I recently read that 95.3 WZLR-FM "the Eagle" in Dayton, OH has switched to ad-free weekend programming. This wasn't a stunt (supposedly) but a programming change.  They will stick with this plan "for the foreseeable future." The idea is that this would improve their TSL, and their ratings book in general. That'd lead to higher ad rates and therefore net gains. It could turn out to be a coup for COX, we shall have to wait and see. More here.

It's worth noting why this is such a selling point. I remember when Sirius Xm was ad-free. NPR is always ad-free and I often let the dial rest there. Spotify, Slacker and Pandora all offer ad-free services for a price. All of them have ads if you don't pay.  (Some even if you do) Yahoo's LaunchCast Debuted as an ad-free service in 2003... but eventually introduced ads. In 1998 Lucent Technologies and CD Radio talking a big game about their ad-free satellite radio service. It never happened. In short, ad-free programming is rare and ad-free services are an endangered species. 

But they noted that they were inspired by a change at 92.3 WBMP-FM  "Amp" a New York City area station.

They ran ad-free weekends over the summer months through Labor day. It boosted their ratings, in a very tough market. This claim got me wondering how far back do ad-free weekends,stunts and events go? I've certainly heard ad-free blocks on radio stations before.. but I have to confess I didn't take much notice of them. the presence of obnoxious ads is so ubiquitous that I don't think I paid enough attention to their absence.

You may remember in the 4th season of WRKP, which aired in 1982, the fictional station went ad-free and became ranked as the 6th station in Cincinnati. But real ad-free radio programming is harder to pull off.  But back in 1988 when Channel 63 in Los Angeles flipped calls from KTIE-TV to KBEH-TV they introduced ad-free weekends. In 1980 WCBN-FM went ad-free when they received the news that John Lennon has been murdered. They did it again in 1985 as a stunt "Commercial-Free for a Free South Africa." But that was not the first either. When 105.5 WWWM-FM  flipped formats to Free Form FM as 'M-105" in March of 1975 they did an ad-free weekend. That is one of the earliest references I can find.

But If you go back to the origins of radio Lee deForrest and David Sarnoff both envisioned a radio band free from advertisements. He mourned the presence of ads on WEAF and even then in the early 1920s was reminiscing about the unstructured broadcasts of a decade earlier because they were commercial-free.

Children in Radio Postcards

In the 1930s there was a mercifully brief and inexplicably faddish number of children-with-radio post cards. All the children are cherubic and toe headed.  All of them are European that I've seen and most of them are German in origin. This is just a sampling of the many dozen I have seen. The phrase "Der ist drollig!" translates roughly to "That's great!"  I guess those are good headphones.

There is much written about the dangers and evils of advertising to children, but very little of adverting with children. It's perfectly common now, and any browse of old magazines will show you this is nothing new. they are used both symbolically to connote newness, purity, youth or innocence. But also more literally in the sales of good that acre actually intended for children. In these context I fail to see why they were so often paired with radio technology.  Thankfully these dark days have passed.

Bust a Nut

So it turns out that this radio ad is real and actually aired. 

Albert Holloway invented corn nuts in 1936. His company developing a hybrid of the Cusco corn, a large-kerned corn, that could be grown in California. Corn nuts are then prepared by soaking the whole  kernels in water, then deep-frying them in oil. Holloway had nothing to do with this ad. his original company was purchased by Nabisco in 1998.

In 1999, Nabisco released their "Bust a Nut" radio campaign, which was pulled from the airwaves on some radio stations after complaints. Despite the rebuke it was selected by a VH1 audience in 2000 as the second best radio jingle of all time. 

Radio Ads

There was once a monthly British magazine called Punch. It was first published in July 17 of 1841. It survived for decades eventually becoming a national institution. It went through changes in management, ownership, format, layout and the occasional scandal. After 160 years and almost 2000 issues, it ceased to exist in 2002 after a failed reboot in the early 1990s. This has nothing to do directly with radio. But recently I came into the possession of two issues. One is from November of 1927, and the other from December 1931—the golden age of radio. I scanned a couple ads for your edification: Ecko, Philips, Lotus, Langham and Mullard valves.

Ancient Radio ads

A pile of western pulp magazines came into my possession. So of course the first things I did was look for old radio ads on their crumbling yellow pages. They are mostly from 1948, but a couple may be a tag newer. I hit pay dirt. I'll post a few this week.

Today I'll start with a nice Motorola ad from the back page. It's on glossy paper and in color, unlike the others. PLEASE CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGE!Really before the Motorola models, car radios were converted household radios. These first "auto radios" were made in about 1930. A car radio had to endure interference from the spark plugs, and eliminate the battery.. In 1930 many household radios were still battery powered.
In 1948, when thsi ad ran, the hot new model would be the Model 408-23007.