WHN Radio, NYC commercials 1975-77 on Vimeo
Advertising for WHN Radio, 1975-77 by Dale Pon
My mentor Dale Pon didn’t get much public recognition for his smart, strategic and wildly successful creative work in media promotion. I’m posting about a few projects I was lucky to work on with him. . . . . .
Ironically, my television career started at a radio station.
WHN Radio in New York was a storied station that took to the air in 1922 from the top of the Hotel Navarro (HN) and went through several popular formats. In 1973, someone had the bright idea of programming country music in the sophisticated home of Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, and the New York Philharmonic. They were shocked that it didn’t work, then General Manager Neil Rockoff came aboard and put together a team that defied gravity.
Ed Salamon was the innovative programmer who took the failed early 70s country format into the “second biggest radio station in all the world.” He partnered with the equally pioneering media promoter Dale Pon and in 1975 they were able to launch an advertising campaign that walked the line between traditional country music like Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Glen Campbell and Elvis Presley, Top 40 radio programming tactics, and the late 70s rock artists –including the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Olivia Newton-John, John Denver and Kenny Rogers– who had absorbed country into their contemporary pop– and, using extensive, award winning television and transit advertising succeeded beyond all expectations.
Ed and Dale shared a unique alchemy of math and magic. They each did the complex, strategic homework on the finite pieces of the radio puzzles, and then had that creative poof! of fresh ways they could put them together so that their audience could be amazed, excited and loyal. Astonishing.
WHN was my first real commerical radio gig, I came in as a junior member of Dale’s team in 1977, so I’ll add my comments after Ed’s.
Ed Salamon, WHN Program Director 1975-1981:
Country radio in New York was considered an impossible challenge, but Dale Pon's advertising helped to turn WHN into the most successful country radio station of all time.
When WHN radio General Manager Neil Rockoff introduced me to Dale Pon shortly after I went to work there in June 1975, the first question that I remember Dale asking me was …
"What is the main reason that people will want to listen to WHN?"
I replied that WHN would give them music they wanted to hear.
When Dale was hired at WHN, he made that the focus of his first WHN advertising campaign. The slogan was …
"WHN gives you the music you wanna hear."
Importantly, it did not use the word "country." Research had shown that after more than two years already in the country format, all listeners in the market who were fans of country music already knew about WHN. Unfortunately, there were not enough of them to make the station successful. Both Dale and I believed that country music would appeal to a much larger audience, if more New Yorkers would sample it.
Dale's advertising did just that, and proved us right.
Dale's WHN ad campaigns featured artists that the station played and, in order to be effective, it was important to him that when someone tuned in, they would soon hear a song by one of those artists. Therefore I had to commit that all of the artists used in the campaigns would be heard frequently on the station. Initially, there was concern whether we could get the right artists' cooperation to endorse WHN, since the artists we wanted were also seeking airplay on other New York radio stations.
There were about a half dozen that were key to WHN, and we were immediately able to secure the participation, at no cost to the station, of everyone we wanted, except Elvis Presley. After the first campaign, we were granted what we were told was the first authorized use of Elvis Presley to promote a radio station.
Dale developed creative that included both television and three by five foot posters in New York City subway stations, which constituted more exposure for most of these artists than had ever been done in the New York market by their record companies. The creative was exceptionally attractive and the artists were all pleased. We only received one complaint from an artist: Anne Murray said that she could no longer go shopping in Manhattan without being recognized. Later subway posters reflecting Dale's and my belief in a diverse audience for WHN included Freddie Fender, some with text in Spanish in high density Hispanic neighborhoods, and Charley Pride in high density Black population centers. At the time, there was an emphasis in measuring ethnic listeners accurately and WHN did well with them, to the surprise of those who did not consider them potential country listeners.
The campaign could not have happened without Neil's ability to get the budget from owner Storer Broadcasting and benefitted from his critiques of our creative effort as well as his support.
Dale Pon's advertising for WHN helped change not only the station, but also the radio and music industries. WHN became the most listened to country music station of all time (based on average quarter hour audience as measured by ARB/Arbitron). More importantly, it became the #2 radio station in the New York market in adults 25 to 49 years of age, which at the time was the demographic group most desired by advertisers.
Since the #1 station was Top 40 formatted WABC, Dale designed a trade ad proclaiming WHN "The biggest thing since rock 'n' roll."
In 1975, Neil Rockoff had also hired Nick Verbitsky to head advertising sales. Dale's success in getting New Yorkers to try WHN and my success in keeping them for a longer than normal time spent listening would have meant little if it didn't result in increased revenues. Dale's ads helped Nick able to overcome advertisers' negative stereotypes of country radio listeners which had only been reinforced by WHN's previous ads featuring cowboy hats and blue collar listeners. The value of the station increase dramatically. When WHN was sold to Amway's Mutual Broadcasting in 1979, the Washington Post reported the selling price of $14 million as the second highest ever paid for a radio station – by far the most for which a country radio station had ever sold. As a result of WHN's success with country radio in America's biggest market, many stations in other urban and northern markets switched their format to country – which until then many considered viable only in southern and rural markets, and the late 70s became the format's greatest growth spurt.
Today, there are still more Country radio stations than those of any other format. Although the artists in Dale's earliest WHN advertising were already successful, they became even more so. As country record sales grew in the New York area, stations of other formats began playing more artists who until then had only been heard on country radio, resulting in their "crossover" onto stations including WABC, which monitored record sales in New York and was influenced to add records accordingly. When WABC added a Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt or Ronnie Milsap record, similar formatted stations in other markets followed and the records crossed over to the Top 40 charts.
Much more detail is available "WHN: When New York City Went Country" by Ed Salamon (Archer Books).
. . . . .
Having joined the WHN Radio Creative Services as a freelance promo producer almost by accident at the beginning of 1977, I realized their first wave of advertising had even made an impact on me, a pop music loving, post college, jazz record producer. Little did I know that I’d learn enough from Dale Pon and, by osmosis, Ed Salamon to fuel my work for the next several decades.
The original advertising (with shifting slogans, demanded by a general manager who got anxious when things stayed the same for too long) had catapulted the station into the world’s top echelons of the almost-ready-to-fade AM music radio stations. Ed commanded more and more respect and attention from artists and their managements and record companies, and Dale had richer budgets to create more sophisticated and targeted advertising.
We started together on a new campaign in 1978, and I took away lessons in almost every aspect of media promotion. In no particular order, here’s what I took away from this once in a lifetime experience.
LANGUAGE: There was no end to things to be aware of with actual language and copywriting.
The call letters were the most important thing because the ratings were determined by a listener actually writing in a book supplied by Arbitron. So you want them to remember those call letters. Use them twice, more if you could, without driving folks crazy.f
“WHN gives you music you wanna hear. WHN 1050.”
Oh yeah, write the way people talk. “Wanna.”
“You is the most important word in advertising. Don’t you notice that McDonald’s makes some of the world’s most effective advertising? And what’s their best ad? ‘You, you’re the one!’ They use ‘you’ twice!”
My favorite thing he did in all his work was get at the pure emotions of human beings. I’ll write more on this in his other work, but for WHN it’s right there, up front. Want. Right there in the first campaign. Music you wanna hear. (He did it again in our first MTV campaign in 1982. “I Want My MTV!”)
When his longtime companion and often his copywriter, Nancy Podbielniak, worked on further WHN variations, the plain language, the visceral feeling in country music was there too.
“Thank you being part of our country.”
“There’s a whole lot of good in this country.”
“Your heart’s in the right place.”
DESIGN: Dale loved all aspects of graphic design. My big take away: “Dominate the space!” he’d shout, over and over. He make his point by asking me to name the greatest album cover, which was –no surprise– the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. I was bewildered at #2, but he was right, with almost a negative dominant, The Beatles’ ‘white’ album.
When it came to WHN, to the chagrin on traditional designers, it meant that to Dale everything had to be bigger! A person was defined between their eyes and their mouths. Oh, and make the logo(s) bigger!
As a practical manner, he was almost maniacal about not only getting the best photograph. We had to beg and cajole the art directors to let us work director with the photographers to get the original transparency or negative; a duplicate wouldn’t do since the enlargement to subway poster size (60”x40”) the dupe would look grainy and crappy.
LOGO PLACEMENT: By the time we worked together, Dale explained that he’d evolved his view of doing logos different in print from TV & radio spots.
“In English, we read from left to right. The less important part of our logo is the dial position (1050), so make WHN big on the left, 1050 smaller on the right. In audio, we remember the last thing we hear, so always have the announcers say “1050, WHN!”
TV PRODUCTION: For me, this is where things got interesting and affected things for many years to come. (Sadly, I don’t have any of the WHN spots we made together. If I find some, I’ll update this post. ...:::Update: Ed Salamon tracked down a reel of these later, live action spots, embedded below. :::...)
Just as a quick background, I was an audio guy only, I’d never done any film or television work. I’d produced radio spots in college, and engineered and produced blues and jazz albums. My work for WHN started as on-air radio promotions.
The 1978-80 WHN Radio commercials Show Reel on Vimeo.
WHN Radio TV commercials #36-70 December 1979-January 1980 from fredseibert on Vimeo.
So when I started working on the 1978-1980 versions TV campaigns, I was a babe in the woods who did whatever I was told. As I said before, the success of WHN allowed Dale a greater creative and financial latitude in these productions. (A note about these two embedded video. The top one is a best of “show reel”. Underneath, the video is a series of separate spots that shows, in detail, the number of variations we prepared on each artist.)
The new spots would feature the artists –eventually, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Freddy Fender, Anne Murray, Crystal Gayle, Elvis Presley* and Kenny Rogers– actually speaking and singing, no ‘Ken Burns’ photo montages like the originals up above. Dale would direct the film shoots and then send me to the audio studio to cut the 30 seconds the way he wanted them.
(By the time Dale left for a competing New York radio station, I also inherited the director’s chair for Dolly Parton. An amazing experience of sitting less than six feet away from a genuinely beautiful woman and charismatic talent.)
I’d was to go to the video editing editor with my audio, and synchronize the video to my edits.
Editor: “You know, television isn’t made like this. In film and TV, we cut the video first, then you go to an audio suite and mix. This way is wrong. It’s backwards.”
Dutifully, I’d telephone the office. “We’re paying them to do what we want!”
The editor would shake his head and patiently explain that if I wanted to succeed in television I needed to do it the right way.
Dale would almost rip my head off. “Look, there’s no one better at audio than you.” Blush. “You make the spots perfectly, and the rhythm of the audio is ultimately more important than the picture.” When I tried this on the editor he just sighed that we were such idiots. “Besides it being better creatively, the audio studio at the station is free, we save a ton.” And he was right, our cost per spot was probably under $100, rather than thousands.
Later, when I was running promotion at MTV I brought the same “backwards” system with me. I figured it worked before, I was basically training students to become producers, they didn’t know any better, and after all, it was music television, the sound was everything.
About 20 years after I left MTV I went back to visit “my” promo grandchildren. When I introduced myself someone said, “You! You’re the one. We make all of our promos the wrong way, audio first! They tell us it’s the MTV way! Grrrrr!”
* Yes, Elvis had indeed passed on when this campaign was conceived. We tracked down some footage from a New York press conference on June 9, 1972, got permission from the Colonel, and I was able to fashion it into spots that almost perfectly matched the original footage we shot of the others. Linda Ronstadt hadn’t died, but it was made clear to us there was no way she would sit for an interview. Instead they provided us with some roller skating footage that perfectly matched her album image of that moment.
MEDIA BUYING: “Whatever anyone else normally does, we do more!”
Dale Pon started his career as a media buyer, and that’s how he trained me too. At the start of our relationship I spent most of my time planning billboard and subway transit platform buys, eventually graduating to TV spot buying.
For most companies that buy subway posters a giant campaign is one 30”x40” vertical poster per stop. WHN bought two 60”x40” horizontals –with a different artist on each poster– per stop. No wonder I’d been aware of his campaigns even if I only listened to jazz! We eventually would have about a dozen artists blanketing New York’s five boroughs, talk about saturation.
The television spots were variations on a theme, the theme being a simple, super close up of the artist, speaking in his/her own words, and singing a bit of their hit song(s). Dale had me cut the audio for at least 10 varying spots per artist –remember the audio was free– and we’d pick the best several, sometimes I hit it right and we’d use all 10. Since the content and the timing of the audio was fixed we could zip through the video and end up with a bunch of spots that looked the same and were kind of the same enough, while always feeling fresh. All in all, we ended up with more than 70 spots in total for the campaign. The viewers were always getting something new.
“Someone needs to see a spot at least three times before they register it. We need to make sure they see ours.”
When it came to buying, Dale followed the same pattern. If an average buy was 100 rating points a week, we’d buy at least 300. (Reach x Frequency = rating points. “Advertising is a frequency medium,” he would say.) We carefully looked for the least expensive shows that our target audiences watched to keep our budgets efficient.
Then we’d have a lot of fun in the spot placements. Some days we run every artist we had. On others it would be all 10 variations of the same person. (I think we did a lot of those with Kenny Rogers). One way or the other, viewers saw a lot of our commercials, but I never heard of anyone who was bored, because we kept things fresh everyday for weeks.
THE MUSICIANS: The artists included in any campaign was to some degree a crap shoot. We made a list of the most popular records on the radio, the ones with the most longevity, and split them as to the veteran, legacy, authentic country stars (like Johnny Cash) and then the artists who’d “crossed over” either from Top 40 or rock radio, or from country radio over to pop.
Then of course, we needed to figure out who would cooperate, give us permission, and not charge a fee. It might seem obvious that the free publicity would be worth it to anyone selling concert tickets and records, but it wasn’t always so easy. The campaign featured here could only get the photo permission. When we moved into live action, it required a lot more collaboration and coordination. We would often agree to fly to far flung venues where an artist was performing and set up in the basement of a stadium or a nearby hotel room, with skilled cinematographers setting up makeshift studios that cleverly disguised their actual locations.
The first live action musician we filmed was Freddy Fender. He had a hit, for sure, but he seemed like small fish to me. Dale patiently explained that Freddy was eager for the exposure and was the first one to agree to our terms. When we cut the final spots they’d be demos to the bigger stars who’d see we were serious about treating them well. He was spot on, the strategy worked and it helped us get the biggest recording artists of the day, and once the spots hit the air we would get a deluge of calls from artists from the smallest to the biggest begging for a shot in a WHN campaign. It was a strategy he successfully followed for the rest of his career.
. . . . .
Was there more I got from Dale? You can’t imagine. But Ed’s recollections and mine have gone on long enough for this post. Check out the rest of my ramblings on Dale Pon here.
