Intelligent, Conservative Talk Radio

I recently did a little listening on a local talk radio station. They have a little tag line that runs: "Conservative, Intelligent, Talk Radio".

It is not, of course, intelligent, but it's business model is. In fact its absolutely brilliant. I only realized this after listening to the Mike Gallagher show and the advertising.

First, the advertising takes up a huge amount of the show. Not sure the percentage but its certainly quite a bit, especially since Mike himself takes up some of his air time hawking products, like miracle vitamin pills or ways to become rich using the Internet.

But the brilliance, the wonderful capitalistic magic of conservative talk radio is the content of the show combined with the advertising.

Look, the whole point of capitalism is to create wealth. Advertisers want efficient ads to be heard by receptive audiences. And I can not think of a more receptive audience than the people who would be listing to conservative talk radio. One thing is certain, there isn't a skeptic out there. This is a good thing when it comes to advertising.

Lets talk the content for Mike's show. He had two points.

1) Intellectuals are evil. They have lead the country off the deep end many times.

They tossed around a few definitions of intellectual (none from a real dictionary of course), but heres one. "An intellectual is a person who is educated beyond their brain capacity" Now someone skeptical might just think "what the hell does that mean", but thats not what the audience apparently does. Thoughts like "Does this make sense?", don't enter the heads of the audience. This makes them a perfect soft target for advertising.

Just for clarity, Webster defines Intellectual as:

Intellectual: Endowed with intellect; having the power of understanding;

having capacity for the higher forms of knowledge or thought;

characterized by intelligence or mental capacity; as, an intellectual

person.

Wow, sound nefarious to me.

This was followed by a discussion over the following Obama quote: "When times are tough, you tighten your belts, You don't go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don't blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you're trying to save for college."

Now when I read that quote I think the guy said something pretty reasonable. He obviously holds average Americans in high regard and he thinks they handle finances responsibly. One might argue there are a lot of idiots out there as well, but Obama seems to be giving Americans the benefit of the doubt.

But to Mike Gallagher and his audience, this was Obama telling Americans how they should spend their money and that it was damaging the Las Vegas economy. Apparently, what Obama should have said was that if you are saving for College, its OK to blow a bunch of cash in Vegas. Not that that makes any sense but here is the glorious thing. None of Mike Gallagher's audience apparently thinks about what is being said. Really thinks. Now does that make them stupid? Well, I would say it would rule them out from being intellectuals (see discussion point 1). But non intellectuals and non skeptics are exactly what advertisers are looking for.

So talk radio herds soft minded people into a single channel for advertisers. Brilliant. If you are looking to advertise, talk radio is where you should go. Yes the folks probably aren't the most affluent, but what little they do have, they will probably part with (even if they are saving for college which, come on now, they're not).

Anyway, talk radio needs to slightly modify their tag line. Intelligent business model with conservative talk. Its where I'm going to advertise next.