Damned Spot
This spot is unlike all others: it is not a point, for those thinking in Euclidean terms; nor is it a stain to be treated in the laundry; nor a place to park one’s car. It is a damned spot certainly, but not the one Lady Macbeth failed to eradicate. What it is is the foundation, the rationale, the raison d’etre, if you will, for the existence of commercial radio. This particular spot is, in the jargon of its profession, the radio commercial. Usually 30 seconds in length in its recorded form (often longer when a rhapsodizing host delivers his personal endorsement in a live program), the spot is the basis for an entire industry.
Think of it this way: radio programming — the talk show, the sports broadcast, the news, the music — is the vehicle that carries the spot to its intended destination, the listener’s ears. The program is like a float in a parade, functional, dependable and ultimately interchangeable; incidental to its actual purpose. The spot is the queen, attired in sash and tiara, waving to the crowd from her elevated perch, saying: “Look at me. See how bright and shiny I am. I can fulfill all your fantasies.” The spot offers a concentrated explosion of sonic interest, inciting envy, attention and desire. Like the queen, it demands to be noticed.
In commercial radio more effort per second is devoted to the spot than anything else broadcast. At a local station, hours of a host’s off-air time are devoted to producing these gems, creatively expressing the client’s needs with a snappy script, effects, music, an audio signature of the business, perhaps an existing jingle. The space into which the spot is jammed is called the avail, that precious window in which products and services are hyped. In a typical 2-minute break from programming you might hear two or three spots, a brief promo, and a station liner before the jock briefly introduces the next set of music. This is typical of music formats.
The majority of my time in commercial radio was spent at a news/sports/talk station. The same principles applied there but with other factors necessarily addressed. News and talk programming were delivered by the earliest satellite radio networks, while musical selections for our sister rock station were chosen and rotated according to the dictates of the station group headquarters. At KNST we were members of both the ABC and Mutual Radio Networks. As I recall, ABC had top of the hour newscasts, while Mutual’s were at the bottom of the hour. Every three and a half minute newscast had two 30 second network spots and one local break for weather update, promo and station I.D., totaling five minutes.
Being a member of a network imposed certain obligations on the local affiliate. Not to carry all its programming necessarily, but to air every single one of its national spots. The spot ruled, as always. Now, being a member of two networks meant that there was always catching up to do on the other network’s spots. A live sports broadcast made the situation even worse; while you were carrying the game with it own national spots you obviously couldn’t air either of the networks’ national newscast spots. What to do?
Here’s where I will introduce the concept of the makegood. While airing one network’s programming (or none) the operator must be diligent in recording the other’s un-aired spots for future broadcast. These are known as makegoods — network spots that are eventually heard in a local avail. Fortunately, the networks weren’t absolute sticklers on when spots aired (they couldn’t be), as long as they eventually did.
So what happens if you miss your local avail? Is there dead air, the one unforgivable sin of radio broadcasting? Don’t be silly. The network just airs another spot, a freebie for them and a loss to your station. These must have been a super-bargain for ad buyers because there was no guarantee that they would ever air. My absolute favorite in this category was a spot straight out of the 1950s for Doan’s Pills, a product I had not otherwise heard of and had never seen on any retail shelves. It offered a litany of agony in an assortment of voices, before presenting the solution you couldn’t live without: “Oh the pain, the pain’s just awful. It really hurts; stop the pain, please stop the pain (…and so on).” Reassuringly, it was “recommended by doctors.”
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In those pre-automated digital capture days, one auditioned the newscast in the cue position while keeping half your attention on the live feed being broadcast, because guess what: while a sports broadcast has defined commercial breaks, it doesn’t have defined start times for those breaks, since it has to constantly adjust to the pace of play. A timeout, change of possession, or end of quarter all offered opportunities to cut away from the broadcast (the same principles applied to baseball and basketball). A break could arrive at any time! And those breaks included their own national spots and local avails.
So imagine this scenario. The live sports broadcast is looking for a near top-of-the-hour break for local affiliates who need to provide FCC-required legal IDs, while the local operator is otherwise occupied with monitoring the network news in order to capture the national spots to be made good for later airing. Can you imagine the tension? There could be no hesitation, no decision to act, only pure reflexive action. When you got really good at it and lucky it was sometimes possible to capture the first network spot in the newsbreak and immediately re-cycle it into the local avail in the game broadcast. That was a triumphant feeling, let me tell you.
More typically, those carts stacked higher and higher as one fell further and further behind. I should explain that now defunct format, the broadcast cart machine. Though it resembled in appearance the eight track consumer format of the time, it ran two-track, quarter-inch tape at 7 and ½ inches per second, the same as reel to reel tape, the broadcast standard of the ’60s through the ’80s. What made the cart indispensable in the era of tape was that it established a cue point on the tape that always returned the recording to its start position for its next use. Of course you had to ensure you had a cart of proper length to make that quick turnaround; :40 for :30, :70 for :60, and so on. So a thirty second spot could cue up for replay in as little as ten seconds after it ended. Some carts held up to 7 minutes of tape in order to record longer feature-y programs, but the format was intended mainly for spots.
I enjoyed the challenge, the split-second decisiveness (don’t clip that start!) in capturing and then recycling network spots. It was a clear demonstration of my competence as a board operator. One typical Saturday afternoon with back to back college football games the leftover network spots had piled up beyond my capacity to get them all broadcast. Since I was back on the following Sunday morning, I knew I could finish off the makegoods before my shift ended at noon, a resolution that would satisfy the very stringent manual audits of station program logs required of network affiliates. Nowadays all the verification is automated via apps that capture broadcast data for all stations. The present day media apparatus misses nothing.
I was committed to getting an early start, knowing that it would take a while to work off my makegoods. I hit the early newscast that offered the first local avail before launching our 7 a.m. broadcast of that perennial favorite, The Lutheran Hour, at least for the early rising Lutherans of Tucson. Even in that technologically backward year of 1984 I was astounded that an hour-long program still arrived on vinyl, warps and all, to deliver its weekly message. I settled in for a dreamy half-hour of the pleasantly droning pastor over the periodic whoomp, whoomp, whoomp of the rotating warp, knowing everything was cool until I had to turn the record over.
Though no spots were scheduled at the bottom of the hour, the 58:30 program length allowed for some leeway before a top-of-the-hour newscast. I lined up a choice Budweiser spot to get me to the second half of the program. I may not have mentioned that I was filling in for one of my fellow board-ops, so none of this was totally familiar to me. It was definitely an easy shift compared to Saturday afternoon games (and obviously a very lightly attended daypart), so I was ultra-relaxed.
It couldn’t have been five minutes after the station break and the start of the program’s second half that I heard the phone ring. Now, that was odd. Who could be making a totally unexpected call at 7:30 on a Sunday morning? “You idiot! Why the fuck are you airing beer commercials during The Lutheran Hour?” I recognized my program director’s voice through the uncharacteristic agitation of his having been rudely awakened early on a Sunday morning. He was usually totally professional and focused on the job when he arrived at 5 a.m. for his normal morning shift after my overnights.
“Don’t you know it’s a sponsored program?” Actually, I didn’t. I viewed it merely as another vehicle in which to shove a makegood that I was obligated to dispose of. Well, that was certainly a lesson from early in my career; don’t mess with the religious programming. It was not much of a stretch to imagine the guy who had paid for the program slot (and perhaps the only one listening) calling in outrage over having his sublime message polluted by commerce, and for a mediocre beer at that.
It wouldn’t be long before I abandoned my post at KNST, having got on as a jazz announcer at the University’s public station, a far more congenial job for my tastes. A few years later I gave commercial radio another try when I was recruited to host a Wave format (then popular at KWAV in Los Angeles) on a funky locally-owned AM station. That very transitory format died after 6 months and the station went back to easy listening. C’est la vie.
