Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Get WITH it on 90.1 - Marketing Gone Awry?

So WEOS holds a CP for a new station on 90.1 down in Ithaca, NY. Originally we hoped to get the call letters "WEOI" but those belong to an active ship, so no go. After a while we finally managed to get the next best thing: "WITH".

Yes, I'm serious: WITH...short for Ithaca, of course. But as you can imagine, the possibility for marketing cheesiness is quite high anytime you have call letters that actually spell a word. A prime example is WIFE-FM 94.3 in Rushville, Indiana...their slogan is "The Hot Wife". Grooooan.

And I'm already finding myself getting a little too cheesy for comfort in thinking about our promotions plan when we get 90.1 on the air. For example, one of our biggest shows is Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. So the slogan that immediately comes to mind is:

Get WITH Amy Goodman every weekday on 90.1FM!

...annnnnd it's all downhill from there.

Yes it's clever, but it's definitely straddling the line when you're talking about public radio. Sure NPR is often way too uptight but we do try to have some level of decorum. This is, I imagine, something I'll be dealing with for quite a while. :-)

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