Can You Program Listeners As Well As Your Radio Station?

Want listeners to think of your call letters each time their phone rings?

All you need to do is play the sound of a phone ringing and immediately say your call letters after it time and time again.

Wouldn't it be nice if subliminal advertising was that easy?

The "Ignore This Message" website puts it all in this slightly tongue-in-cheek context:

Subliminal advertising doesn't exist. But if it does, it doesn't work. But if it does, it's not a problem. But if it is, it doesn't matter. But if it does, ignore it.

Snopes.com debunks the long-standing rumor that secret cues inside a Coke commercial got movie-goers to buy more popcorn.

Here in Seattle, UW Prof Tony Greenwald has been skeptically studying "Subliminal Influence" for almost five decades: "I think unconscious cognition is a pretty dumb but fast processor that scans sensory input and directs our attention."

Thus, he is at odds with followers of Freud, who contend the unconscious is a very smart and powerful entity that protects a person from psychic threats, such as knowledge of a fatal illness or personal incompetence, that are too anxiety-provoking for the more fragile conscious mind.

So, associate your brand with a ringing phone if it makes you feel diabolically clever, but don't count on this tactic to increase your ratings in any consistent and measurable way.

Win Radio Creative's Annual $100,000 Prizes

Normally, I reserve my Twitter account for "re-Tweeting" and try to at the very least put a new spin on news items adequately covered by the traditional trades when I blog. However, the annual call for entries, creative seminars and announcement of the Radio Mercury awards deserves an exception.

The prizes are substantial, the chief judge is impressive, the audio examples will inspire you.

Click here and spend some time on their site!

"Reinvent" This!

It wouldn't be a radio business convention or meeting if someone didn't call once again for reinvention of one aspect of what we do or another.

There's nothing wrong with rethinking, of course, but Arbitron's Ron Rodrigues (Marketing Manager for the Programming Services Team) has a better idea in my view:

The next time your sales staff is driving you crazy with value-added, got-to-have-this-or-the-client-will-cancel demands, educate them even further about the power of radio.

Go to the next sales meeting and give them the five-question pop quiz below. Bring a pair of concert tickets or a $5 gift card for the person who scores the best. Be sure to count how many times you hear “Hmm—didn’t know that.”

Before you walk back to your office feeling like the smartest person in the building, remind the sales team that all of this information can be found in Arbitron’s “Radio Today by the Numbers.” This tool will arm them with the information they need to show clients how well radio works for advertisers.

Radio Listenership Quiz

Q1: What percentage of Americans aged six and up does radio reach on a weekly basis?

1. 73%
2. 83%
3. 93%
4. 103%
5. Are you counting all eight days of the week?

Q2: How many hours a month do consumers spend listening to the radio?

1. 14.5 million
2. 1.45 billion
3. 14.5 billion
4. A gazillion

Q3: If there are 10 people in a room, how many are likely to have listened to the radio in the past day?

1. 5
2. 6
3. 7
4. 8
5. It depends on the room.

Q4: What percentage of consumers does radio reach during prime time (6AM–7PM) each day?

1. 60%
2. 70%
3. 80%
4. 90%
5. More than newspaper

Q5: Rank these devices from highest to lowest by the percentage of radio listeners who own one:

1. Digital Camera
2. Computer
3. HDTV
4. Cell Phone
5. Predator Drone

Answer Key:

Q1: C—Radio reaches 93% of all Americans on a weekly basis.

Q2: C—Consumers listen to 14.5 billion hours of radio each month.

Q3: C—Slightly more than 7 out of 10 consumers listen to radio each day.

Q4: D—90% of consumers tune in between 6AM and 7PM.

Q5: From highest percentage of ownership to lowest—Cell Phone (90%), Computer (84%), HDTV (69%), Digital Camera (67%), Predator Drone (unknown %).

I'd suggest that our agency friends who seem to be hooked on nothing but the age-old negotiating ploy called "cost per point" that actually drives the percentage they make on radio buys down, since an agency commission on a small number is less than buying radio intelligently, using qualitative, all our multimedia platforms and involving us in your creative design, testing and execution.

They might increase the rate the agency pays a bit, but wouldn't that increase the dollars buyers make from radio and also act as an incentive for the radio side of the bargain to maximize results, not just lower our prices?

Make radio a full partner in working for the client instead of just a low cost vendor you can beat up in long-used ways.

Let's talk together about reinventing THAT.

Is Your Show, Your Commercial, Your Imaging "Sexy?"

One of the best aspects of what I do for a living is that the job description changes constantly.

Consulting requires understanding changing listener tastes, working with executives and coaching talent seems to call on new skills, requiring always learning new things every day.

In 2012, Job #1 is helping Gen Xers and Leading Edge boomers "engage" and increase usage from Millennials. We're "Digital Immigrants" (learning new media as a second language, having been raised in an analog world) and they're "Digital Natives" (they learned to play video games, program a TV remote, interact with a computer before they spoke their first word).

The size of "the Taylor Swift generation" (click to watch the insightful video produced by Natalie Vardabasso and Kristina Emmott as a midterm project) means they simply can't be ignored, as the oldest of them are about to turn 30 and already they dominate the 25-34 demo.

I have been wishing I could find a way to let their parents and grandparents who still hope to be relevant in media for at least a few years more hear how life sounds to their Millennial listeners and now it's possible thanks to this man.

Meet Jad Abumrad: The man who Canada's Globe And Mail this week said has "made public radio sexy." (click to read the article)

The show uses any tools it can to illustrate the ideas it presents and hold the listener’s attention: tiny musical compositions, for example. Sound effects such as eerie echoed munching noises bring the listener to the ocean floor where scavenging hagfish devour a whale corpse. Layered voices talking on top of each other pass the story from person to person, just like in a real conversation. And rather than the formality of introducing each new speaker that listeners are accustomed to, these appear with the sound of throat clearing or a quick “ready?” before they are even introduced. For Abumrad, all this evolution is about fighting back against what he calls the “tune-out moments” of conventional storytelling and using the language of sound to jolt his listeners out of the inertia of the familiar.

How many "tune out moments" are there in your programming? Ask anyone in a PPM market: tune out moments literally do cause REAL tune-outs and drive ratings down, whether they happen in a song, a commercial, a promo, stationality elements or when an air personality opens a microphone.

“It’s totally accessible, which is awesome. I think that’s a trend in radio, and especially podcasts, making it accessible,” says Colleen Joyce, a 29-year-old living in Victoria, BC.

Do you have more listeners to your podcasts than to your terrestrial radio broadcasts? And, by the way, how are your numbers 25-34, let alone 18-24 and teens?

Perhaps you should spend some time experiencing WNYC's Radiolab.

Why Radio Stations Get Away With Lying

The New York Times' "Debaters" feature last week was a thoughtful analysis on why politicians feel the need to lie and why, as a result, their most passionate supporters start lying to themselves.

Meanwhile, the inspiring author Andy Andrews is on a book tour promoting his new very easy and quick read How Do You Kill 11 Million People?.

I'm not going to wade into those controversial waters today, but all of that focus on the public's lack of trust of institutions that seems to pop up for me each time I pick up something to read right now is also a good reminder that radio stations so routinely lie to listeners needlessly that, just like most of us with politicians, they are turned off and have stopped paying attention.

• Do we really need to "promise" 50 minutes of music every hour when we actually only play 48? Do listeners conduct an hourly auction with their time and only spend it with the station that promises to be the highest bidder? Would they listen less if we told them how much music we really play in the hour?
  
• If the cost of a commercial free hour is a commercial-filled hour in the hours just before and after it, who are we kidding?
• Is saying "the station that cares about the community" believable on a 24/7 voice tracked outlet?
• "12 in a row coming next" is followed by an eight unit commercial break.
• Positioning "best new music" on your radio station is followed by yet another play of Garth Brooks' "The Dance."
  

I could go on. So could you.

Listen to your radio station today and listen for those little lies you're telling so routinely that many jocks think that's "personality" and "entertainment."

Get them off the air. Entertain, interact, make the listener the star. Keep it upbeat and fun. Make me feel something. Paint me colorful word pictures. Tell me a story. Involve me.

Just not a fairy tale, please.

Why do radio stations get away with lying? Could it be because no one is paying very much attention?

Still Passing Out Plastic To The 9Th Caller?

Asking your listeners to drive across town to pick up a prize?

Jim Pattison Broadcast Group's JRfm/Vancouver is doing it differently.

And, as usual with digital, there are lots of helpful metrics that come along with this approach, like:

• 230 people came to the JRfm music store on just one December day during the promotion, which drove impressive page views for many weeks.
• The strong # 1 showing of Chad Brownlee's single, for example, is evidence that Vancouver country listeners appreciate and want to own Canadian country music.

Three? Two? One? Zero?

As it has become increasingly obvious that Clear Channel and Cumulus have both been rolling out standardized, duplicate playlists across an increasing number of their very largest market stations, I've been speculating where that leaves the trade charts today, hoping that it will open opportunity for all of those highly successful stations to somehow still be represented - as networks, perhaps - while also opening up the chance for additional stations to be monitored and report as well.

In response to that, yesterday, Scott Fuller added this comment...

I'm sure you may disagree Jaye, but I personally feel that the gradual dismantling of the 'chart system' would be the best thing to happen to country radio moving forward.

Of course, I use charts to verify music decisions I make.

But ask the question: 'what if they weren't there tomorrow?' We still have a log to schedule, full of what the audience wants to hear and separates us from the other guys.

It might force we radio programmers to do something that's deeply fallen from our daily routine: caring what our own audience has to say. Sure, we'd still play the A+ from Nashville, but I'll bet we'd give a lot more spins to the B- in our own backyard over Nashville's third or fourth tier.

And just imagine the thousands of different 'types' of country radio 'mini formats' that would follow in their wake. Call letters with character once again.

I don't hate charts, and I'm not saying tomorrow, but it is starting to look like the way the business is going in general.

I certainly understand Scott's point of view and it's tempting to agree totally with it, but I still feel that the country format needs multiple trades and as many more reporters as possible.

The shrinking size of the monitored panel seems to me to be one of the factors hurting the speed that new music by unknown artists can move. This week's Billboard Country Update proves statistically that the hits still find a way to cut through and endure, a testament to the weekly efforts of Wade Jesson, Lon Helton, David Ross and their country chart teams' concerted efforts to be judicious.

The rules of the whole system, which admittedly can sometimes be exploited by knowledgeable promoters simply because they are so clear-cut, are well-known. Though no one likes to be the umpire, we think they are generally applied by in an aboveboard, even-handed manner.

Today, it is these forces that have created the need for independent consulting firms to do research, gather objective data from stations and listeners, keep at arms-length from the record promotion business and offer dependable, objective guidance on music to radio based solidly in listener reaction.

Frankly, the consulting business is GREAT right now partially because of these very actions that consolidated groups are taking in the face of incredible promotional pressure. Their competition is increasingly looking for believable help in separating the honest hits from the hype (of which there is plenty).

Country stations want and need trustworthy data more than ever, and we work hard to maintain high ethical standards in the information we provide to our clients.

A&O thinks the future of the formats and radio broadcasters we serve depends on it.