The Art Of Loudness

(Preface from Karl Wiemer, ESQ, with Wilcox, Rich & Jones [with locations at 17 area strip malls, call for a location near you today. Se habla Espanol!] )

This written piece's original title was "The Art Of Noise." Following protracted litigation with Mr. Nienaber on behalf of our clients Messer's Horn and Morley (DBA: Art Of Noise), Mr. Nienaber was forced to concede copyright, pay a settlement and change the name of the article. Individuals who have retained files or printed materials with said title are advised that this is a violation of licensing laws and must destroy them accordingly. This also applies to other past infractions by Mr. Nienaber. If you hold the original work later re-named "Debbie Does Dulles," "The Tonight Shoe" or "McRonalds," the same warning applies. We hope that Mr. Nienaber has finally learned his lesson. Thank you.)

I'm a big believer in "noise." We're in the Attention-Getting Business. And he who hath the most noise, winneth.

So-to-speak.

And that's really what promotion is all about -- being loud, dancing around, yelling, generally making spectacles of ourselves. So that people will, if only for a moment, pause, look in our direction and say, "Huh?"

"Huh?" is good. I'll take "huh?" any day. It sure beats being ignored -- which we are, by the way. We have literally and figuratively dropped from the audience's radar. At least here in the States.

And it's NOT about money, so please nip that bullshit excuse in the bud. In the past week my stations have made some serious, attention-getting noise. For pennies or nothing.

We used to be good at it. It was our curve ball. Our strike-'em-out pitch. And then people started to overthink things and try to justify their spot on the payroll by coming up with Trig-like theories and equations that took a simple 3rd-grade mindset and turned it into Plasma Physics.

Why? For the same reason a thunderstorm causes all TV channels in the Twin Cities to go to the Weather 7 Action Live Super Storm Center. It makes them appear irreplaceable and important. Consultants keep their jobs by creating problems that need to be solved. That's how they keep their gigs. Ditto (sometimes) with upper management.

Great example: My oldest and oddest sibling is a muckety-muck journalist. High-falooting editor to a big daily paper. He was visiting with the fam and we were discussing each other's industries.

First ... and this will kill you ... I was explaining how we/radio had put all our eggs in the HD Basket. He asked, "What's HD Radio?"

Pause.

Thank you.

He's a fan of radio. Has always secretly wished, I think, that he could be in a career where people get rewarded for Living Velveeta Naked. And he said, "I can't remember the last time a station in Kansas City did anything that people noticed or talked about."

Zactly.

I can name off five or six clients that just had monstrous Springs. With no budget. Just by being noisy. By taking every single opportunity that had the misfortune of crossing their desk and turning it into a meg-amp concert speaker that rattled windows blocks away.

These things are out there every day. Peak in Boise? The only cluster in that market to acknowledge the local soldier taken hostage by the Taliban. White ribbons. Candlelight vigils. Loud and appropriate response to the situation.

Max Media in Denver and Norfolk? Flipped formats.

These are our best and noisiest and least-expensive opportunities and they have Three Mile Island-like half lives. Eleven years later, go back to Tampa and ask people about the launch of Wild 98.7. My guess? Fully 5% of the people you ask will immediately start rattling off about the time that Josh and Brian hijacked the radio station while they were stoned on their dad's boat.

Ask people what you did for the Spring book. Seriously. Go out and ask. They won't remember. But 11 years later they can tell you about the doofs in the boat.

Did Max Media send out a press release a week ahead of time and declare the format and the exact time it was going to launch? My God, no. They stunted with faux-mats and made noise and had fun and became the buzz of the market. Denver and the strip club format? Got two-and-a-half minutes on ABC in NYC and a column in a newspaper in Panama.

It was loud. It was noisy. It was show biz.

One of the things I do to remind people of is that our goal as a Promotions Machine is to write "Be Loud!" and post it on walls around the station. It's a litmus for everything they do. Will it cut through the clutter and miasma of other messages the audience is getting pummeled with? No? Then turn up the volume.

The two best street-teamers in radio work for Newcap in Halifax. Christina and Ruby. If there's a God, we'll all be working for them some day.

AC/DC just played up the road in Moncton and 70,000 people were expected to descend en masse on this community of 100,000 people. And with a competitor having just flipped, Newcap in that market wanted to insure that they dominated this thing, and got the nearby markets to ship them some promo staff for the day. (Wow ... inner-company cooperation and sharing of resources)

Christina headed up there at 5a and it was an ass-kicking of the best variety. Such that I asked her to write a recap to show my U.S. clients. Did they have thousands of dollars to spend? No. They had a T-shirt gun, a few shirts and free water. And they stole the concert.

She wrote up a beautiful treatise, but her summary was the best. Succinct and to the point: "We won because we were the noisiest."

Radio was at its best when it drew people who, when their teacher told them to "Keep it down!" did the opposite. Now we're an industry of hall monitors.

Be loud. Be noisy. Get noticed. It's not rocket science and it's free. You just need good lungs.