You think you’re a genius at radio promotions? You’ve heard and seen it all, been there, done that?
Around 1960, Chuck Blore was brought to Minneapolis to program KDWB.
“KDWB was way down at the end of the dial — 63. And up until that time all of the radio stations were above 1100. People didn’t even know that the other end of the dial existed. What we had to do was figure a way to get listeners down there. So the answer was: Advertise on the other radio stations.
“Well, though it’s an obvious answer, it wasn’t that easy to bring off. What we did was get the fellow who invented Hadacol — “
{a much promoted “patent medicine” of the 1950s}
” — to record these commercials for Formula 63. It was free and guaranteed to remove boredom.
“Had any of the stations bothered to check into the situation, they would have found out KDWB was behind it. But they didn’t. They got the spots from the agency and put them on the air.
“We’d bought guaranteed time so that on a given moment if you tuned completely across the dial, all you’d hear was that one spot.
“The product was available in the drugstores. People could go into drugstores and pick up these packages of Formula 63. And they went into the drugstores by the thousands.
“In these little packages was a message that Formula 63 was a radio station and if they tuned it in they would never be bored again.
“Some of the stations were furious; others made us finish the contract. Most of them thought, ‘Hey, we’ve been duped, but what a great thing to have happen for radio.’
“But there’s one giant station in the town that didn’t think it was funny. I guess I wouldn’t have thought it was very funny if someone had done it to me; I’d have been furious.”
Reprinted by permission from THIS BUSINESS OF RADIO PROGRAMMING, copyright by Claude and Barbara Hall.
View video of Chuck Blore telling the KDWB Formula 63 story.
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