View From the Phlipside Radio - TV Commercial Radio

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.

I suppose it was inevitable.  In a day and age where folks are constantly looking for a new niche, just that little edge that will give them the jump on the competition you’re always looking for what the audience likes.  So a music station dedicated to the music that you hear in TV commercials probably shouldn’t come as a great surprise.

And yet my bet is that your first reaction was similar to mine.  Which was “Come on, really?”.  Then I thought about it.  Music has always played an important part of advertising on both radio and TV.  I’m sure that you like me can finish dozens of jingles that we grew up listening to.  Now add in that over the last, what, two decades more and more TV advertising has used actual songs from both popular and unknown groups.  Hey, CBS’s franchise CSI has made a whole thing out of using the music of The Who as their theme music.  How many times have you been listening to a TV ad and thought “Who is that” with the music?  How about the Kia hamster ads with the Black Sheep saying “You can deal this or you can do with that?”

So there IS a market for the concept.  And now there’s is an outlet for the concept as well.  Slacker Radio which is an online customizable music service in the vein of Pandora or Spotify now offers TV Commercials Radio.  Currently the playlist is 175 songs which puts it at about the same number as a classic Top 40 station (there’s a reason why it seems the same song is always airing at those stations).  As more music gets put into TV ads the library will continue to expand.  The hottest times for usage of the station is, not surprisingly, the holidays and the Super Bowl.  As a former radio music director I thought the rationale behind the station was interesting.  Slacker officials say that commercial music supervisors are a more reliable ear for great music than most traditional sources like radio play.  My initial reaction was a bit of professional pique.  Then I thought about the times we’d take a flyer on a borderline tune.  Something that no one investing millions of dollars on an ad campaign would ever think of doing.  Hard to argue with the logic.

So maybe I’ll tune into to Slacker and see how many of the tunes I can connect with their ads.  A whole new way to waste time.  Cool.

Call that the View From the Phlipside