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Earlier this week we broke down the devastating effect that cutting ties with Kirk Minihane has had on WEEI’s ratings. I’m not going to recap it all since you can read it here, but the TL;DR is that their audience share has been cut in half, and every show on WEEI is now routinely being murdered by 98.5 The Sports Hub. They got rid of Minihane because of 3 people:
- Millionaire activist Bob Murchison, who wanted to dictate that they couldn’t talk about transgender athletes in sports and harassed advertisers relentlessly in bad faith with out of context clips of the show
- Boston Globe editor Shirley Leung, who used the Globe’s platform to harass and target WEEI advertisers with misleading information about the station’s content
- Red Sox President Sam Kennedy, who didn’t like Minihane’s criticism of the franchise
Getting rid of Minihane was not a business decision, since he delivered historically high ratings for that station. It was an emotionally based decision in which Entercom gave into demands of PC authoritarians because they were too gutless to stand by their employees. And now we’re seeing the financial effects this has had on their station.
We were forwarded an email correspondence between a Massachusetts based business and an Entercom sales rep, trying to get them to commit to radio advertising on WEEI. The customer asks the salesman how many listeners he can reach on Radio.com, and the salesman tells the business owner that they sell spots at $10 CPM (cost per 1,000 listeners) and cites 350,000 listeners in November in December.
The salesman tells him this will cost between $2,000 and $10,000 a month.
Then we dropped the article about the station’s ratings without Minihane, and the business owner made it clear that he saw this and wasn’t going to advertise due to the low ratings brought upon by Bob Murchison.
The salesman then admits that Bob Murchison is a huge pain in the ass and tries to sell him on WEEI’s “social media following” instead.
That’s a hard pass buddy. Sorry you have to work for such a poorly run, spineless company that doesn’t put the interests of the business over their interest in being politically correct. Sorry you work for cowards who give into irrelevant people like Shirley Leung and Bob Murchison. And yes, I realize Sam Kennedy had something to do with this too, but he wasn’t on the phone harassing advertisers and sending out emails. He just didn’t like Minihane and preferred if he was gone.
For what it’s worth, $10 CPM is outrageous. If you’re a small business owner just understand that we charge a fraction of that and have an audience much larger than WEEI. Feel free to email turtleboysports@gmail.com for more information on advertising packages we offer. Sure, a couple Murchison’s of the world might send you an email or two, but at the end of the day we’re going to send you a lot of new business which is the whole point of advertising.
Let this be a lesson to business owners everywhere though – the only thing that should ever matter to you is money. Radio stations can charge more for advertising if they have higher ratings. The guy who brings you higher ratings is the most valuable person in your company. People like Bob Murchison don’t matter. If they harass your advertisers then it’s up to you to tell the advertisers that they are free to ignore this lunatic, urge them to block him (or fire back like Kaplansky Insurance) and reassure them that they are getting a return on investment that they can’t get anywhere else by partnering with you.
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25 Comment(s)
radio needs to be compelling. there is nothing compelling about weei….nothing, no way, no how.
they rid themselves of anything entertaining and compelling and would be better served picking up that sunday morning flea market show that was just cancelled rather than continue to broadcast gerry “im just riding out my contract” callahan and mike “white noise, party killer, dude, my traps are uuuge, holy crap shut up already” mutnansky. ratings oblivion.
if entercom was in the business of making shirley and bob happy they’re a success…otherwise, not so much.
WEEI started their slow slide way before Minehan. John Dennis and Jerry Callahan single handily got Scott Brown elected to the US Senate. After the election WEEI Brass pressured Dennis and Callahan to not talk Politics or Current Events “because listeners only wanted to hear sports talk” (even though the ratings were sky high)…fuck off. We all know the Democratic Machine put the on squeeze on WEEI….I used to religiously listen to WEEI in the morning. Now I listen to Fox News on XM on my morning commute and Howie Carr on the ride home…I hope you pathetic spineless fucks at EEI and the Red Sox are reading this post. Best regards 40 something white male 115 grand a year
It’s sad that you can make 115,000 per year yet don’t know that it’s single-handedly and not single-handily.
Nice try Shirley, you can fake your name, but you can’t fake who you are. Only an editor would point out a punctuation mistake as a retaliatory tactic on a message board.
Chip Striker from the top rope !
Well said
By not advertising with WEEI, commerce is allowing a douchebag like my father to win. If it was for him, I wouldn’t be so obsessed with cock, that I wanted one of my own.
By going after WEEI it helps Bob Murchison deal with the fact that he failed as a parent because he has a freak show of a son.
Money can’t fix that Bob. Minihane is gone, but you’re kid will always be a fucking weirdo and you suck as a parent.
I don’t like Murchison either but it’s no reason to act like an ignorant a-hole. I find all that stuff confusing and odd myself, but I don’t know why you seem to care so much and get so angry about somebody else’s confusion over their gender. Maybe you’re feeling a little bit confused about some things yourself, and that’s why you get so fired up.
“Let this be a lesson to business owners everywhere though – the only thing that should ever matter to you is money. Radio stations can charge more for advertising if they have higher ratings. The guy who brings you higher ratings is the most valuable person in your company. ”
Which TB blogger is bringing in the big bucks here?
Thank you for contributing to the eventual death of WEEI.
Good job TB, for once.
Kudos to Kaplansky Insurance. Stand your ground! And FU, Murchison!
They give ya low teeza rates then bam! Ya premiums go up for no reason!
That’s not how insurance brokerages work dumbass.
I think he knows how it works. He’s saying he doesn’t adhere to those tactics. Dumbass!
Bob Murchisons mentally ill kid caused the demise of WEEI. Only in today’s world can that happen. Mentally sick people like Bob Murchisons son caused this. How mentally sick does that kid have to be for his dad to be such a pathetic scumbag? It is sick that they pander to mentally ill sickos like Bob Murchisons son. Bob Murchisons son is a pathetic mentally ill person who needs daddy to fight for him. What a pathetic human Bob Murchison is for making everyone pander because of his mentally sick kid.
Did the son plug in the vagina so that it is a useless opaque orifice with no opening? Just asking for the non binary folk here who like to plug vagina’s. Since its getting warmer I’m just trying to avoid swamp ass cream.
Bring minihane back for double what he was making or keep sinking assholes.
WEEI is still on the air?
I fucking hate Felger and Mazz, I have to change it. Mazzaroti makes me scream while in the car driving, urgh
Get woke go broke.
I think you miss the point. They did make a business decision as they were hemorrhaging advertisers. They just completely underestimated Kirk’s popularity and thought he could be replaced. The station manager needs to be fired for making the biggest boneheaded business decision since opie and Anthony announced that Menino had died.
As far as a large social media following well people don’t always un-follow a twitter account right away but believe me they will.
Not sure you should have exposed the sales rep though. Entercom has the e-mails as it an entercom e-mail address. That’s the property of Entercom and not the sales rep. Hiding the “—–” to left of the @ isn’t going to stop Entercom from figuring it out. Like google trophy s they just don’t disappear.
Also, Entercom knows who bailed out. I”m sure that while you haven’t told us, the name of the business might get back to the balled headed wonder. Depending on the business and how big of a dick that day the balled headed wonder is the business might feel some pain.
I contacted turtleboy about advertising, and they never got back to me. Welp now my season’s over so fuck it.
I’m pretty sure TB’s marketing department is serving a sentence and should be out on parole by late summer.
If you notice, there are ZERO local businesses advertising on this blog. I’m sure the fact that he had no problem suing former advertisers, and badmouthing them when they stop advertising has something to do with that.
TB want’s you to pay him $10 per month for “ad free” viewing, the same thing you can get with a free ad blocker.
Is everything in MA this big of a pain in the ass?