I don’t have much unique to add to the amazing and effective campaign to muff up Rush Limbaugh after his heinous remarks of last week. It’s wonderful.
I have, however, listened to this person for many years (it’s the best way to figure out Republican political strategy) and I’m kind of obsessed with reverse-engineering facts and patterns. I’ve got some stuff on that:
- Rush Limbaugh is a master pitchman. A huge amount of his advertising is “live reads” that he deftly bakes into the content of his show. One minute he’s ranting about a current hacking scandal and the next he’s extolling the virtues of backing up your files with Carbonite
- The list of advertisers who have left are pretty much the only ones I’ve ever heard advertised on his show. These are long-time, huge volume advertisers
- Developing new relationships like this is not a simple matter. It’s one thing to have companies place ready-made campaigns on your show. It’s another altogether to develop sophisticated content strategies that hide the ads in your unique content
- Apparently today people heard Allstate commercials on the Rush show and they called out Allstate immediately. At first, Allstate said they didn’t know what people were talking about and that they didn’t advertise on his show. Then they issued a clarification saying their media buyer pumped commercials on the show. This sounds believable to me
- I don’t know anything about radio ad sales, but it sounds like the Rush people dipped into a generic pool of ads to fill the empty space (some sort of high-quality remnant thingy?)
- It would be cool if someone listened to every single Rush Limbaugh show and compiled/ tweeted the authoritative list of all commercials, including company name, general content, format, and contact info (Twitter/ Facebook/ corporate, etc.) for each. This would help keep the pressure on and get a better bead on the advertising industry in general– for the war next time