Dave Yonki, who I happened to work with at WARD AM several ... Continue reading “The Ballad of WARMland.” Or, “Can There Be Two?”]]> Those who live in the Wilkes-Barre / Scranton area of northeast Pennsylvania will remember WARM 590 radio. It had a very rich history during its heyday and unfortunately was left hung out to die on its own by its license holder, Citadel Broadcasting.

Dave Yonki, who I happened to work with at WARD AM several years ago, maintains a blog called “590 Forever WARM Radio.” I’m going to have to put a shout out to Dave to see if he can help with this bit of WARM trivia.

While cleaning my office today, I discovered an old 45-LP that I picked up several years back but never played. It’s contains the Ballad of WARMland, a station promotional jingle, on one side and a commercial for the old Stop N Go drive-in restaurants on the other. I became confused as it started to play, as it was not the Ballad of WARMland that I have heard over the years. The one on this record was a PAMS jingle and sung by Terri Lee.

So which is the real Ballad of WARMland?

Here is the one that I’ve always thought was the real one:

Here is the one by Terri Lee:

And if you’re interested in hearing the Stop N Go commercial sung to the same music as the Terri Lee Ballad of WARMland, here it is:

I pulled off the Interstate and made my way back to find ... Continue reading “The Trouble With Signs.” Or, “Why Proofreading Matters.”]]> As I was driving on Interstate 81 North in Pittston, PA today, I noticed a billboard for a now defunct restaurant suddenly made a return appearance. Not quite sure why the sign was resurrected, but after seeing it, something looked a little odd.

I pulled off the Interstate and made my way back to find the sign in order to get a better look. What I saw up close and personal was indeed what I saw in the distance. I stopped for a moment, and said to myself, “well, that couldn’t have been good for business!”

Whoever designed the billboard, never proofread the sign before it went up, and the billboard was displaying an incorrect exit number. There is no exit 570 off Interstate 81 or any other roads nearby for that matter. 570 happens to be the telephone area code for this part of northeastern Pennsylvania. The exit you would need to take to get to this former eatery would have been 175.

Now the home of Tony Stella’s Goodfellos, 1901 Highway 315, Pittston used to be the Mayfair Supper Club and reincarnated into a few nightspots including Bella Vino and most recently Stultz’s “All-U-Can-Eat” which had a lifespan close to that of a fruit fly (which happens to be 30 days).

It makes me wonder how things like this get bought and paid for despite being inaccurate. Did the owner not review the mock-up for the billboard before it was printed and installed? Did customers or employees not notice its error and bring it to someone’s attention? Did the billboard company think something was off when they put the sign up knowing there was no exit 570? The company, Besko Media, has an office locally so they can’t plead ignorant.

Whether you’re designing a billboard that will be seen by 60,000 people a day, or designing a cover for a menu that will be seen by 50 people a day, take the time to review it once, twice, even three times. Then have others do the same. Chance are you’re going to find something that’s incorrect or could have been done better.

In the mean time, if you’re looking for a place to eat, go ahead and try Tony Stella’s Goodfello’s. They’re located underneath the ugly yellow and black billboard advertising a tacky “All-U-Can-Eat” joint off the Interstate. Just don’t take exit 570. God only knows where you’ll end up.

MyOutwardHound.com is a small, niche store that primarily sells the Outward Hound line of dog gear that includes car booster seats, dog strollers, dog ... Continue reading “Google, Are You Geo-Targeting My Search?” Or, “Maybe Only People In California Buy Dog Stuff.”]]> I’ve come to notice something very interesting on one of my eCommerce stores and I’m beginning to wonder if this is just a coincidence or something that can be attributed to Google.

MyOutwardHound.com is a small, niche store that primarily sells the Outward Hound line of dog gear that includes car booster seats, dog strollers, dog life vests, and outdoor gear for dogs. The manufacturer of these products is the Kyjen Company located in Huntington Beach, California. Since the site is pretty keyword rich in “Outward Hound” terms, our search engine placement is good – which is a double edge sword. People looking to buy Outward Hound items find us pretty quickly, but so do people who think we’re the manufacturer and are looking for replacement parts or warranty information.

To help those customers who aren’t looking to buy, but need the contact information of the manufacturer, I added the following text to the customer service page:

Outward Hound Product Warranty Question or Information:
For question regarding replacement parts, accessories or warranty claims on Outward Hound pet product, please contact the manufacturer directly at:

The Kyjen Company, Inc.
P.O. Box 793
Huntington Beach, CA 92648

Phone: 800-477-5735
Fax: 714-841-8979
E-mail: info-mail@kyjen.com

Since that text was added, nearly 16% of site visits for February MTD comes from the state of California, which is more 3 times more than the second highest state.

I started noticing the number of orders being shipped to CA and I had to dig further into why, and the numbers got me thinking.

Is Google (or other engines for that matter) crawling pages like this looking for information that may determine where orders ship from and geo-target search results based on where the search originates from? Or, do these products fit the California lifestyle?

That same page has an address on it for our office in Wilkes-Barre, PA, but traffic from Pennsylvania is just like any other state according to the sites analytics. I want to ride out the month of February before making changes to this page, but come March, I’m going to remove the California address and do a test to see if site traffic from California users decreases.

I’ll keep you posted with my findings. In the mean time, if you own a dog that you spend a lot of time with outdoors, check out MyOutwardHound.com – even if you don’t live in California.

Whether it be the smell of burning leaves that reminds you of fall and spirals you into seasonal depression or the obscured back road in the middle of nowhere that reminds you of the first time you tried out back-seat yoga in your old Chevelle.

Today, I had ... Continue reading “Polkas, Bartels and Some Dusty LPs.” Or, “Remembering WARD-AM.”]]> Sometimes the craziest things spark a memory.

Whether it be the smell of burning leaves that reminds you of fall and spirals you into seasonal depression or the obscured back road in the middle of nowhere that reminds you of the first time you tried out back-seat yoga in your old Chevelle.

Today, I had to go and do a walk-thru of a rental property I own, as the renter is moving out. I lived in this house about 6 years ago and thought I got all my stuff out of it back then, but came upon an interesting stash up in the attic.

In 1987 I got my first job in radio working for Jim & Dorothy Ward at WARD-AM in Pittston, PA. It was a 10,000 watt day timer and one of the few remaining independently owned, yet stand-alone, AM radio stations in northeast Pennsylvania. After Jim’s death in 1994, the place went down the toilet and I moved on in 1997 right before it was sold.

WARD was unique to say the very least. Some day I’ll talk more about my time there and the craziness that went on inside a building that had house trailers attached to it, shag carpeting on the walls, flakeboard for paneling and an oil burner that always ran out of oil during my shift. WARD was the very first station in the market to embrace an all talk format and introduced Rush Limbaugh to northeast PA. High school sports was a big part of the station’s programming (and a big help for cash flow) as was Polka Weekend.

Yes, Polka Weekend.

Sam Liguori, Dale Michaels (aka Rusty Fender / Shadoe Steele), Rob Neyhard, Brunon Kryger and myself, along with rotating part-timers, overtook the radios in every nursing home, bingo hall, VFW, corner bar and Polish household in NEPA beginning at 6am Saturday morning and not giving up until the bars ran out of Bartels late Sunday night.

We did air shifts ranging from 4 to 6 hours, did live on-air requests and dedications without a delay, queued up records, and did more remotes from church bazars and fire company picnics than I care to count, yet remember. There were no computers loaded with MP3 files – we had boxes of records, yes records, that we flipped through and queued up on turntables. Commercials and bumpers were recorded on “carts” – audio cartridges similar to an 8-track tape. There were no CD players and the Sunday early morning religious programs came in the mail on 7-inch reel-to-reel tape. When we had to voice commercials, we had to splice tape with real razor blades, not a Mac running Adobe Audition.

Today, I stumbled upon 2 boxes of those records we used to spin on Polka Weekend hiding in the attic. Notes are taped to some of them which say things like, “Don’t play cut 3 it skips” or “Do not remove from studio” – glad I paid attention to that one. They all look like they’re in good condition and aren’t warped, but I don’t have a turntable to verify.

After finding this cache, I started thinking about the time I spent at WARD and looked for some photos that I had of the old place. Low and behold, I even found some of them, with a very young and thinner looking me.

Some memories you want to forget, some you want to remember. Memories of WARD I’ll always cherish as it was a special, one-of-a-kind place even if the place at 83 Foote Avenue in Duryea is now a junk yard.

Here I am chatting on the phone in the main studio. The Lazy Susan cart rack is in the back holding all the commercials. The black and white TV up in the corner was the only entertainment we had, and also served as the audio source for when we broadcast WNEP-TV news at 6pm and 11pm during the week. The red EBS binder contained the envelope with the secret code and instructions on what to do “in the event of a real emergency!” That strange contraption to the left with the circle of orange felt is a turn table – something that doesn’t exist in radio stations today!

Here I am donning a set of Radio Shack head phones, wearing an Izod shirt and some stone washed denim – sure signs of the 80′s. The Electro Voice RE20 mic in the on-air studio was a big investment at the time.

If you look closely there is a block of wood that we used to prop up the telos telephone interface so we can see it at a better angle. The walls in the studio were wrapped in lovely shag carpeting and the jock sitting at the board faced a clock on the other side of the wall and a big hole in the roof that leaked when it rained, but it was the only way the cables from the satellite dishes in the back got into the building.

President Obama and Vice President Obama filling out their Nielsen Diaries saying they watch American Idol and Lost.

With the President’s State of ... Continue reading “As A Nation, We’re Lost.” Or, “What Would Reagan Do?”]]>

President Obama and Vice President Obama filling out their Nielsen Diaries saying they watch American Idol and Lost.

With the President’s State of the Union Address coming up, rumors started flying around the Internet that the speech would pre-empt the premier episode of the final season of the ABC television show, Lost. Fans of the show cried foul, mounted campaigns against pre-emption and in the end won.

The White House on Friday announced that President Obama’s speech will not be on the same night as the Lost premier. Stopping short of saying that the pressure from the public played a part in the decision, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded to a question by ABC reporter Ann Compton by saying, “I don’t foresee a scenario in which millions people who hope to finally get some conclusion with Lost are preempted by the president.”

Two Tuesday night dates were tossed around for the annual address, January 26th and February 2nd. January 26th as nixed because American Idol is on and we all know that even Obama won’t mess with Simon Cowell.

With American soldiers being killed everyday overseas, terrorist plots to attack the country are foiled, the economy in the toilet and unemployment rates at their highest point in recent history, I would think that every person in the U.S. would be wanting to hear the annual report from the prez. It’s a shame that a fictional television show is more important than the State of the Union.

This latest incident is one that makes me shake my head and wonder where this country is heading and where our priorities lie. I could only imagine what people in other countries of the world are thinking and saying.

It’s time that President Obama reaches in his pants, finds a set of balls and says, “I’m going on the air February 2nd. If you don’t like it, get Lost.”

The most famous ocean liner in the world, Titanic, now has a shrimp named after her.

However, the pump was labeled as “Regular, ... Continue reading “Regular, Plus & Premium.” Or, “Regular, Plus & Super.”]]> I stopped by the local Sunoco station to fill ‘er up yesterday and was greeted with signs promoting Sunoco gift cards for the holiday. With a clever take on the different grades of gasoline, the signs touted that the gift cards are available in “Regular, Plus & Premium.”

However, the pump was labeled as “Regular, Plus & Super.”

Being the curious devil that I am, I wanted to see if this was a marketing blunder or mislabeling at the pump. I found that Sunoco has four different grades of gasoline, Regular, Plus, Premium and Ultra 93. Super is nowhere to be found in that lineup.

As the stewards of the Sunoco “brand,” the oil giant should care enough to force stations to comply with proper labeling and brand identification – especially with the much marketed ULTRA 93 product. By not doing that, it only creates confusion.

But it’s only gasoline, Scott!

A good friend of mine, Catherine Shafer from CDS Creative put on a presentation during Solid Cactus Boot Camp called, “Your Brand is an Asset.” During the 90-minute session, she discussed the importance of protecting your brand and making sure it’s used properly. We all work hard building our brand and to see it used inappropriately is not good for business, which is why we should invest time in protecting it.

This example serves as a simple lesson in consistency and why enforcement of proper brand usage is important. A Big Mac is a Big Mac in every McDonalds. It’s not a Big Burger, a Big McD, or The Mac. It’s a Big Mac and that’s their brand and it’s what people order that sandwich by.

Super! Or is it….. nevermind.

P.S.: According to Sunoco, gas stations are not obligated to carry all four gasoline grades at their pumps which explains the absence of the fourth at this particular station. It’s doesn’t excuse the mislabeling, tho.