Back in 1992, one of my jobs was to “play-out” the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40, a networked show on the Metro Radio Group, broadcast on The Pulse, a station in West Yorkshire.

Things were pretty free and easy then, and I, a naive 21 year-old, took to filling the one-minute between the end of the network chart and the IRN news bulletin at 7.00pm by opening my mouth and telling the audience that Rick Dees was coming up, and that Phil Butler’s phone-in was happening at 10pm as well – aided by the fact that the news jingle required the presenter to say things in little gaps, and we’d never got David Jensen to record the relevant bits, so I kind of had to do that bit too. (No editorial compliance forms here. We were just trusted to do the job. Ludicrous, I know.)

I also decided that, since the ad log was quite light, I’d not fill the ad breaks with nasty advertisements, and instead, off the top of my head, invented a feature for Rick Dees’s Weekly Top 40 called “Stateside Stonkers” (it was the early 90s) which was essentially any song I quite liked that was recorded by a US artist, preceded by a jingle recorded by now Real Radio Yorkshire programme director Ricky Durkin with a deep voice and a rather bad american accent. These were occasionally inserted into the adbreaks in the programme, rather than having to play pieces of creative for local advertisers like Lookers of Nelson Street, or Angel Mobile Phones of Odsal Top.

This appeared to work well for a while. But Steve Martin, the genius programme director for the station, must have tuned in at some point. First, he appeared to like what I did in terms of talking on-air, eventually offering me a job presenting drivetime. And second, he liked the idea of Stateside Stonkers, but on reflection, he asked me to fill the programme with local ads instead. “Just fill with local ads, James. Don’t play any nationals,” he’d say, in a quiet measured tone.

The reasons were, as everything was with Steve, genius. Rick Dees was three hours of very foreign-sounding programming (yes, three hours – we got a re-edited version instead of the US’s four-hour version). Given that this was three hours of very foreign-sounding programming, with IRN bulletins every hour that had no local content either, how could we make this still sound local? By including local placenames and local businesses, of course. And what was the best way of doing this?

By playing local ads.

Skip to today – and you could argue that the most local thing on some stations are the ads – being the only local content within a nationally-delivered mid-morning show, for example.

Advertising is actually one of the main reasons that people still buy local newspapers. And local advertising reinforces the localness of a radio station. So, when filling adbreaks (as many people have to these days), it’s an interesting idea to only fill with local advertisers – even if the McDonald’s ads sounded pretty cool and funky, and the TDK ads for video cassettes were pretty cool too. It’s a brilliant, simple, plan – and doubtless, one of the things that propelled that station from a rather embarrassing number 7 in the market (or wherever it was) right up to the market leader. I wonder how many stations consciously run such a policy these days? Global Radio, you can have this idea on me. (grin)

Steve Martin was the best programme director I’ve ever worked for. Sadly, he was also the first ever programme director I’d ever worked for. I didn’t know better – but if I did, I’d have worked much harder for him.

(Later: I discover that Steve Martin is the PC for Heart 102.4 Norwich, the station that posted 30% increases in total hours this quarter.)

The advert above is a global advertiser doing an interesting job in a local market – GIbraltar suffers from the levante, a cloud that forms on the rock, making the small dependency rather colder than it ordinarily should be. How Coke Zero plans on getting rid of this problem is anyone’s guess, but it’s natty advertising for a local marketplace.

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