[nostalgie]

Bonjour!

I am reading the book The Hits Between the Hits and I would like to understand better the notion
of barter between jingles producers and radio stations.

I know that many producers were trading their ID's against time on the air… but what did they do with that time? Was it commercial time? If so, does it mean that they were selling advertisements and managing the time on the air based on what they received in exchange for their jingles? It is not clear to me.

Thanks for your help.

[teachercreature]

Hi Thierry,
Well I can only speak to one situation involving Pepper-Tanner in the late sixties. At WHYL in Carlisle, PA, the Tanner company traded jingle package costs for Welcome Wagon spots. Welcome Wagon was a service they were involved with in which baskets of promotional gifts were given to new home buyers in the Carlisle area. WHYL obtained several jingle packages in this manner.

[OBieInDC]

In 1964 the group of stations I worked for bought jingles and production libraries from Pepper Sound Studios not because they were good, but because the owners didn’t have any money in the budget….and we could do a trade. In simplest terms that meant “We give you jingles….you give us airtime”. Pepper owned a “bank” of air time at our station, and ran commercials for their clients (not the stations) on a schedule called “ROS” or Run-of-Schedule. Most of With Pepper ‘s time had a ratio of 5 to 1; that meant for every one dollar of product Pepper supplied you with we’d have to give them 5 dollars, in airtime, in return. If you had to give make-goods (if a spot didn’t run for a particular reason; cart malfunction, preemption for a news event or whatever) the ratio was 3 to 1. For each spot missed 60 or 30 second you had to give them 3 in return. I remember running spots for Orkin Pest Control, Preparation H Hemorrhoid Cream, Sea & Ski and various other products from a company John Pepper owned, with his partner Bert Ferguson called BertJohn, that sold pharmaceutical products. Some of those packages we traded for were:
The Money Maker, The MARS Production Library and The Sales & Service Library. ID packages we got from Pepper included Happy Hornblower, Swingles, Fun Ones and probably Pepper’s biggest selling package The Now Sound. It’s a shame that I only have a few cuts of the Now Sound & Fun Ones in my collection.

Hope this helps, Thierry

[nostalgie]

Thanks a lot guys! I appreciate the info very much.

[bobgreenradioMember]

pepper “WAS” the master! when i worked for a.s.i./mcgavern-guild we bought limited pams cuts, and traded for pepper. the pepper stuff was just so awful! i think the best and only semi useful package then was 'its whats happening'. on “paper” the package was offered for cash at some foolish $2000 amount. pams then had a 'retail' of $100 per cut, which they would discount. when we did the pepper deal we would get national “d' grade spot traffic. 7 up soda spots, stp oil treatment, etc. if we worked the real numbers that $2000 pepper package was costing us $8000. BUT! in the real world, R.O.S. placement….the time was worthless that we gave pepper..
pepper actually was working over the account booking office (stp, etc) for the big bucks.

got it?

it was actually a good deal for everybody and im surprised nobody does it today. plus pepper did have the MARS program. contests and crap every 30 days in pilot form. far better than those shit tracks.

today i give ben freedman huge credit for doing resings that are 100% better than the first runs! bens stuff actually sounds good, unlike peppers. thunder being the exception to my rant

[StarbrelzMember]

It STILL is done today! Jingles. Info sources for show prep, News. Audio systems. MANY of the network commercials you hear on (at least) US stations are BARTERED! I know. I deal with it every week.

[bobgreenradioMember]

not so quick there. there always is a barter deal (although i remember when nets did pay the stations cash for the time) between nets, ap, etc for program time.
what we are talking about is the pure jingle package for (sort of) free (worthless time) booked by the jingle producer.
pepper sold (though i doubt much) and exchanged huge numbers of packages in exchange for their crud produced for a national account they also produced.
i know of nobody in the jingle biz doing swaps today. at 1 point i thought that was the plan jones had when they got tm, but i see no activity so far

[IainJohnstonMember]

Reelworld possibly?

Hearing these P-T revelations, could it be that the P-T stuff for the non-commercial BBC Radio One & Two circa 1968/69 might have been quite rare instances of 1960s P-T genuinely selling/leasing jingles to a station?

[StarbrelzMember]

Jones/TM has had barter packages very recently. At one point, I believe you could barter Jam jingles through a special arrangement between Jam and Jones. It may not be the case now, but it was THIS century. I could be wrong, but I'm sure I saw it on the Jones/TM site.

[bobgreenradioMember]

i remember seeing maybe 5 or so years ago, jones had a deal with 'jam'. umm, pretty good chance 'jam' got jellied out when jones took over tm. after all; who needs dodge if you just bought chrysler?

as for bbc, be sure, pepper would NEVER refuse money! haha, so selling to bbc was a win win…and, i can only suspect bbc had a hair across its ass with the earlier biz pams was doing with the pirates. face it. crc, later tm was always over produced. pepper was worse than watered pepsi, jam didnt exist, but when it did it simply didnt have that very special spark pams had.
in a market of a dozen stations (1960's) all stations needed air image and there were lots of small jingle factories. i remember quality jingles from ft worth tx. a package of 20 cuts for $15.00 cant beat that!
what must have kept pepper going was the trade out market. it wasnt their product. gwin, mark century, formatics, etc etc came and went. why?

[IainJohnstonMember]

That “$15 package” topic has come up before on JM…must be a link back to it somewere…:^)

[OBieInDC]

I think the package Bob & Iain are talking about sold for $19.00 for 11 cuts. Here are a few cuts from their demo called Demo K, produced using the call letters KTOR, 1360 in Chicago. Of course there never was a KTOR in Chicago.

http://jinglemad.com/e107_files/public/1268582186_6711_FT78846_quality.mp3 filename:quality.mp3

Here is the top portion of the letter sent to stations to pitch the K series.

Hear the entire package at:

http://www.4shared.com/file/241089763/5f4a692a/Quality_Jingle_Demo_K.html

[topcat]

I'll just briefly pop into this thread. Barter is still available through TM, JAM, and Tony Griffin that I know of. Just because TM is owned by Dial Global doesn't preclude other jingle producers from having a “barter” arrangement with the parent company. After all… a buck is still a buck.

As for the demise of Gwin, Mark Century and so on…. that's material for a book… of which a few have been written.

-TC

[bobgreenradioMember]

hahaha!! thats the stuff! ktor. haha, i never heard that set. must have been the “B” mix out? hahaha…i just remember the “pineapples” and “Mangos” cuts! ugh….and the order sheet, low quality high school purple ditto sheets, was for $15 bucks.
well well, this was a rare treat.

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