The Radio Star

Video killed the radio star… but who was the radio star?

His name was Martin Block, and in the 1930s, he became the world’s first disc jokey to have mass appeal.

Radio technology had been around for some time but it was still finding its forte. Most broadcasters were keen early adopters with a few hundred listeners.

The industry norm was to broadcast live bands, but when the Great Depression hit, stations and hobbyists alike resorted to filling the airwaves with recorded sounds, and the voices of the early “disc jockeys”.

Martin Block was one such individual, who created a “theatre of the mind” by styling his show as “The Make Believe Ballroom”, wherein he held imaginary conversations with musicians, in between playing their records.

Within 4 months, The Make Believe Ballroom had over 4 million listeners, and Martin was receiving 12,000 fan letters a week.

If Martin had been around in the 1990s, he might have been content with being a “superstar DJ”, but he was, first and foremost, an advertising man.

One day, he arranged a sponsor for his program - a company selling weightloss pills. Bear in mind this was the 1930s, so it’s not an especially honorable message, but after seductively suggesting to his female audience, “be fair to your husband by taking the reducing pill” the station received six hundred orders that day, and 3,750 by the end of the week.

From “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco” to “Always buy Chesterfields,” Martin wrote his own lines, and was proud of it. He once managed to sell 300 freezer cabinets during a snowstorm in Newark, New Jersey.

The music industry, and the advertising industry, both sat up and took notice.

Hopeful record labels sent in their new releases, and businesses queued up for one of his quarter-hourly sponsor slots.

For the first time, the radio DJ established himself as a nexus between pop culture, and marketing, and the advertising industry has never looked back.

It was a long time before video came along, and even then, the first TV commercial ever aired was a radio ad with a picture.