The RAB Should Know Better. Bravo Eric Rhoads of Radio Ink Magazine!

The annual RAB Mercury-Awards will be presented today, but no award will be presented in the Station-Produced category. According to the RAB, the judges said the station submissions were subpar, and not of high enough quality for awards. There will be no awards in the PSA, Political, or Student-Produced categories, either.

I smell a rat.

Though I trust Jeff Haley and the RAB, I have to admit that my first thought was that not presenting these awards will save money. Times are tough at RAB, and I wonder if the participating groups who always come up with the money said, “Cut it back this year, Jeff.” Of course, in this case I wonder if they said it after the awards were launched. Or the judges may be thinking, “Why stroke local radio anyway? The awards were really designed to get creative juices going at the agency creative level so they would understand what could be done with radio.”

But I still smell a rat.

To say there is no local advertising good enough to receive an award raises two giant problems:

1) If you hold the Olympics, the best athlete wins. Period. There is nothing in the rules that says that athlete has to beat the record of previous winners. If an award was promoted and people entered, the award should be presented. Even though the official rules say the judges are free to decide not to present an award in any category, that is not how anyone understands a competition like this or how they expect it to work when they pay their — non-refundable — entry fee.

2) If the RAB is designed to promote radio, who in their right mind would EVER make a public statement that there were no local radio spots good enough to win an award? Translation: Don’t count on local radio to produce good spots. This is a PR nightmare for radio. I can see this plastered all over Advertising Age: “Radio Industry Can’t Find a Good Spot at Any Local Radio Station.”

Let’s assume that the RAB was willing to award this money and the judges really did say there were no spots good enough to win.

That probably is the case. And that would signal two different giant problems:

1) The awards were not promoted well. My guess is that this is a big part of the problem. As I travel the country, I hear loads of very high-quality local spots. The RAB recently laid off its longtime PR person, and perhaps the new staff simply did not have the “corporate history” to understand what is necessary to promote these awards and get enough entries from local stations. Of course, it’s also possible radio has its head down and simply cannot focus on entering contests at the moment, nor are they willing to spend a few bucks on an entry fee.

2) Radio production quality has suffered. This is a very real possibility with cutbacks across the industry. And, frankly, the industry has often seemed not to value the importance of high-quality local creative. I recently bought ads and asked for a two-voice spot, one female. I was told, “It’s not possible. We cannot provide you with a female voice on the spots.” This was a major-market, top-tier radio station.

No matter what the problem, this is an embarrassment to radio. I hold RAB and its CEO in high regard. But something like this should not happen.

Eric Rhoads
www.radioink.com