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Wow. I used to cut, and occasionally write, radio spots for a living. I agree that it's annoying, but it's so that the message is carried across, not because ma

Wow. I used to cut, and occasionally write, radio spots for a living. I agree that it's annoying, but it's so that the message is carried across, not because marketing people are some epithet. That's what the sponsor is paying for, after all, and you are not. Radio-friendly music is often mastered with the same dynamics removed. Most pop and modern rock looks about the same on a spectro as the spots I used to cut. We made a conscious effort at my last station to master stingers ("you're listening to...") and other meta stuff at the same overall loudness level as the average spot, so there was a heavy contrast between the talk radio portion and the everything else portion and you'd have a solid cue of when to turn down if you so chose. There's actually pushes in the industry right now to move toward PPM meters that more effectively indicate loudness. We got it, believe me. Radio is a lovely profession full of wonderful people. There is a strong hacker culture on the engineering and air operations side of things, and the head of sales at my last station baked six huge cakes for a company event in her home. Pretty much every day the station smelled like solder from some hilarious contraption the bored engineers were putting together. Most people who like HN would love a radio station. Marketing ("sales," in radio) is a necessary function in capitalism, and loud commercials have nothing to do with ethics. If you want an example of how ethical radio sales can be, if I technically erred while airing even one second of a :30, they'd refund the whole spot and re-air it. Most of my job during broadcast operations was notating these exact problems, and they never thought twice about making it right. Why would they? Advertisers are what, you know, feeds the family of everybody at the station and gives you something to listen to on your drive home for free, and they do spot check. This comment is just really, really awful all around, and I expect better from you. Ethical is not an antonym for crappy, nor annoying, and accusing a whole group of people of being unpleasant and unethical simply because [issue] is nothing short of completely shitty, speaking more about you than them.

stagbeetle 10y ago
I have friends with similar complaints. Ads are annoying, but you can always change the freq/input. It starts to become a problem when the commercials are exceptionally louder than whatever was on before. It shocks the driver, and if they're sensitive to loud noises or disruptions, they may be liable to jerk the wheel in response. Even more so when the ad creators knowingly place in car crash/swerving and police siren sounds. It's dirty and unethical. > Marketing is a necessary function in capitalism. All I can say is that necessary evils are evils nonetheless and "good people" do terrible things all of the time.
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago
  > Even more so when the ad creators knowingly place in car crash/swerving and police siren sounds. It's dirty and unethical. This I agree with, and they were specifically against policy at my last station. I ended up with copy that called for one and refused it, and the sponsor understood and sent new copy. This is not uncommon, particularly in larger markets, and it is a well-known problem amongst production types. And yes, production can refuse copy. They're often not empowered to at smaller, broke stations. > It shocks the driver, and if they're sensitive to loud noises or disruptions, they may be liable to jerk the wheel in response. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where this is the fault of the radio station. Trust me, I can see both sides, I just don't know if I can assign fault the same way. To be clear, on-air responsibility is not overlooked, though... "War of the Worlds" would, without question, never happen today. I'd just hope your hypothetical driver would maybe not max out the volume during dynamic programming if they're susceptible to that. If there's a >20% difference between normal programming and the rest, the station you listen to needs new engineering and operations. That's just sloppy. Especially on AM, one should be compressing the living shit out of everyone speaking, so... > All I can say is that necessary evils are evils nonetheless and "good people" do terrible things all of the time. Yeah, no, that's not how that works. Found a startup without sales or marketing and get back to me.
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    > Yeah, no, that's not how that works. Found a startup without sales or marketing and get back to me. Entrenched legacy B2B is one example where the level of marketing can be close to nil (if we don't include "sales" in our definition of marketing, otherwise there's no reason to argue), but still allow the business to prosper. But that ignores that you haven't refuted the point. The advertising part of marketing, in its current form, is a net negative ("evil") to consumers. I'm not specifically signaling out the entirety of the "marketing" umbrella, but one of its subsections. Can you tell me how advertising directly benefits the consumer?
bicubic 10y ago
> and loud commercials have nothing to do with ethics A quick google search makes it clear that people don't want to hear loud commercials and want legislation in place to prevent them (actually they're wondering why the fuck existing legislation to prevent exactly those ads is being circumvented). It's not just annoying, it's hijacking their hardware to assault their senses. It makes watching TV or listening to radio at night a nightmare if anyone is sleeping in the house. It's ambiguously unethical and the practice only persists because consumers aren't able to out-lobby advertising interests to pass the laws needed to prevent it in many states. And in your mind this is how it should be because 'that's what the sponsor is paying for'..?
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago
  Yes. Free, broadcast radio, which is what I'm speaking about, comes to you because advertisers pay them to hijack your hardware and feed you a message you don't want to hear. That's literally how it works, and it should be unsurprising that you cannot outlobby them. (The great caper, of course, is that everybody pays for cable but those television channels still have advertising on them.) It's weird that people like capitalism, but then want capitalism on strictly their terms: in the modern age, thanks to market pressure, radio with few exceptions exists to allow Bob's Turnpike Honda to tell you about their President's Day sale. The rest is designed to develop an audience for that function. That's just the nature of the game now. Solution: Pay for content you like so that more broadcasters enable those options. No ads. Done. This applies to pretty much every broadcast medium including the Web. Sirius XM, Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube Red... toss a few bucks at Apple Music and get into podcasts. This is a fixable problem without worrying about how loud the SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY spot is on your local radio station, and it's far more fixable now than it was even three years ago. Notice I said I formerly worked in broadcast radio. Inventory is decreasing in terrestrial. Satellite and alternatives are winning. That problem is only going to become worse in terrestrial radio. It's weird, though, because radio also serves a vital role with EAS, local news, and other functions. I remember when Clear Channel started collapsing all the locals and Sirius and XM launched, most of my peers said the end was nigh. I don't know how it'd "end," but it's slowly worsening. And no, calling anything I just said "unethical" is a misunderstanding of the word ethical.
anigbrowl 10y ago
I agree that it's annoying, but it's so that the message is carried across It's not acceptable to annoy people to run your business, and the fact you have internalized these justifications from marketing people underscores my point. I know all about the technicalities involved from >20 years as a sound engineer, much of it in the media landscape. The reason you people are now switching to better PPM meters are because people like me have been making a fuss about this issue for many many years. I'm sorry you think my comment is awful, but I am do not support capitalism reflexively the way you do and I reject your claim that it's OK to increase sales by making people's lives a little worse. I am using the word ethical judiciously, whether or not you agree with me, and I am not going to change my opinion about marketing people either.

stagbeetle 10y ago

I have friends with similar complaints. Ads are annoying, but you can always change the freq/input. It starts to become a problem when the commercials are exceptionally louder than whatever was on before. It shocks the driver, and if they're sensitive to loud noises or disruptions, they may be liable to jerk the wheel in response. Even more so when the ad creators knowingly place in car crash/swerving and police siren sounds. It's dirty and unethical. > Marketing is a necessary function in capitalism. All I can say is that necessary evils are evils nonetheless and "good people" do terrible things all of the time.

jsmthrowaway 10y ago
> Even more so when the ad creators knowingly place in car crash/swerving and police siren sounds. It's dirty and unethical. This I agree with, and they were specifically against policy at my last station. I ended up with copy that called for one and refused it, and the sponsor understood and sent new copy. This is not uncommon, particularly in larger markets, and it is a well-known problem amongst production types. And yes, production can refuse copy. They're often not empowered to at smaller, broke stations. > It shocks the driver, and if they're sensitive to loud noises or disruptions, they may be liable to jerk the wheel in response. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where this is the fault of the radio station. Trust me, I can see both sides, I just don't know if I can assign fault the same way. To be clear, on-air responsibility is not overlooked, though... "War of the Worlds" would, without question, never happen today. I'd just hope your hypothetical driver would maybe not max out the volume during dynamic programming if they're susceptible to that. If there's a >20% difference between normal programming and the rest, the station you listen to needs new engineering and operations. That's just sloppy. Especially on AM, one should be compressing the living shit out of everyone speaking, so... > All I can say is that necessary evils are evils nonetheless and "good people" do terrible things all of the time. Yeah, no, that's not how that works. Found a startup without sales or marketing and get back to me.
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  > Yeah, no, that's not how that works. Found a startup without sales or marketing and get back to me. Entrenched legacy B2B is one example where the level of marketing can be close to nil (if we don't include "sales" in our definition of marketing, otherwise there's no reason to argue), but still allow the business to prosper. But that ignores that you haven't refuted the point. The advertising part of marketing, in its current form, is a net negative ("evil") to consumers. I'm not specifically signaling out the entirety of the "marketing" umbrella, but one of its subsections. Can you tell me how advertising directly benefits the consumer?

bicubic 10y ago

> and loud commercials have nothing to do with ethics A quick google search makes it clear that people don't want to hear loud commercials and want legislation in place to prevent them (actually they're wondering why the fuck existing legislation to prevent exactly those ads is being circumvented). It's not just annoying, it's hijacking their hardware to assault their senses. It makes watching TV or listening to radio at night a nightmare if anyone is sleeping in the house. It's ambiguously unethical and the practice only persists because consumers aren't able to out-lobby advertising interests to pass the laws needed to prevent it in many states. And in your mind this is how it should be because 'that's what the sponsor is paying for'..?

jsmthrowaway 10y ago
Yes. Free, broadcast radio, which is what I'm speaking about, comes to you because advertisers pay them to hijack your hardware and feed you a message you don't want to hear. That's literally how it works, and it should be unsurprising that you cannot outlobby them. (The great caper, of course, is that everybody pays for cable but those television channels still have advertising on them.) It's weird that people like capitalism, but then want capitalism on strictly their terms: in the modern age, thanks to market pressure, radio with few exceptions exists to allow Bob's Turnpike Honda to tell you about their President's Day sale. The rest is designed to develop an audience for that function. That's just the nature of the game now. Solution: Pay for content you like so that more broadcasters enable those options. No ads. Done. This applies to pretty much every broadcast medium including the Web. Sirius XM, Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube Red... toss a few bucks at Apple Music and get into podcasts. This is a fixable problem without worrying about how loud the SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY spot is on your local radio station, and it's far more fixable now than it was even three years ago. Notice I said I formerly worked in broadcast radio. Inventory is decreasing in terrestrial. Satellite and alternatives are winning. That problem is only going to become worse in terrestrial radio. It's weird, though, because radio also serves a vital role with EAS, local news, and other functions. I remember when Clear Channel started collapsing all the locals and Sirius and XM launched, most of my peers said the end was nigh. I don't know how it'd "end," but it's slowly worsening. And no, calling anything I just said "unethical" is a misunderstanding of the word ethical.

anigbrowl 10y ago

I agree that it's annoying, but it's so that the message is carried across It's not acceptable to annoy people to run your business, and the fact you have internalized these justifications from marketing people underscores my point. I know all about the technicalities involved from >20 years as a sound engineer, much of it in the media landscape. The reason you people are now switching to better PPM meters are because people like me have been making a fuss about this issue for many many years. I'm sorry you think my comment is awful, but I am do not support capitalism reflexively the way you do and I reject your claim that it's OK to increase sales by making people's lives a little worse. I am using the word ethical judiciously, whether or not you agree with me, and I am not going to change my opinion about marketing people either.