Glenn Beck is cruising for trouble with his affiliates.
Radio station owners regularly bristle on the topic of “Those syndicated shows take away too many minutes” – meaning that in order to get a syndicated show (and not having to produce their own local show), the local station agrees to allow the network to have several minutes an hour for their commercials to pay for the show. For a popular show, the station may also be paying money for the show in addition to giving up “their” advertising minutes.
The stations make their money back by selling local ads at a better price, not having to pay local staff, and good ratings mean that the ratings for the station may go higher, and that means they can charge higher rates for their own local shows, where they control all of “their minutes”.
In supermarkets, this is called a “loss leader”. You don’t make money on the things on sale that get people to your store – you make it on the husband and children filling the cart with overpriced snack foods.
Every syndicated show has a formal “show clock” – it’s part of the syndication agreement and necessary for computer automation to work correctly (getting in the commercial breaks, station IDs, etc…)
Glenn Beck Show Clock (for example)
Stations expect that the gray parts of that program will be filled with programs, not network commercials (4 minutes per hour) or advertisements. The Yellow parts are “Live Reads”, where the show host reads the ad copy live on the air, or in the case of Beck rambles on tangents without getting around to the ad. The FCC is picky that these things must be a “commercial break” – meaning there is a clear distinction between where the programming ends, and the paid advertisement begins. (See: And the world is about to end, and now is the time to start buying gold…)
Monday, Glenn Beck spent a lot of time talking about his new business venture markdown.com, and chocolate.com – the first featured company. Most station owners would probably tolerate this today, being the first day – but this could easily turn into a slippery slope where Glenn regularly spends air time promoting products on markdown.com. This could become contentious if that semi-advertising wanders into something competing directly with a local sponsor.
Dave Ramsey and Clear Channel butted heads over this a few years ago – Premiere felt that Dave was using too much of the air time to promote his own products (his computer programs, courses, books, etc..) rather than actual programming (like talking about things in the news, taking calls, etc…). They demanded that Ramsey pay for the time for his shows. He refused. My memory is his exact quote on air was “I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay anyone to put my show on the air”.
Clear Channel kicked Ramsey off their stations. Dave introduced Jesus to his audience and the importance of continuing to tithe 10% to the church – even if you’re broke -into his program, and picked up a lot of free affiliates on for-profit Christian radio stations. He built up his audience through working through churches, and ultimately got a TV show which broke him into the big time.
All of the time Glenn is spending selling travel packages to Israel and promoting things on sale on his own internet retailer site may create pushback. He has a certain number of minutes contractually to run ads. Go beyond that, and radio stations may start pushing back and threaten to bill him for ad time on their stations.
Glenn dropped the biggest hint yet about what his future plans are – he referred to the former VP of Premier/CNN that he hired recently as the “Head of our TV division or whatever”. I’m firmly convinced he plans to launch a “real” 24 hr/day Cable TV channel
Pardon me while I bunny trail on the “paying tithes when your broke”. I consider myself a Christian (although not a very good one and I kowtow to no denomination or organized group). A number of years ago I worked for a sincere Christian gentlemen whose business venture was in severe debt. He was very much indoctrinated with “you must pay tithes” and “the Lord should get his cut off the top”. I tried to reason with my boss that it would be a much better testimony to some of our non-Christian creditors if we paid off our debts to them rather than giving 10% of the GROSS income of the business to “the Lord” and then trying to pay our bills (and our employees!) with the remaining 90%.
He was convinced that rather than being a good testimony as a Christian businessman, that such a choice would be “sinful” and bring God’s judgment upon our endeavors. God would only bless us if we paid tithes first and foremost (silly me, I thought that Jesus brought a new covenant that caused the Law to pass away).
Needless to say, I was glad when I found another job….
Ramsey’s business model is pretty straight forward. People make inquiries, his company forwards the contact information to a “Endorsed local provider”, a phrase which means absolutely nothing in legalese. The ELP pays a fee for the referral, and then tries to sell financial products (like life insurance) to the prospects.
The other day, he got a call from someone and they were talking about some really esoteric topic – something about estate taxes, or real estste or something… I should have written it down at the time. The caller, who was asking for Dave’s advice – corrected some nuance about his answer (something I knew she was correct about), strongly suggesting to me that she wasn’t a caller at all, but an ELP calling in and pretending to be person with a problem.
Next time you listen to show, listen carefully and ask yourself if it is possible the caller working from a script. Carl Shay of the shaytard family got on his show (his family is big on Youtube)… if you follow the story of his family, it’s pretty clear the story he told Dave Ramsey about his situation was highly embellished – and his financial situation has a lot more to do with his revenue from Youtube than working Dave’s plan to get out of debt.
I miss the old Bruce Williams show (from the 80’s and 90’s). He spent some time hawking crap to pay his bills, but mostly he came across as a straight shooter who had lived real life and run businesses in the “real world” and was willing to advise other folks in how to dig themselves out of debt or resolve a business problem.
Typical call: “Bruce, I have $20 k in credit card debt and am working 50 hours a week but only paying the minimum payments”. Answer: “1. Cut up up all the credit cards so you can’t charge anything new, 2. What are you doing on the weekends? You are getting another job to pay off the debt”.
Bruce was not “enlightened” enough to know that 10% should have been held back from creditors for “the Lord” 😉
Particularly near the end after he went to self syndication, most (all?) of the sponsors were companies he was an owner in.
He really went off the rails when he decided he wanted to talk about politics. It was pretty clear he missed most of what has happened in the United States in the last 50 years. “Doing what we did in WW2” doesn’t really provide a lot of solutions for today’s problems