I am at Memorial Hixson today with my mother, Marianne, 92, who fell and broke a hip Monday afternoon.
With great thanks do I consider your subscription to Nooganomics.com or your regular visitations over these pages. I count it an honor to be its editor for four years and to post a worthy essay nearly every day.
By David Tulis
On Monday I dropped my show on AM 1240 Hot News Talk Radio, deciding to end the program and give my time to pitching this terrific media platform to advertisers.
I like to describe myself as the writer with the biggest pen in Chattanooga — the station’s 200-foot tower in Soddy-Daisy. I was made half owner of the station after working two years to prosper it and help its owner, “Confederate Mike,” succeed. Of late the David Tulis program is two hours every weekday morning. It is the oral version of this website, and entertains an audience entirely apart from the one of which you are a part.
But I can yield the platform if sales will help the enterprise get over the difficult startup phase.
Meanwhile 1240 is running Mike Gallagher, a conservative and Christian host offering a national perspective. I hope to be back on the airwaves in four weeks.
Need for strong local support
I am disheartened at the lack of affinity buying of advertising on AM 1240 Hot News Talk Radio. An affinity buy is one from an advertiser who says, “You’re doing such a great job and so rightly reflect my conservative and/or Christian views that I’d like to buy advertising for the next year for two of my businesses, so here’s a check for F$8,000 to cover the marketing.”
You would think that a station such mine would win huge popular support. It hasn’t. To have expected it is to have misunderstood how people use media and consume it. They don’t rely on it as much as its practitioners would like to think.
We sell every account and win every account. They’re not dropped into our laps by an admiring public.
In advertising sales, I focus on the benefits of running your spots on local “right-wing” talk radio. Advertise, increase your business, save money. That’s the argument. We don’t beg for money, as does nonprofit and Christian radio. We don’t say, “ Support us because we need the money.” We always focus on the benefit of connecting with the listener.
Perhaps because Hot News Talk Radio is so other-centric and so results oriented we don’t get sympathy buys. Not sure. If we were a leftwing media platform we’d be rolling in affinity buys but would probably be a flop as a commercial concern. Progressive radio doesn’t sell and doesn’t work. Right-wing commercial radio generally has succeeded. And that’s what we’re counting on.
Making other people successful and being rewarded for furthering the marketplace and human relationships and making our livings.
The Internet brings terrific competition to other media platforms. Still, I am confident that a business owner still needs to stand out from the rest. That means he needs to make use of the so-called legacy formats. Everyone is on Facebook. Everyone has a website. Social media “solutions” to advertising sometimes work. But still a business person needs a way to stand on the Internet floor that constitutes the minimum outreach. Radio with a real signal grabs people when they are out, and Hot News Talk Radio is grabbing more people every day to eat out at Jet’s Pizza or their accounts handled by Eric Pelton Co. It’s an attention grabber beyond the Internet.
Atomization problem
But the explanation of my struggle as a media business goes deeper, maybe. Perhaps we are afflicted with paralysis. A paralysis of spirit. A sense that we are not responsible for our destinies, that the future is entirely beyond our influence and that our personal choices are of no account because whatever will happen to the country will happen, to our jobs, our savings, our family relations — will happen. And we cannot alter them.
This sense of our feebleness is part of our our ability to think in a large scale, on a global scale, where all the moving parts of the future are giant entities such as governments, presidents and elections. So long have we Americans been acted upon by unseen circumstances that we have lost any sense of personal responsibility and a desire to write our own stories.
Living in an era of national government and the welfare-surveillance state, we have been atomized, dislocated, alienated from community and ourselves, and find ourselves incapable of discrete individual action. Pitirim Sorokin describes this decline in his 1941 book, The Crisis of Our Age.
However we might describe the atrophy of relations among Chattanoogans and the atrophy in our own hearts, the limits this spiritual and cultural deadness on my idea-oriented enterprises are remarkable.
Advertise on my platforms
If you believe the Nooganomics and AM 1240 Hot News Talk Radio platform is worth following, perhaps it is worth using to further your family in commerce.
Think not in terms of helping me, but of helping yourself.
Make a good business decision and let me advertise your business, your church, your favorite charity. You can make a donation to your favorite nonprofit by buying two or three months of commercials or paying to pump an upcoming event.
