American Top 40

No, not the Ryan Seacrest version in 2026. I'm talking about the Casey Kasem version from the 1970s and early 1980s.

You can hear the old reruns on the 70s channel on SiriusXM.

In my case, I could hear the show from 3pm - 7pm on Sunday afternoon on WQTC, and if I missed anything I could hear it again from 6pm - 10pm on Sunday evening on WIXX in Green Bay.

I once told a client that they should have a Top 40 list for their best forty items, promoted via email marketing. Make it a weekly event. The Marketing Executive had a typically snide remark.

• "Yeah, that's what we want to do. We want to tell our competition what our best selling items are."

Of course, this company sent a pair of clearance/liquidation emails a week. The Marketing Lemonhead had no issue whatsoever telling the competition what didn't work.

If you don't want to communicate your best sellers, create your own opaque criteria like they did on the old American Top 40 Shows.

• Average Rank of Sales, Units, and Conversion Rate, for instance.

Start you email week with your Top 40 items according to this criteria. Share it on Instagram, Facebook, you name it. Have one of your merchants feature the top five items on a brief video on TikTok. Have a pregame show on YouTube where two in-house marketing influencers predict what will happen. Have the pregame show hosts read an email, a long-distance dedication of sorts.

I realize none of you will do this.

But somebody should do this.