Loading…
15
Blew $2,100 on a programmatic radio buy for a MulchFest in Sacramento and got 11 listeners
Last spring I talked a client into running a three week radio campaign for a garden center event in Sacramento, and I sold it hard. Real audience data, daypart targeting, the whole pitch deck. We spent $2,100 across 14 stations and got a grand total of 11 trackable responses. Eleven. I drove out to the event on the last Saturday just to see what was happening, and the parking lot had more geese in it than people. Turns out half the "listener data" I trusted came from a rep who left the company two months before we signed, and nobody bothered to update the numbers. My client was nice about it, which somehow felt worse than if he had yelled at me in the parking lot. If you are buying radio in a small market, ask to see the actual spot logs before you write the check, not a deck with pretty charts. Anybody here run a broadcast buy that went this sideways?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
jakeellis9d ago
Radio seemed like easy money to me for years. You buy spots, people hear them, people show up. Simple math. Then I watched a buddy burn $3k on a car dealership spot in Fresno and get like nine phone calls, and now I just don't buy it anymore. The spot logs thing is real too, because half these stations run your ad at 2am on a Tuesday and call it "drive time." Good on you for posting this. People need to hear it before they hand over a check.
1