Glenn Beck is cruising for trouble with his affiliates.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 For a popular show, the station may also be paying money for the show in addition to giving up “their” advertising minutes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0ratings 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”.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In supermarkets, this is called a “loss leader”.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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…)<\/p>\n
Glenn Beck Show Clock<\/a>\u00a0 (for example)<\/p>\n Stations expect that the gray parts of that program will be filled with programs, not network commercials (4 minutes per hour) or advertisements.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (See: And the world is about to end, and now is the\u00a0time to start buying gold…)\u00a0<\/p>\n Monday, Glenn Beck spent a lot of time talking about his new business venture markdown.com, and chocolate.com – the first featured company.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 This could become contentious if that semi-advertising wanders into something competing directly with a local sponsor.<\/p>\n 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…).\u00a0\u00a0 They demanded that Ramsey pay for the time for his shows.\u00a0 He refused.\u00a0 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”.\u00a0<\/p>\n Clear Channel kicked Ramsey off their stations.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dave introduced\u00a0Jesus to his audience and the importance of continuing to tithe 10% to the church\u00a0– even if you’re broke -into his program, and picked up a lot of free affiliates on for-profit Christian radio stations.\u00a0 He\u00a0built up his audience through working through churches, and ultimately got a TV show which broke him into the big time.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0 He has a certain number of minutes contractually\u00a0to run ads.\u00a0\u00a0 Go beyond that, and radio stations may start pushing back and threaten to bill him for ad time on their stations.<\/p>\n 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”.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m firmly convinced he plans to launch a “real” 24 hr\/day Cable TV channel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading