Maintaining Listener Loyalty

1. Be consistent.  Unfamiliarity is almost always a negative.  Surround it with the familiar, so it appears as a pleasant surprise, an expected part of the overall presentation.
2. Be the soundtrack of your listener’s life.
3. It’s a 140 character, 17 second, society.  Be brief.  Respect the listener’s time.
4. Be a companion and friend, never an announcer.  Avoid phrase patterns and verbal crutches.
5. Cluster music into long sets.  Control commercial content. 
6. Hopefully, you can play fewer commercials than your direct competition.  If not, your only winning option is longer stopsets and fewer of them, placed equally on both sides of quarter hours, equidistant from each other in the hour if you’re being measured by Nielsen PPM methodology.  If it’s BBM PPM, the station with the strongest content and the least minutes of potential tune outs wins.  If it’s diaries that make up your ratings, place commercial breaks so that you hold your listener for 35 minutes, equalling four “quarter hours.”  If it’s a phone survey, top of kindness wins.  Use telephone in your contesting and have the biggest, best prizes and promotions.
7. Two five unit breaks per hour is ideal.
8. Count units, not minutes.  From the listener’s point of view, intros, outros, :30s, :60s, and even “mentions” are all commercials.
9. Play only hits.  Never add a song until you believe it’s going to be a hit.
10. Play “clutter busters” once every quarter with your staff.  Make a list of the least popular bits, benchmarks and programs you air from the talent’s perspective and then test them with listeners in an online survey or focus groups.  Drop unpopular ones.
11. Promote, but never HYPE.  Do what you say and offer proof.

Listing these things is easy.  DOING them is hard.  Odds are, your owner or manager will expect you to win loyalty while stinting on some of them.

That's why we believe you need a consultant.  You can sometimes win while cutting a few of these corners, but if you need to constantly and predictably do so.

There's only one way to do that.

To constantly dominate a market position, be uncompromising when it comes to all listener loyalty drivers.

Guest Commentary On Radio's Engagement Goals

Lately, every time I click on something, especially a link on Facebook, I have to sit through a commercial that's up to 30-seconds in length.  It's getting rarer and rarer that you get an ad where you can bail out after 5-seconds.

Yesterday, I wanted to stream a station and was greeted with a 15-second spot for the Washington Lottery.  But the stream died and I had to restart it, only to hear that exact spot again.  Without getting into all the reasons why, I had to hear that exact commercial 6 times within 5 minutes.  UNCLE!

Not all, but a lot of these ads are being bonused to stations' best advertisers.  So, if we're GIVING them away, why not stick to the shortest ones -- the 10s?  I've seen them cross my desk and it is frequently the option of the AE to select which spot the station can use. 

Have we reached a time when the sales department no longer thinks about the listener and what used to be part of what we called Listener Fatigue?  The Internet is not like a radio station where the listener knows he/she is waiting for music and can turn the radio down, mentally tune out, or literally tune out.   But when people click onto a link on the Internet, it's literally in your face.  You're sitting at a computer monitor or tablet with your nose pressed against a video screen, so it's difficult to escape the ad without shutting down the browser.  On top of that, you're liable to get the exact same ad over and over if you are clicking around to various sites.  I can't believe that leaves an impression that the advertiser wanted.

To me, there's no longer anything that is worth sitting through a 30-second spot in my face.  More often than not, I say, "Forget it," and go back to what I was doing. 

Doesn't it seem like a good idea to drop a cookie into the person's browser to let the advertisers know they've already made their point and to give the listener a break for a change?

  -- Jon Badeaux

PS:  When I first left BP Consulting Group back in the mid-90s and went back on my own as a consultant, Jon was my first associate and I still worship his intelligence and integrity, as do many of A&O&B's long-standing clients.

Managing Engagement

When Clarke Ingram was PD of KRQQ/Tucson he remembered the old radio programming saw "the more times you say your call letters, the higher your ratings will be."  So, he mandated that his personalities say "K-R-Q" a minimum of 60 times per hour and the station hit a TEN share.

PPM, of course, has changed the metrics in larger markets, but Lord Kelvin's maxim ("If you can't measure it, you can't improve it") still holds true with smart programmers.

• Want to improve the time listeners spend with your radio station?  Figure out how many occasions your average fan spends with you and create ways to grow that number.
• Want to build your email database?  Figure out why your current list subscribed and do more of the things - free concert tickets, discounts on valued planned future purchases, learn how to buy the best seats in advance.
• Want to improve the level of engagement your social and text fans have with your radio station?  It's tempting to begin counting the responses from listeners in answer to questions you post and ask more of those same questions day after day.  

That can grow your numbers short term, but it also will dilute the authentic character of your personality images, making the kind of social interactions you have more like the very same kind everyone else you compete with also has.

Just like a political candidate, it is important to resonate with the values of your target if you hope to win the election.  But, taken too far, everyone stands for the same things, making some positions and content too generic to build memorability and loyalty.

Before starting a count of anything, the savvy programmer figures out what makes each personality unique and appealing to the largest numbers of target listeners, coaching to improve the quality and consistency of those moments.

That way, as engagement stats build, so does the stickiness of each voice on the radio station on all available touch points.

Allow Me To Propose One More Initial

I admire Cox Radio for the way it operates and manages its radio stations as indicated by the titles it uses for programming executives and it was great to see the Drew Bland's appointment this week in Orlando as further evidence of it.

What used to be called a "PD" is now "B&P," and I'll bet it won't be long until that position gets another letter:  "BP & E."

Today's radio programmer certainly protects the brand, spending a lot of time improving programming, but the importance of new media can't be understated as well.

A big part of today's "B&P" job is also overseeing, encouraging and perfecting all forms of listener engagement as well.

Do Old Basics Still Work?

Legendary programmer/radio research pioneer Todd Wallace recently wrote this article for the Australian trade-publication RadioToday (Aussie's still are dealing with only diary measurement). Given last week's thread I opened, I am taking the liberty of posting it here in hopes it generates even more reaction):

One of the questions I get asked most often these days deals with whether the old “tried and true” radio basics, as they apply to Breakfast Shows, are still valid.

Here in North America, the introduction of PPM ratings technology (Portable People Meter measurement by Nielsen and BBM) has caused many programmers to question or re-think their stance on these basic programming truths.

What should be considered first and foremost are two facts: 

 1)  A strong breakfast show or personality is one of the most-mentioned reasons listeners still cite, even today, for why they like listening to, or feel compelled to listen to, a radio station first thing in the morning, My all-time favorite radio adage, “win breakfast, win the war” still stands. When Mulray joined Triple M numbers spiked, when Wayne “The Poo” Roberts joined 4BC the station immediately began making boatloads of cash, and recently then Kyle and Jackie O switched stations, the new world order of Sydney radio ratings instantly changed. 

2)  Nearly all truly great radio stations have defining breakfast shows.

A strong (as they say down under) "brekky" show..

• Can serve as a cume magnet, drawing listeners from other stations all over the dial (and even from other media)  
• Can provide an effective promotional vehicle which helps recycle listeners into other dayparts. 
• Can be the “center stage” for addressing community needs with outstanding, imaginative public service projects. 
• Can serve as an effective platform for sales promotions (in a way that couldn’t be supported in other music-driven dayparts) 
• Can be utilized to “camouflage” increased commercial inventory before 9am so it doesn’t have to run in other dayparts where it may be more noticeable.  

Some programmers seem to think PPM means everything has changed. But the more you examine what really drives breakfast listening, the more you see the validity of maintaining a strong basics discipline.

My friend and colleague Country Consultant Jaye Albright put it this way: “Listeners still perceive and make use of radio in the same ways they always have. It’s the measurement techniques and the sample that changed, requiring new usage tactics and perceptual- driven strategies”.

With that in mind, let us proceed to look at the bigger brekky basics and update some thinking to today.

Station Identification. You can be the funniest and/or most outrageous jock in the world, but it you don’t get proper credit in a Nielsen ratings diary, your numbers will never match your full potential. Even when being measured by PPM, regular reminders of who you are (call letters or brand name identifier) and what your address is (frequency) and what you’re famous for (“the new Country leader”) helps to remind a panelist of where and why they should return again every morning. That hasn’t changed.

Timechex. Breakfast listeners still largely listen the way they always have during their multi-tasked morning routine full of activities. Regular time-checks every 3 or 4 minutes help a listener maintain his/her body-clock without having to make a conscious effort to look at a clock or watch. (“I know when The Dirty Joke Of The Day comes on, I need to be out the door”) A time-check can also a useful punctuator or seque-tool in the middle of live content. Double-time, digital followed by analog time (“6:43, that’s 17 before 7”) reinforces the fact you are providing the time-check. (Many listeners may not notice you’ve given the time if you only give single-time.) That hasn’t changed.

Weather. Listeners still want to know what elements they’ll be facing on their way to work/school/etc. You still can’t give weather often enough in the morning (as long as it’s concise). Current temp, sky- weather, and a capsule forecast of the next extreme high several times an hour.
That hasn’t changed.

Humor. Even on a so-called “serious” station, something “magic” happens when you don’t take yourself so seriously. Most listeners still like hearing something that amuses them. Remember to keep humor positive (not degrading or poking fun at someone else’s expense). Funny is still funny. Most people like to laugh when they wake up. That hasn’t changed.

Features. Many listeners are feature-junkies, especially bedrock breakfast benchmarks. An effective feature can take what might ordinarily be just a throw-away line, joke, or concept, and give it new life in a way that cannot be ignored. Programmed at the same time every morning as a benchmark bit can generate a tune-in cuming-pattern just for a feature, which will have much longer time-spent-listening (diary) or time-spent-exposed (metered) benefits. Too often, PD’s or jocks tend to stop doing a feature long before its real “use by” date and sometimes end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As ancient as they may be to PD’s and jocks trying to stay on the cutting edge, “old” features like “the Mystery Oldie” or “the Joke Of The Day” or “Battle Of The Sexes” trivia can still be very entertaining to the average listener. That hasn’t changed.

Essential Information. When a listener wakes up, they want to know if the world is still there. And they expect an efficient summary of news they need to know. Enough of a story-count (of real news, not fluff) to bring them “up to date” is sufficient. (I suggest 6 quickies consisting of a clever grabber- headline and an explanatory follow-up sentence,) Plus traffic, weather, and sports-shorts. That hasn’t changed.

Topicality. What is today’s big local event? The thing that everyone will be talking about at work. It may not necessarily be “local” but it’s what locals are or will be buzzing about today. And keep it going all morning. Mentioning it once at 6:18 is not enough. You’ll have a new audience again by 6:55, and at 7:30, and at 8:15. That hasn’t changed

Music The amount of music that should be programmed is largely dependant on how much truly great content is regularly prepared every morning. Some personalities or ensemble teams have so much excellent subject matter that listeners actually prefer to hear them rather than a song. But most shows benefit from scheduling music at least once or twice each quarter-hour as part of the breakfast entertainment mix. I caution clients against programming music-sweeps in a breakfast show. In my experience, most listeners don’t wake up clamoring sweeps, they’d rather hear a great bit or feature after a song plays, and a great song after great spoken or produce content has played. That hasn’t changed.

So what HAS changed?

One way that the application of PPM measurement has changed breakfast shows in the States is that it has provided tangible proof to personalities and teams willing to dive deep into the numbers that brevity is indeed the soul of wit. Even that is an old concept that is still valid, even more valid, today!

Shows that have learned to get to the point fast and streamline their schticke have seen their numbers increase – often significantly – often very quickly. There was a time that some of those personalities just “started talking until they could finally think of something to say”. Now they’ve learned how to focus their content and improve their methods of show prep, often by hiring effective talent coaches.

The good news is that jocks who have educated themselves about what listeners will tolerate, minute- by-minute, find that when what used to be a 4-or-5-minute loosey-goosey rambling is transformed into a tight 2-minute efficient bit with a great payoff, there is a definite and immediate ratings benefit.

Bottom-line: You can never go wrong by making words work. And by getting morning personalities in the habit of scrutinizing every single bit and feature of their show.

    -- Todd Wallace (602-866-TODD), Phoenix, AZ

New Gold Has More Than Just A Familiar Sound

A&O&B's Fall 2013 gold research composites are being tabbed and categorized now and probably the first thing most client stations will note as they placed the new gold recommendation on the air is the return of some “older” titles. 

Top of the ranker, by "net positive" among A&O&B USA client stations

Top of the ranker, by "net positive" among A&O&B Canadian client stations

In fact, two factors combine to make this development less startling then it first appears. 

The very small proportion of the library that now comes from the 1990's is songs that test very well 25-34.  

These young people may not even know that these tunes aren’t new country songs! 

They see them as a return to more traditional sounds, which is universally appreciated by the core. 

And, due to careful categorization of them, this well under 10% of your updated gold music library actually gets played less 5% of the time.

It's all about "variety," and research continues to reinforce that is highly-prized by most of the target, while their primary demand is to hear their favorites more than anything else.

Becky Brenner

She had already done traffic, middays, production director and promotion director duties by the time I arrived at KMPS and I subsequently worked, first as her boss and then later as her consultant, with her for most of the 25 years she was there, spending 16 winning literally every radio programming accolade possible.

So, there are innumerable things I have learned from her.

Let me highlight one that just happened today.

Some of us, after numerous years of listening to new music and being pushed to add things that don't sound bad on the air by aggressive promotion, many of us become somewhat jaded and adopt the point of view that since almost anyone can be auto-tuned, Pro-Tooled, reverbed with those great Nashville backup musicians and singers to the point that even a mediocre song can "test" well enough and a vocalist can sound good enough that you develop a "heck, it won't hurt me that much" attitude.

Maybe they'll beg and plead, catching you on a good day.

Maybe the artist will do a free show for your listeners.

Maybe you overlook on "just this one" that performance and star power matter.  What rings the bell for all elements of the business is to reserve radio airplay for potential stars who understand "performance," who release only amazing songs that resonate to the point that in a year or two the artist has four or five songs plus a reputation for delighting in-person audiences so that they can pack a large arena.

Keeping your standards that high requires a passion for and understanding of all aspects of the music business.

It means recognizing that you go to showcases and live shows not to get your ego stroked, but to see how an act commands the stage, moves the listener.

That takes time and effort.

This morning Becky was a four hour drive from our Seattle offices in Central Washington where A&O&B clients and listeners had attended Watershed Music Festival. 

The event's three day passes had been long-since sold out.  No one day tickets were ever available, due to the three-day-pass sell out.  Becky felt that it was her duty to spend at least one day at the event and yet wasn't able to spend more time than that due to other professional commitments.

I told her to skip it.  Our clients could fill us in on how it all went on the phone, but that's not Becky  Brenner.  She wanted to experience as much of it as possible.  A music FAN, she sees it as part of her duties.  She paid for a three day pass so that she could go for at least the final day.

I've learned how to be a passionate country music fan, even after four decades in the business, thanks to the example of Becky Brenner.

For Your Tool Kit

My recent items (5 Last) "Measure It To Manage It", Simple Stats To Track,  Gauging Your Growth and Radio Management Vital Signs attracted a helpful, welcome response from Andrew Curran, COO at DMR:

Love your series of areas to measure. 

Since you mentioned having people start a spreadsheet, I thought I’d share with you one that we developed with a variety of Key Performance Indicators in mind. 

Feel free to pass it along (click to download the xls). 

One tab is a detailed view and one tab is a top line management view.

A new acronym to add to your vocabulary:  "KPI."

(5 Last) "Measure It To Manage It"

16.     Number of local stories on your website with listener comments/reactions

17.     Number of blog posts by every personality ranked by page view and responses.

18.     Open rate of your weekly e-mail (to determine effectiveness of subject lines, etc.)

19.     Text Club subscriber rate and unsubscribes

20.     Website Metrics: 

           a.  Unique Users

           b.  Total Pageviews

           c.  Top 5 Most Viewed Pages

 - a final set of numbers from some smart managers willing this week to share what they watch to be sure their stations pace toward their goals.

No doubt, you can think of many more.

So can I, but if you have 20 priorities, do you have any priorities?

Start with this 20 and focus on the handful of them where you find your farthest from where you want to be that will move you forward fastest to where you need to be.

Once you ingrain the levers on them in your daily execution, pick another five and repeat until all 20 metrics are positive.

Only then, start to look for more metrics to measure and manage.

(More) Simple Stats To Track

Readers have been sharing the numbers they watch like clockwork to be sure their stations pace positively.

A few more:

11.     Number of public appearances per week by each on air personality/estimated number of people who attended each appearance

12.     Number of cold calls per week by salesperson

13.     Number of spec spots presented to new prospects per week

14.     Number of irritating commercials which harm listening levels per week

15.     Number of advertisers per month (and names) on your competition, not you

Thanks to BCAB for inviting me to moderate their research panel which featured Chris Byrnes, Warren Kurtzman and Sean Ross, providing the idea for creating a list of key objective management data.

Gauging Your Growth

I started the list with just five.  Now, thanks to many readers, you're going to want to start a table or a spreadsheet to track these numbers on the same date each month:

6.     Annual survey of email database: how satisfied are you 1-10? (% "very vs % not)

7.     # of Facebook friends + gain/loss + followed by # of people

8.     Twitter followers (gain/loss)

9.     Total number of units available for sale per week/revenue = average unit rate (track for total and also by sales person)

10.     Number of different advertisers per month by business category

Radio Management Vital Signs

Crucial (but no-cost) numbers to track to make sure your station is on course:

1.     Call your station’s business office phone.  How many rings before someone answers?

2.     (if you have ratings) Weekly cume (daily cume if PPM) trend

3.     Target demo TSL (daily sessions if PPM) trend

4.     Track streaming hours tuned monthly.

5.     Contacts in your listener email database (grown/loss)

Write these numbers down on the same date every month.  If they're not consistent or even better, growing, you're dying.

What else do you trend to be sure you are on pace toward your goals?
 

Philosophy

The first time I saw a resume from a programming applicant which also contained a multi-page statement of the person's philosophy of programming, I was so impressed.

Now, 15-million of them later, I have learned a valuable lesson:  the strongest philosophy (or strategy) doesn't achieve anything unless it's audible on the radio every time listeners tune in.

These days, I am less impressed by lengthy statements of general and fundamental problems.  Now, I want to know what you do to bring it all to life in entertaining, engaging, compelling ways.

How's your execution of that philosophy in reality?

How about laying that out in detail, with proof?

Stand out from the pack.

Rotations: What I Think They Mean

I hope you have been as interested as I have been in Country Aircheck's series on what PPM is teaching country programmers about rotations.  Now that they used a quote from what I told R. J. Curtis in this week's edition when he requested that I spill my guts on the topic, I hope you'll be interested in everything I said to him about it:

PPM shows us that almost universally the average time spent exposed per listening occasion is very close to 10-11 minutes.  Heavy users give their favorite stations maybe three or four times that much.  And, that that we've seen those realities, there are some folks, like Cox's K92/Orlando, who have upped their spins on a very small number of extremely popular songs to levels previously unheard of and - guess what? - those songs do not "burn" and in fact often test better faster.  Is 50 spins?  70 spins?  100 spins? right for you?  I'd say to try it only if you have extremely reliable weekly music testing to precisely monitor reaction on a consistent basis.  It's even better if you also have MScore data as well, so that you can pull anything that could be hurting you very quickly.  Since A&O is proud to works with OM and PM Len Shackelford, I can testify that it is working.

Stations which do that appear to be finding that cume can go up more than we might have previously thought possible without hurting "time spent listening" as calculated by old diary metrics.  This is because only a very small number of country panelists are ultra-core.  In a top ten market I looked at recently there were four panelists who were listening to radio nine hours per day or more.  Obviously, if one of these people is in your panel sample, you need to be extremely cautious about spinning anything they don't love regardless of how much.  Another 75 panelists used radio between 100 and 200 quarter hours a week.  Again, if you have several of those panelists, you'll want to be cautious about hyper-spinning anything that would lose them.

However, after those folks, the vast majority of radio users spend time in fairly fixed amounts of time and instead give their daily cume and daily occasions to stations with exceed their expectations musically and that's not normally unfamiliar new music.

The more stations sharing very similar playlists the more crucial song quality becomes.  If you're the only station playing your type of music, you of course have more leeway as long as you don't have any interest in stealing listeners from your shared-cume competition.

To me, this means "tight" is "right."

I know that there are some very successful country stations in non-competitive situations who seem to get away with playing everything being promoted to radio, but I strongly believe that if you're dropping more than one or two songs a month because either they never got enough airplay for your listeners to become familiar with them or because they never tested or charted very well you're not using radio correctly.  That's like an advertiser buying 10-15 spots a week and expecting good results.  We'd never allow sales to take that person's money, but for some reason no one questions the music director on a 10-15 spin a week category that's never going to see the light of day.

My advice is to play songs you feel have a good shot of going top ten as soon as you feel that way and keep playing them heavily as long as you retain that confidence in them.  Use local music testing to validate your instincts and then learn from it and make fewer and fewer wrong judgements.

Any station that's exposing very many songs that fail that test had better hope they're in a situation where no one else can possibly go country against them, because they are extremely vulnerable!

We Get Letters...

Dear Albright and O'Malley folks,

Something really, really bothers me about the Country radio station where I work. It's that the owner of our radio station 'refuses' to advertise! Obviously, I think he's wrong. What do you say? How important is advertising a radio station?

Before trying to change your owner's mind, I think you have some homework to do.

1. How is your signal compared to any other country stations also available to your prospective audience?

Before advertising, you need to be honest with yourself about your distribution and there's no sense marketing a product to people who have other superior choices from that perspective.

2. If you've been in the same format for years and your cume has been stable, you have to ask yourself: is that because the people in your city grade signal area don't know about your existence?

Or, are they aware of you, but simply don't use you?

If the problem is a lack of awareness of what you do, perhaps you should advertise inside the area where you have the best signal available to users of your format.

3. If 90% of the people inside that area do know who you are and what you do but they still don't cume you, I'd suggest you need to do some research before spending marketing money trying to compete with other area stations for new cume. Do listeners see a "unique selling proposition" that fills a need for them? Or, are they not cuming your station because they currently have plenty of other choices available to them which satisfy their needs?

4. If you spend major dollars and actually did double your cume (a huge achievement, not easy to do) would your radio station be able to charge higher rates and recoup the expense plus the profit margin your owner requires to stay in business?

A mature brand - especially a radio station which has been doing entertaining programming, community involvement, remotes and appearances for all that time - street marketing - may actually have a very high level of awareness already.

5. People like new things and are always willing to try something new. As a result, cume is always naturally eroding. So, if your cume has been stable and consistent, that makes a good statement about what you do now.

6. Do you have a database (email/street addresses) of at the very least 20% of your cume? You should. Have you been in touch with those people on a consistent basis? Do they respond to your emails and participate in your promotions? If not, cume building won't work for you. Make sure you have a loyal core of brand evangelists who love you before you consider marketing.

7. Are advertisers on your station successful? Do clients feel like ads on your station work for them?

8. Are you profitable?

If so, perhaps your owner is right.

If he's wrong, you need to convince him that there would be a good return on investment on marketing expenses.

9. Read Wikipedia's excellent beginner's guide to building marketing plans for a start.

Put it all in writing. What percentage of profits would he be willing to invest in trying to increase revenues? What are the odds of success?

10. Do the math. Don't spend marketing money until you know your product is perceived as unique and excellent by its current cume. Once that is the case, find out how many other people inside your city grade coverage area would use your station - people just like the ones you love you who simply don't know about you or what makes you unique and better.

Calculate whether getting another 20%, for example, to cume you every week would be worth the money. Usually, it's much easier to grow your ratings by focusing on improving the number of days per week and times per day your existing cume uses the radio station before trying to convince non-users to sample, convert and become regular users. Until your "time spent listening" is the best among all the other stations you compete with, I'd focus first on that.

11. Is it possible your owner is reluctant to advertise because he has concerns about the quality or your product? If so, work on growing the stats that will prove that he's wrong.

Great TSL and high exclusive cume are two simple measures of "satisfaction" with your programming.

Maximise getting your current core to use no other radio station and enticing listeners to spend more time per day with you.

How you'll know you're "there:" when more than a third of your weekly cume listens to no other radio in an average week and your average listener spends two-thirds of their total time using radio per day with your station, I'd say you're ready to do some marketing if you're not happy with your shares those above-average performance measurements will generate for you.

Disney's "Low Ride Out" Policy

Some years ago WAJI/Ft. Wayne PD Barb Richards attended Disney Institute and came away raving about many principles she learned and put into practice as a programmer.

For example: "When they put in a new ride, they take out the one with lowest ridership."

If you are a popular station, you probably get lots of requests to be involved with events. It's hard to say no -- and the next thing you know you're over-committed. Rather than adding and adding to the calendar, look at the events that give you the most exposure or the really big image builders. Keep those, move some smaller events in and out. Say no to the rest. Don't be afraid to move on to new things when you sense an old one has run it's course.

We kick off our "95 Days Of Summer" with a water-park party.

There's just no other way to start the summer in Fort Wayne. Unfortunately in the years we have done this event, the weather has been crappy more times than not. We used to do a rain date, but discovered that it was really hard to keep up the enthusiasm. So we decided if the weather was bad, we would just cancel.

Still planning on doing it next year, but thinking about what we can do as an alternate. How can I make this event still work with our lousy, unpredictable Indiana weather?

Ask yourself when someone wants the station to become involved if this is the best decision for the station. How would you feel if you heard it on anther station? Would it bother you not to be there?

These questions can help you decide if you want to be involved.

Promotions are great, for so many reasons. But they have to work for the organization or sponsor, and work for the station.

The Space Heater In The Well House

Water to my home comes from a well, and several years ago during a winter cold snap the pipes from the well froze. So, of course, I "winterized" everything. Insulation on all pipes. Heaters in every location possible.

Thankfully, we've never had our pipes freeze again in spite of a few days each winter of bitter cold temperatures.

Yesterday, a lovely mid-70's summer day, I discovered that the space heater in my well house has been keeping the temperature in there in the mid-80's, driving up my utility bills, for at least the last 90 days, if not longer.

Do you have any "space heaters in your (programming) well house?"

• That 60's and 70's weekend music show which worked very well when 60's and 70's variety was important to your strategy, a decade ago?
• A value-added short form feature you agreed to run when a prospect dangled big bucks in front of sales, but the client no longer remembers that you run it to get his business?
• Morning show benchmarks which seemed like good ideas once upon a time, but haven't been freshened or tested in a very long time?

Summer started this week, so it's too late to encourage you to do "spring cleaning" of your features, contests, promotions, mentions and other programming elements.

Instead, like I did yesterday, maybe it's time for you to turn off a few "space heaters" that only cost resources and have outlived their usefulness.

“Oh, Wow?” Or, “Oh, Crap?”

Clear Channel’s WMZQ/Washington’s 3.8-3.6 October-November 12+ ARB trend of course can’t be attributed to any one thing, but the station’s 3.7 (July)-3.9 (August)- 4.3 (September) moves in the wake of going commercial free every Tuesday from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm since August, among other things, may underscore that keeping a station constantly fresh, even when you’re doing something you know listeners really love is an important part of the game.

Is it saying that they even get used to a full day commercial free and it can become old news after a couple months? If so, can ANYTHING be kept fresh and top-of-mind enough??

With that in mind, a client PD asked me this week if A&O has an "oh wow" oldies list for country after reading online about the pros/cons of maintaining freshness of destinational formats by maintaining/platooning spice songs in and out.

We do, and also could, of course, start a comments thread in reply to this thought of the many, many country novelty songs, could-a/should-a been's and one hit wonders of the format over six or more decades.

There are hundreds of them.

But, country is a transitional format with a constant need to keep a great balance of male, female, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44 and 45-54 appeal, let alone the right mix of “P-1” music vs “P-2” appeal songs, I recommend looking for “oh wow” songs from new music rather than opening up marginal gold songs that one age group might find exciting to hear but another group will simply not get the musical reference point from before they came to country music.

The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young,” which of course has turned into a breakthrough #1 hit for an exciting new group started for me as an “oh wow” song which added a nice quality of freshness to our sound because it was so different from everything else when it first came out 30+ weeks ago.

Zac Brown Band, Jason Aldean, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Chris Young, Luke Bryan, Lady Antebellum and many others got their first traction on country playlists with an “oh, wow, what/who was that?” song. Taylor Swift’s “Tim McGraw” not only did that on radio, but also on the ACM Awards TV show when she went into the audience and sang it face to face to Tim.

Now, THAT moment was a WOW.

Look at the playlist of some of country’s most-successful PPM stations and you’ll see “buzz record” new music being used very cleverly.

Consultant playlists, by definition are “safe,” since we build our national recommendations on consensus research, but A&O sometimes adds new music right into heavy rotation when we hear music that creates sizzle.

So, for me, country’s “oh wow” category is built most often on exciting new songs that resonate with the values and universal life stories of all the ages we need to energize every age and gender.

How about you? What songs do you use to keep your rotations fresh? How do you play them?

Getting Younger Listeners To Pay Attention

1. Tight production. Treat the station like a CHR or Hot AC in terms of production value. But, today's contemporary - authentic and organic - not like 80's or 90's Top 40.
2. Music elements. Use contemporary music as backgrounds or as "hooks" for feature stories. Use music beds, when appropriate, but beat beds which distract from the content don't work. Keep it simple, real.
3. Hipness factor. Saying you don't know how to pronounce "Kanye" or "Bieber" says 'you are old.' If you can't pronounce it, don't say it.
   
4. Pop culture references provide context for your content.
5. No "interviews with water commissioners," even in newscasts and public affairs shows. Tell stories, engage. Begin each narrative with "what's in it for me."
6. Less clutter. Stick to commercial limits. Shorten newscasts or eliminate formal "newscasts" and make everything you talk about be a reflection of what's happening right now.
7. Less "traffic report" mentality. More human "news you can use."
8. Faster pacing. Convey a "sense of urgency."

Impediments to younger demo growth:

1. An "old" reputation gets in the way.
2. Prehistoric production values.
3. Hype.

In fact, let's change that headline to "getting ALL listeners to pay attention."

The Canary Is Still Breathing; The Branch Hasn't Broken

It's been more than a decade since it became conventional wisdom that radio's programming and marketing departments were primarily a service bureau for sales, in pursuit of revenues, cutting costs, thus attaining higher multiples.

Ratings bonuses have increasingly been replaced at the companies where bonuses for talent and programming still exist with "BCF" bonuses, making us all members of the sales department.

The executives who started this trend are longtime broadcasters and I have always told myself that they may bend the twig until they start to hear cracking, but they're smart enough to stop bending just before it breaks. They'd recognize the sound of a coalmine canary that stops chirping.

And, just because it still sounds like some major market traffic reporters, news departments and weather forecasters no longer answer to the station program director in the length or word choice of their content, the twig remains barely intact and the bird is still, softly, singing.

What? Me? Worry?

I get paid by A&O clients to worry.

As PPM is rewarding the panel listeners' most compelling and likable personalities, punishing ones they don't spend as much time using, driving up ratings of stations which waste the least amount of time talking about anything or playing songs the audience doesn't engage with, broadcasters who want to win simply must relearn how to edit, edit, edit everything.

Now, programming as a service bureau for sales includes once again focusing on trimming everything that doesn't make money or entertain to the bone.

Sure, a great PD still brings ideas that make money, but PPM clearly shows that every competitor has the same 60 minutes per hour and not a second more and it creates lots more revenue to have high ratings than to add more value-added mentions.

There was a time when the majority of General Managers and Program Directors spent a day away from the radio station listening together, agreeing on what elements grew audience and made money and which ones were simply wasting time.

• That way, the PD could talk authoritatively to the cluster's news director, the long distance meteorologist, the bartered traffic service knowing that the GM is going to back her up when she says "this is what I need" and expect great execution.
• That way, they agree on how many extra mentions "we" do compared to our shared-cume competition.
  
• That way, they set firm commercial unit limits and concur on the costs of overselling them.

PPM has provided new tools which amplify the sound of cracking twigs, chirping canaries, making product integrity - as defined by radio's users - a programmer and manager's time-tested, very highest priority.