This is the second part of a Marlin’s Musings Encore, where we bring visibility to call letters that are unfamiliar to most of those who advertise in the New York market … and get their attention in this somewhat off-beat manner. As you’ll read, we began this even before we became a major force in the audience ratings reports, so the later appearance of the WRFM call letters would be less of a surprise:
Back in the 1960’s and 70’s, one of the most popular and well-read publications, if not the top one, targeting and serving those who worked in New York City’s huge world of advertising was named ANNY … which stood for Advertising News of New York.
As discussed on Page 117 of my radio industry memoir, once we had WRFM’s new programming design fully implemented … even though the station had yet to show improved ratings, we felt it time to begin introducing the call letters––although they had been in the market for 15 years, but still barely known––and why it was different from anything presently being offered on radio in the market to the advertising community, as they would be key to WRFM’s financial success not too far down the road. To do this, we chose to purchase space in the ANNY monthly magazine.
Rather than simply buy a typical ad proclaiming our reason for being and asking for their dollars, we came up with the attention-getting tongue-in-cheek concept of this advice column, where the answer to any question was WRFM and its comfort-providing musical programming … no matter what the situation might be:
In case you aren’t old enough to remember, the immensely popular newspaper advice column of that era was Dear Abby, written by “Abigale Van Buren” … we simply played off of it, and was never challenged for doing so. The Dear gAbby “column” was written by our public relations and publicity director at the time, who’s name I’m pretty certain was Marion Kurtz … and she chose to use her own picture as the face of “gAbby.”
This is just one of the numerous unique and innovative things we did at WRFM, both in advertising and programming, which had never before been done in radio. They were definitely fun times … and led to unbelievable success for the station.
Otherwise, you can read all of the details––and about all of the stops along my 60-year radio “journey”–– in “RADIO … My Love, My Passion” … available now right here on this website, or from Amazon.com if you prefer!
