A Friend of Jack

[naomikritzer]

If brand name recognition were considered a school readiness skill like scissor use and a familiarity with the alphabet, Molly would be seriously behind. We don't watch a lot of TV, and that's where most of it would come from. She does recognize the characters of the children's TV shows now -- Dora, Bob the Builder, etc. -- but she doesn't know that Frosted Lucky Charms are Magically Delicious, she doesn't know that Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is There, and she is not a member of the Pepsi Generation.

She is, however, a friend of Jack.

We don't watch much TV, but we do listen to the radio every time we're in the car. A month or two back, one of my stations switched formats -- 104 went from being "the Eighties station, Mix 104.1" to "Jack FM...playing what we want." For some reason, this tagline really appealed to Molly, and she started asking about it. I gave her a brief explanation to the concept of station taglines and formats, and now she recognizes all the stations I listen to. And she'll request Jack, which I think is very funny. The music is the same endless repeats of classic rock standbys that you'd hear on KQ; Jack's main selling point, so far as I can tell, is that they don't play requests. They play what THEY want, not what YOU want. I've been listening carefully when the announcer comes on, and I think that this may actually be a way to avoid paying a DJ. I think they program everything in, including commercials and station identification, and just leave it. Then again, I haven't listened to it during the morning drive time, when most of the music stations compete with the personalities of their DJs.

Molly was also intrigued by KQ's claim that they play everything -- I told her that this was an exaggeration (I then had to explain what an exaggeration was) and gave her some examples (St. John's Passion, "Little Boxes") of music they would never play.

Comments

[leftwithashes.livejournal.com]

Pepsi Generation...? blasted! I can't list off hardly any taglines! Let's see... something is um.. Eating Good in the Neighboorhood.. then I always wonder what Brown can do for me... but... then I get confused.

I do, however, remember that when women wanted to play professional basketball.. they got next.

Well, I can sing a few jingles (Kit Kat & Chili's) but yeah - I'm pretty much stupid when it comes to advertising tags.

[squigsoup.livejournal.com]

I, personally, am an aficianado of tag lines. But I don't let the kids watch a lot of commercial television, so they don't really know about advertising. Tony the Tiger was on a commercial the other day and I had to explain to Rachel who he was.

I bet your Jack FM is probably remotely programmed into the computer, sad as that is to me. I like disc jockeys, the more local the better. I can't stand it when the local Clear Channel station has a contest that is playing at the same time in every other state in the nation.

[perimyndith.livejournal.com]

We recently had a station here in Seattle change to a "Jack" station. Same motto and type of operation. I hear several of 'em popped up around the country at about the same time. I don't quite get it, or why radio executives decided this was the way to go. I guess we'll see how long these things last...