I think laughing is the best thing

There is a radio station in the UK call talkSPORT. It’s done pretty well, driven on by a certain Mr Kelvin MacKenzie, a bit of a character in the UK media industry. Some might say this is the understatement of the year.

For some while talSPORT has been running adverts like the one in this post (this was taken from this week's edition of Marketing Week, a UK weekly marketing mag). The idea, so it would seem, is to annoy and rile older marketers and to generate a laugh and a snigger from the younger variety. I suppose the theory is that if you can generate anger and complaint about the tastelessness of the thing then so much the better.

What is so weird is that the majority of talkSPORT's listeners (52% are not “young men”, as the ad suggests, but over the age of 45. Classic FM, the station that it is attacking, has a 69% of its audience that are 45+, not that much different.

Now you would think that talkSPORT would be trumpeting its success at getting such a high number of older and richer listeners, but clearly this is not their intention. Very weird.


TalkSPORT advert in MW