In the middle of the bloodbath that was 2009, 102 Jamz, the #1 station in Orlando had $4000 on the books. This was about the point where CBS had an emergency confab of all their markets in the state at a hotel in Orlando to try to figure out what they could do to stop the bleeding.
The #1 answer from that meeting was that “great copy sells spots”. And not a lot of training had gone into teaching the sales team how to craft a great spot, so some of the stations started trolling for interns with writing skills. And they churned out amazing, masterful copy that did end up selling some schedules.
One of my favorite creative people was making starvation wages in Glens Falls and started writing ads for my clients at $50 a pop. That’s how she survived.
So….
….in about 2002 I was at a youth sports event and for some reason a guy jokingly yelled “Hurrah!” Without batting an eye, my friend Cathy did a little tap dance and said, “And the name of the store is Hurrah…3…4.”
It was the tag line to one of the most successful Radio campaigns in the Twin Cities for a chain of young women’s clothing stores in the mid-late 1970’s.
The spot was a girl tap dancing and singing:
“This is a slightly irregular radio commercial for a slightly irregular store…3…4…Hurrah is the name and what they sell there’s irregular clothes you can hardly tell they’re so slightly irregular you can hardly see or care, you oughta get yourself a blouse, or top or shirt or jeans to wear, you never really know what they have at Hurrah but whatever they have is really CHEAP”
And then some guy with a voice would add in sales or new locations and it would end with her breathlessly saying “And the name of the store is Hurrah…3…4.”
Cathy’s ability to recall a campaign from 25 years previous spurred me to write something about it and every year since, someone, somewhere, trying to find a copy of that commercial stumbles on my piece and emails me about it. One was from a woman who ran an ad agency in Denmark and in 1976 had been an exchange student in Bloomington and the spot had stuck with her all these years as the singular great Radio commercial she’d heard and she HAD to share this with her team.
So here it is. It’s scoped by a Radio guy who recorded it off KDWB when he was in school in 1977. You miss the first couple of seconds and they divert from the regular format for her to do some ad libbing at the end. But you get the gist of it.
This is only top-of-mind because we’re trying to sell spots and I got this email yesterday:
Hello Paige,
I’ve been trying to find the Hurrah commercial online for years, and I finally stumbled on your post from a decade ago! Is there any chance you’re still at this address? Is there any chance I’ll get to hear that fabulous jingle again?
Hope so!
Best wishes to you & yours,
Gina Woods
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