<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Satellite radio 

Oh, yeah, here's another radio advertising oddity:
Last week I was hearing this ad against satellite radio. It was getting somewhat heavy rotation on a couple of stations. Basically it was a bunch of voices--disgruntled satellite radio customers--blamming about the shortcomings of satellite radio. You know, horrible things like having to pay for programming and equipment, lack of censorship, no local traffic reports, the fact that you lose the signal when you drive under an overpass. (Gee, anyone remember AM?) Then an announcer comes on and encourages people not to switch to satellite radio. He also tells us that this message was brought to us by our local broadcast radio stations. Anyway, that was last week. This week, I haven't heard the spot once. In my spare moments I racked my brain (well, maybe more like comfy chaired my brain) for a reason for it's sudden disappearance. Some possibilities:

-The radio stations changed their minds.
-The radio stations got some paying advertisers for those slots.
-Too many people pointed out that the local stations running the ad are owned by a company in Pennsylvania.
-Too many people pointed out that the disgruntled customers sound like a bunch of whiners.
-The radio stations realized that many people probably signed up for satellite radio because it offered something broadcast radio didn't.
-The radio stations realized that some of their listeners (like me) hadn't even heard about satellite radio until they started running their spots.

(One other note: in researching this post, I discovered that one channel offered via satellite radio is the Playboy channel. Now maybe I'm just too visually oriented, but what the heck does Playboy have to offer me over the radio?)