I found an old 1982 rate card with AM Drive priced at 1.5x, and it got me wondering which station or market first started selling drive-time as a named daypart, and what client problem that naming solved. I’m asking because we still frame schedules around it when tailoring solutions for new accounts, and I’d love the backstory from folks who were there.
At our FM in the late ’80s we didn’t know who coined it, but we sold AM drive as “windshield time” to fix a car dealer’s “I’m missing commuters” gripe — diaries showed big cume but short TSL, so we added:15s at:10/:40 to stack frequency. If you’re still building around it, pull DOT counts or Google’s typical traffic graphs to prove when your market moves; in one suburb our 2:30–4:00 “school-run” beat classic PM drive. “Drive-time” is a great hook, but the hours are yours to redraw.
Quick example: we boosted a coffee chain by splitting AM drive into a 6:15–7:00 “ramp” and 7:30–8:45 “crush,” priced the latter higher, and tied both to traffic; it solved their “wasted early hours” gripe and lifted visits. “Drive-time” still sells, but we redraw the clock using Google/Waze congestion and Nielsen’s commute curves: Insights | Nielsen. Anyone else carving a short school-run burst around 2:40–3:30 for QSRs?
We did a similar 1.5x on a 1990 sheet and branded it “commuter halo,” selling a grocery on a simple “two touches before 8” tied to top-of-hour news and the:08 weather — your 1982 card logic with a friendlier name. Small caveat: the premium only stuck when we capped units and guaranteed first/last-in-break; if a client balks at old labels, I reframe it as “pre-task moments” and keep the guardrails the same.