The Era of the Derek
[Text: Bill Rosenblatt ’83]
WPRB is one of a very few student-run radio stations in the country with a commercial license, meaning that it can sell airtime. The station has always sold ads, but the highest level of ad sales was undoubtedly the early-mid 1980s, and the man responsible for this was Derek Berghuis ’83 – a living legend in WPRB history.
Derek – his last name is pronounced “Berg-hice” – was drawn to WPRB by his brother Brian Berghuis ’81 and Brian’s friend Ashley Ellott ’80, respectively the station’s Business Manager and Station Manager, and all alums of the same prep school in Toronto, Canada. He got on air quickly during his freshman year as a member of the news department and as the “news sidekick” on a show called WPRB Weekend, which Program Director Jason Meyer ’80 did with Ellott and Derek as a commercial-sounding “chatty morning show” on Saturday mornings. WPRB Weekend left the airwaves when Ellott and Meyer graduated. Derek did not find his position as Mercer County News Editor very exciting, so he switched to sales.
We all found out very quickly that Derek was capable of selling ice to the inhabitants of the northern provinces of his native country.
The task at the time for ad salespeople was to charm owners of local businesses into buying ads at prices that were a fraction of what the professional stations in the area were charging. We had no data about our listenership; WPRB rarely showed up in what were then called the ARBs (Arbitron ratings – now Nielsen Audio). Instead the sales pitch was mostly about supporting a student-run business and maybe reaching an audience of students on campus and area residents attracted to WPRB’s programming. Derek was charming indeed: his combination of stereotypical Canadian mannerisms (politeness; liberal use of “eh,” “aroond,” “aboot,” and “washroom”), preppy mode of dress, well-used brown leather briefcase, and affable manner won them over. But behind the personal charm lay a killer combination of entrepreneurial drive and organizational skills.
Although Derek’s talent and energy were paramount, two other factors made his success possible. First was that Princeton, NJ was still a town full of locally-run businesses that could make their own ad-buying decisions — as opposed to the chain stores (The Gap, Ralph Lauren, etc.) that began to infiltrate the area later on, which handled advertising at national levels through big agencies. Second was that Jason Meyer had created a new structure for WPRB’s program schedule that eschewed freeform programming in favor of the block format that continues more or less to this day: classical in the early morning, jazz from midmorning through lunchtime, rock until the evening, and “specialty shows” (blues, reggae, electronic, etc.) later at night. This gave Derek a “product” that was easier to sell.
Derek’s first tactic was to focus on the Morning Classical block from 6-10AM. It was an ideal outlet for the types of businesses that littered Nassau and Witherspoon Streets: jewelry stores, clothing boutiques, tea salons, gift shops, gourmet food stores, and so on. He created sponsorship packages that included ads as well as scripted DJ mentions at the top of each hour that resembled “Supported by…” messages heard on public radio. Soon, and for quite some time, Morning Classical’s ad inventory was sold out. Someone had to produce all those ads, and more often than not, that someone was me – as Production Director and Derek’s sophomore year roommate. That’s why many ads from that period were simple voice-over-music affairs: we had to crank a lot of them out. Derek even voiced an ad himself occasionally.
LISTEN: Derek Berghuis voices an ad for Grover Lumber.
Yet Derek didn’t officially run the sales department until later on. The following year, a more senior WPRBite — who shall remain nameless — became head of the sales department, with Derek working under him. But it was Derek who sold the vast majority of the ads. (Except for nightclubs, bars, etc., which Derek tended to leave for others.) This caused the older guy much insecurity. He agreed to let Derek call himself “Sales Director” because it sounded more impressive to customers, but he designated himself “Executive Sales Director.” And he created a sketch on that year’s WPRB Banquet Tape in which he portrayed Derek as “The Derek,” a sales robot that operated under his control. Once he graduated, Derek became Sales Director for real… but the sobriquet “The Derek” stuck.
Derek’s sales efforts spread rapidly from Morning Classical to other dayparts. He recruited several people and built what may have been the largest sales department in WPRB history. When I became Program Director, Derek and I got into occasional arguments about making the station’s rock airsound more commercial so that he could sell more ads — not that I could have done much about that, even if I had wanted to.
During the summers, Derek interned in sales at CFJR, a commercial AM station in Brockville, Ontario, a small town on the St. Lawrence River. Charles Steinberg ’82, who handled sales on WPRB during one of those summers, found it easy to sell more ads to the base of local businesses that Derek cultivated. Derek was succeeded by Marc Crimmins ’84, who kept the momentum going and maintained ad sales revenue at about the same level for another year before the decline set in. WPRB’s ad sales (adjusted for inflation) never achieved the same levels again. The encroachment of national chain stores into Princeton, together with the shifting of the station’s listenership towards Philadelphia after the 1990 power increase, made it much more difficult for Princeton University students to sell ads on WPRB.
Derek went on to become one of the very few WPRB alums to do it professionally. After business school, he did ad sales at Dow Jones Radio Network, then at ABC, where he rose to Senior Vice President of the company’s radio network. When ABC Radio relocated its headquarters from NYC to Dallas, Derek returned to Canada. There he got a position as sales manager at CFTR in Toronto – the “TR” stood for Ted Rogers, Canada’s biggest media mogul and owner of the station. He was promoted to General Manager and grew the station to #1 in all of Canada. He then became head of sales for the entire Rogers chain of radio stations, making him the most important radio sales executive in his native land.