May Your Stuffing Be Tasty...

May your turkey plump,
May your potatoes and gravy
Have nary a lump.
May your yams be delicious
And your pies take the prize,
And may your Thanksgiving dinner
Stay off your thighs!
-- Grandpa Jones

Time For Programmers To Learn A New Language

This development is not at all surprising.

As usual, they want us to cut our inventories while refusing to pay anything more when we do it, in spite of considerable data proving radio's impact.

If the only way they will pay more is when "cost per point" hits media buyer wishes and dreams, it's crucial that the people creating content fully understand which quarter hours and programming tactics have the highest potential to get target GRPs, ultimately ARPs, as high as possible.

Let's stop worrying about 6+ average quarter hour shares, replacing those with the highest payoff target points.

That's an entirely new way to approach formatic, content and programming metrics.

It's going to require a quick learning curve for most Brand Managers, but A&O&B can help make it simple and very rewarding for you to do so.

It's That Wonderful (?) Time Of The Year

If you're a small indie label or a new, emerging artist, you're coming upon potentially the best time of the year at radio for your needs.

If you're a music director, it's the annual time of year to watch your mailbox for unknown names and labels you never heard of before.

Why?

As Billboard's Country Monday Update noted in listing the adds for the next few weeks it's just three weeks from the time when the vacuum of major label and star artist releases begins.

Country Aircheck made note of the same phenomenon in its pages this week as well.

Most weeks music directors find a lot more piled up in their in box than they can add to their playlists in any one week, but not December 8.

So, it's a very brief window of opportunity if you have something a bit risky or brand new.

Smart music promotion people, like my pal Kris here, know this.

The catch:  if you have a new Christmas song it's going to have to compete with the very familiar and welcome sounds of years past.  It has 17 days to get big or never be heard ever again.

If you have something that you hope will be a major hit in the coming year, you have a few more weeks before the superstar tracks start to come out in 2015, but it needs to be so sticky that it can achieve impact at a time of year when radio listeners are asking to hear more and more Holiday songs per hour.
 At best, you've got five or six weeks to get to the point most big hits take twice that long to gain traction.

So, indie labels and new artists, bring it.

But, please make absolutely sure that what you bring is your very best

And, pardon those of us in radio if we're still a bit dubious and skeptical as we click on your newly-arrived package.

It's the time of year.

A Sense Of History

As we all get ready the 39th annual Twin Cities radio meeting, I am reminded of an anonymous response back in 1996 to a "RadioIQ" (our client e-zene) report of CBS Radio President Dan Mason’s talk at the Upper Midwest Communications Conclave which continues to echo all these years later.
 

“Jobs on the programming side of radio will continue to be eliminated,” Mason correctly predicted back then. “For every position eliminated in programming this year, there will be three added in sales.”

Now that programmatic buying and selling is emerging, eliminating reps while making media sales more transactional and less seller-driven, I am reminded of an anonymous comment I got after that post from 18 years ago:
  

"…any medium which requires more effort to sell than to create is headed for a future no better than slimy posters on the brick wall of public consciousness."

I greatly respect Mason’s smarts and proven track record over the years since that Conclave speech, but I have always wished I knew who “anonymous” was.

That person may have been the smartest of us all.

Their comment remains true, now than ever.

Let Me Second That Motion

The announcement from Country Radio Broadcasters that Jeff Smulyan will be given the 2015 Tom Rivers Humanitarian Award during the opening ceremonies of Country Radio Seminar 2015 is another great decision from the seminar's board.

If you want to peruse the many, many wonderful giving works Jeff has spearheaded and been involved in, click here to read the complete press release listing a lot of them.

I'd like to add a personal reflection on what Jeff has created for the people who work for and with him, which in today's corporate radio competitive environment is another level of humanitarianism.  As their company website notes:  "Emmis is the 9th largest radio group in the U.S (based on listeners) and has been voted the Most Respected Radio Company in a poll of industry CEOs."

Other owners wishing to establish a positive productive "family" environment for their employees would do well to go to click around Emmis.com and learn about a winning culture. 

He purchased my hometown baseball team, reunited two guys named Griffey and turned a losing ball club into a winner, though it wasn't a winner for Jeff.  He used radio marketing tactics and rallied a community to the team's side, getting attendance up after years of apathy by local fans.  He lost money on the deal, but made baseball fun again for Puget Sound fans.

That's when I first observed that this was a guy who did the right thing first and worried about bottom line secondarily.

"Emmis" is the Hebrew word for “truth," and I first got a chance to work with the company when they purchased "KIX" (now "The Arch") in St. Louis from Zimmer.  

We had a very good run and thanks to a wonderful group of people, managed to make a pretty good showing against a powerful incumbent.

In Nashville I was a fly on the wall when they made their first presentation to the Music City community after buying the now defunct KZLA, which was very impressive.  

Of course, from Terre Haute, Indianapolis and many other legendary radio stations, they have shown their ability to win long term in many markets.

I brought up the no-doubt painful Mariners, KZLA and KIX situations for two reasons, having seen Emmis' greatmedia.greatpeople.greatservice^® mission in action for a very long time, even in situations where circumstances led them in the infamous "other direction."   

Their people and the culture Jeff and his team have innovated show "class" even in places where it's not easy to do so, living Eleven Commandments of doing business with a humanitarian tone indeed.

Charitable works are terrific, and Jeff has performed many, but the way you live your life in all aspects is even more noteworthy.

Our entire industry is better because of the values exemplified every day by Jeff Smulyan.

One A Day

Yesterday's list of 16 metrics A&O&B encourages you to track consistently (Programming By The Numbers) is completely overwhelming.

So, try this:  put a different one of them on your day planner every other workday.

Give yourself 30 minutes the first day to update the stats on that area of your responsibilities.  Set up a once-monthly meeting with anyone else who is responsible for that area.  Have them track the numbers and bring them in writing to this meeting to distribute with everyone.

Don't allow it to go longer than a half hour.  Look at the metrics for that one thing compared to the last few months of both your radio station and your competition.

If you're trending up, bettering the folks across the street, give pats on the back all around, award rewards and set up the next update on that one measure one month from today.  The better you're doing, the fewer meetings for all.

If you're not doing as well as you'd like on that set of stats, encourage everyone who has anything to do with it to spend some time later today thinking about what we could do to improve.

Set up a one hour meeting tomorrow to brainstorm, evaluate and prioritize all of the ideas you can generate.  Save the last ten minutes of the meeting to assign duties.

At the next full staff meeting report to everyone on the issue and what needs to be done by the whole team to fix it.

Get back together next month and repeat.

Do what W. Edwards Deming recommended.

If you don't know who he is, it's time to start reading.

Or, reach out.  A&O&B will help adapt his principles to your specific situation.

Programming By The Numbers

Thanks to Radio Ink Magazine for being the impetus for this article by Mike, Becky and me.  They published it yesterday.  In case you missed it: 

Nielsen’s recent report that for the first time in many years the country format national average shares experienced three down months in a row combined with Mike O'Malley’s almost-simultaneous blog post highlighting the A&O&B national country music database music acceptance trends has to be at least a little concerning for Brand Managers.

My post last week in reaction to just-published NuVooDoo format perceptual data showing that country radio success tends to be more music-driven than other formats, while the highest-rated A&O&B client stations have more personality-driven appeal than our “average” client and at the same time Dan O'Day and Becky Brenner have been enumerating the traits of the very best PDs, all of which no doubt made any sharp programmer sit up and wonder what success factors most deserve their time.

Perhaps (though I doubt it) there may have been a time when a radio programmer only had to worry about how their station sounded and “sounding great” was sufficient to be a winner. 

Even all the way back back to when Gordon McClendon, Todd Storz and radio’s many other creative format and research pioneers of the last six decades attacked existing ways of doing things and won, they tracked specific numbers.  You could hear those stats reflected in how their radio stations sounded.

Today’s complex media, lifestyle and demographic environments create a new problem. 

There are so many things you could possibly track which could help you win or lose, the key to success is prioritizing them, understanding which ones drive you to where you need to be as well as what you need to do in your programming to bring them to life:

• Ratings:  Share, persons, total cume audience, heavy users percentage, daily, weekly, monthly trends.
• Stream audience:  uniques, average active sessions, listen live tune-ins, mobile downloads, mobile streaming.
• Music:  how many of the songs you play most often are “favorites” for a third or more of your target?  How many are rated “positively” by at least 65-70%?  How many are burnt to the point that double digit percentages of your target is tired of hearing them on radio?  How many of the songs you play were “never liked” by similar percentages?  Who do listeners feel plays the most?  The best variety according to their tastes?
• Formatics:  what proportion of the entire market’s radio listeners understand your unique position and consider it valuable to them?  Does your content drive usage at the exact times the rating methodology requires on a consistent basis compared to the other choices available?
• Personalities:  how likable are they face-to-face with those on other stations?  How memorable are they?  What are they being remembered for?  How high are their negatives versus their positive images?
• Outreach:  how many non-commercial appearances do you do compared to your competition?  How well do you take advantage of them in turning listener contact into loyalty, giving the folks who do see you reasons to listen immediately?
• Reception:  what are people coming in to talk about?  What questions are they asking when they phone us?  How many are positive/negative on specific things we do?
• Website and blogs:  Visits, page views, uniques, average session length, page views per session, blogs page views, video views.
• Listener phone lines:  what are they requesting?  Complaining about?  Where are they calling from?
• Branding:  how does your brand make people feel?  How does that compare to all other stations you compete with?
• Technical:  can everyone you need to listen receive you with a powerful signal?  How does your station compare to other choices?
• Social:  Facebook likes, people talking about this, engaged users, viral reach, paid reach.  Twitter followers, following, tweets.  Others:  what percentage of your target uses each of the others?  How viable in similar stats as above are you in the ones they make use of the most?
• Database:  Email database compared to your competition?  Loyalty club members?  Response rates?  New %?  % in metro?  Contests vs non-contest players?  Active in the past 90 days?  Text club members, # of texts, response rates.
• On air contesting:  how important is it to your usage?  Do you dominate the image or are you beaten by someone else?
• Info elements:  weather, news, community involvement and service.  How important is each to your success and how strong is your ownership of the images that matter most.
• Events:  what percentage of your target knows what you do?  Are they motivated to participate?  What other events do they attend and would like you do be involved with?  Where are the best locales for our external marketing?  What % of our time is being spent in those places?

Ask any radio researcher.  If you have the money and listeners are willing to take the time, they can design a perceptual questionnaire that tabs all of these metrics for you and many more.

The challenge for Audio Program Director/Brand Managers today is that every one of the time-proven data points still matters a lot, but the nature of today’s changing listening patterns means that many more new numbers you must track are also crucial to understand and compare in every heritage and new media competitive environment.

Prioritizing and measuring them all while acting on what they tell you about all station activities and endeavors in fun, creative, authentic ways so that it all feels and seems “easy” is what builds a lasting winner.

That is how you get to the number which has always mattered the most:  #1.

Why Consumers Enjoy Radio In LA

Nielsen Harris Poll, October 15-23, 2014, wordcloud presented to SCBA:

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it:

• Listen critically at all hours and every day of the week and ask yourself how well your station lives up to these listener expectations.
• Finally, does your radio station do so in unique ways and all your analog and digital media channels  that belong exclusively to your brand and not to every radio station in your area?

The secret is that there is no secret. 

We all know what the audience wants and expects. 

The key is executing it better and more consistently than our proliferating competition.

From Borrell: Much More Than #4

No doubt you've seen the trade press on a webinar last week anchored by researcher Gordon Borrell celebrating the 20th anniversary of the appearance of the first banner ad.

The prognostication presentation came as a result of a survey of 2,102 Small and Medium Business managers conducted in August & September 2014 combined with an analysis of Borrell’s database of marketing expenditures covering 3,000 U.S. counties.

Borrell wanted to know:

• Is the Golden Age of Advertising coming to an end? 
• What will the media company and ad agency of the future look like?

In spite of the fact that the "big" reason for the study had only a little to do with analog media and much more to understanding the priorities of SMB operators as it relates to digital marketing budgets, there is no denying that Gordon and his team predicted along the way:

• Half of the 15,433 radio stations currently on the air will cease to exist. 
• “It will be the weakest stations we believe that will disappear, reemerging in the form of promotions.” 
• "Local advertising as we know it disappears, but it reemerges in the form of promotions,”
• New dashboard technology will cause long-term listening erosion for FM/AM radio. 
• “Inevitability” of radio-enabled smartphones.
•  “All of these businesses out there have the medium at their disposal to go direct to consumers.”
• Sales reps won’t sell ads but help educate local businesses on how to create and perform promotions.
• 95% of advertising will be bought and sold programmatically by 2024

Since A&O&B friends Mark Ramsey and Tracy Johnson have already written prescient thought-pieces on what we need to do about #4, I'd like to focus on another very positive radio story contained in Borrell's data:  24% more of these SMB executives credit radio with providing them with new customers than television does!

“Radio tends to have a very strong beat on promotions.  All of these businesses out there have the medium at their disposal to go direct to consumers.”  -- Gordon Borrell

My take: allowing media buyers to convince us to move away from direct local, regional and national selling person to person toward numbers-based programming buying will devalue radio.  

In the short run, it may save up to 30% of gross revenues by lowering cost of sales, but if radio polishes its immediate bottom line while failing to invest in face-to-face presentations of our ROI strengths vis a vis all other competing media, it won't even take ten years for Borrell's pessimistic prognostications to become self-fulfilling.

A full analysis of the results can be found in “2014 Digital Marketing Services Outlook” on the Borrell website.

(Not So) Smart

It shouldn't take many words to make my point today.  Take a look at my inbox and ask yourself which one you'd move to spam before even reading:

I normally read all of the "SmartBrief" messages, because they often carry great content.

Not this time.  $25 isn't enough to waste even a few seconds of my time.

And, if you're the type who needs words to understand a point, read Steve Marx's latest blog post which will explain it all to you:  How to Get Your Email Opened: Subject Line Best Practices

A Willing Buyer, A Willing Seller And A Clever Idea

.. but I have a few concerns before we go too much farther down this road.

Whether Colorado Broadcasters Association President/CEO Justin Sasso or a Nielsen researcher/affiliate rep came up with the concept, it's a brilliant win-win in any case, as 300+ Colorado broadcasters this week at the Doubletree in Grand Junction got a look at some of the latest information from Nielsen on the use of television, radio and other media sources.

Sasso highlighted the value of television and radio as sources that many throughout the state continue to use in receiving their news -- despite of the many newer media platforms developing online.  "We're trying to get people's heads around what's happening, instead of what they're reading in newspapers that these new media sources are taking over, and they're great, but in no way replacing radio and television." - News Channel 5's Jorma Duran

Inside Radio reported yesterday:  "other state associations have used presentations to reinforce the power of broadcasting, these were the first to use custom Nielsen data for a specific state.  Since many broadcasters in the state’s smaller markets aren’t Nielsen subscribers, the CBA commissioned Nielsen to crunch the Colorado numbers and license the data to its members to incorporate into their own presentations for one year."

Regional presentations took place in Ft. Collins, Denver, Colorado Springs and Grand Junction to packed houses in three days, pulling off four regionally customized presentations compiled using Nielsen’s vast database.

The data was licensed from Nielsen, at the CBA’s expense, for one year. CBA members will be able to access the Nielsen data and incorporate pertinent information into their station presentations.

My take, for what it's worth:

It would be wonderful if the 49 other broadcast associations and Nielsen are able to get together to do the same thing regionally in every single state over the coming months to become a fully regional "Audio Today 2015!"

Of course, it would be a nice additional source of revenue for Nielsen, repurposing stats from a new angle that have already been paid for by subscribing radio and TV stations.

For that reason, I hope the price can be kept low and as other state broadcast groups negotiate for them with Nielsen.

I'd encourage the rating firm to use some of that "found money" from these projects to be very transparent about how they manage to merge the very different PPM, condensed market rolling average and very small sample county by county diary data which doesn't come out until the following April, in the year after it was collected.

Hopefully by going to respondent level, Nielsen can give our local clients in small markets all over the country fresh, very reliable regional usage data in as close to real time as possible.

Are You Still Programming Like It Was 2008?

For eight years nearly a hundred A&O&B clients have participated in the annual online "Roadmap" study, tracking trends in music, tech, non-music elements and other aspects of usage and images.

The attitudes change every year.  For example, just seven years ago the average listener ranked country leadership and giving away big contest prizes as the #1 and #2 reasons to pick a favorite.  Music quantity out-rated music quality.

Eight months ago, when we tabbed the 2014 results, the most important parameters in choosing a favorite changed radically:

Is your emphasis on key images outdated?

If you're still trying to bribe listeners with prizes and music quantity promises, you may be out of synch with today's audience, which now wants the best songs, more fun, friendly authenticity and good vibes compared to what they did just a few years ago.

There Is No "Average Country Radio Station"

It's never a good idea to program your radio station using "national average" research trends.

A few years ago, A&O&B asked the listeners to almost all of our client stations:

Just for fun, I went back to that study and pulled out the local data for the ten top-ranked morning shows in their local ratings.  No two of them mirrored the averages.

The one with the highest "DJ's" score's audience (24.41%) gave music 13.95% and "both" 61.65%.

The one with the highest "music" score (23.89%) had 16.38% DJ's and 59.73% "both."

The one with the highest "both" score (71.56%) had 16.64 primarily "DJ's" and 11.8% "music only."

All ten of these top-rated stations' listeners rated "DJ's" as more important than the average of the total sample, however.  Only one of them had "music" rate higher than the national average.

I'd say that would make the odds about nine to one that you won't win in the morning in the country radio format without great personalities who your listeners rate far better than "national average  personalities," but like any good coach you need to adjust the percentages you emphasize based on the caliber and mix of talent on your lineup.

Is Country Radio Too Dependent On Music?

NuVooDoo's strategic researchers have been sharing their radio format national perceptual trending on their blog for several years.  Recently, they've been probing the aspects of programming which "delight" the typical format listener.

If you ask what it was that surprised them other than a song, the answers tend to be contest prizes and funny morning show bits.  Well-designed contests hit the mark, as does genuinely humorous comedy.  While listeners rarely cite being pleasantly surprised by station imaging, we’re certain that there are instances of that among the 37% overall who were surprised in a good way by something other than a song in the past week.
   -- Leigh Jacobs

Pop CHR ranks #1 in its ability to please the audience with music and country comes in a close second in that measurement.

However, when they dug into the most pleasing non-music content, country radio ranks next to last when compared to eight other music formats.

Even worse, country's most pleasing non-music surprises come about once a month, compared to the other format listeners who get their surprises daily or at least weekly when compared to our P-1 listeners.

If the passion for country's music softens, as it historically always has about once a decade for every music style, almost all other formats are better positioned in the minds of their core in contest prizes, funny morning show bits and other program elements besides music images.

There's never a better time to measure your station-specific performance in driving usage and loyalty with non-music content than right now.

Thank You, Supreme Court

There are two kinds of consulting clients and A&O&B has our share of both, thankfully.

1.  Those who are aggressive and always want to know the latest tactics and strategies that will help them gain an "unfair/stealth" advantage over their competition.

2.  Management who does a great job selling marketing to others but believes radio is a terrific marketing medium which doesn't require any money be spent on external marketing beyond the "free" word of mouth that can be created by great over-the-air content and social media.

We love them both and have hundreds of case studies where both groups have been very successful doing things "their way."

Both #1 and #2 tend to believe that everyone else in broadcasting is like them.  #1 always wants to know what secret things their competition did to make their numbers rise and #2 tends to deny that anyone else spends the kind of money that marketing can take.

I hope both of them saw this:

So, many thanks to the highest court in the land for their decision last week.

It's great to know that calling someone and inviting them to try a new radio station is not the same as attempting to sell them anything.

As a bonus, we now have legal proof for those #2's among us that their competitive managers at the Rotary Club who deny ever doing it may not be telling them the whole truth.


(Now, if only Canada's regulators would come to a similar conclusion.  

I won't hold my breath...)

This Changes Everything (Again For Yet Another Year)

Just as Canada celebrates Thanksgiving before it comes to the U.S., Numeris and Stats Can bring something to Canadian broadcasters before Nielsen and the Census Bureau do to American media.

On September 9th, A&O&B Canadian clients were reminded:

The demographic questions in the PPM questionnaire are designed to be comparable to Statistics Canada data where appropriate. The demographics relating to industry, occupation, first language learned and home language will be updated to reflect the 2011 census, data from which was made available in 2013.

The revised panel member questionnaires will be put into field in at the beginning of the 2014-2015 broadcast year. Questionnaires are administered to households when they join the panel and subsequently once a year on their anniversary date. All newly recruited PPM households will receive the revised questionnaires and all existing PPM panel households will receive the revised questionnaires on their anniversary date (as per current procedure).

Demographics for the Industry and Occupation questions will be populated through derivation from the existing answers. The new Industry and Occupation questions will be available for the start of the 2014-15 broadcast year.

The new language questions will take up to one year to become fully populated, and will be available at the beginning of the 2015-16 broadcast year. 
 

In the USA, the more-or-less the same things start to happen on October 1.

The update is a shorthand term for the massive set of demographic estimates and
projections produced for the Nielsen Pop-Facts products. Estimates consist of data
prepared for the current year, and projections (sometimes called forecasts) prepared
for dates five years in the future.

The update is brought up to date for many geographic levels including national, state, county, census tract, and block group. Data is also available for commonly-used areas such as metropolitan areas, cities/towns, ZIP Codes, and media areas such as DMAs. Because it is produced for small areas, the update can be easily aggregated to custom geographic areas specified by the user.

The update begins with the estimation and projection of base counts, such as total population, household population, group quarters population, households, family households, and housing units. Characteristics related to these base counts are then estimated. Population characteristics include age, sex, race, and Hispanic ethnicity.

Households are estimated by age of householder and income. Owner-occupied housing units are estimated by value.

What does this mean to you?

It's highly likely that your station's shares are going to change at least slightly as a result of these updates being made right now.  The only reason they wouldn't would be if you serve an area that hasn't changed in any way since last year and the last census.  Highly unlikely, since even if all other things were stable, everyone got one year older.

Anyone who wants to fully understand their competitive situation simply must fully understand, stay up-to-date with and react to population changes in every market and demographic they target.

As with all things in audience measurement:  it's as much about what they do as what you do!

I Completely Fell Apart

Another true-life lesson, shared in hopes it teaches you something that you don't need to learn the hard way, like I did.

I played trombone in my high school band and orchestra.

It never felt like I was all that talented as a musician, but since I moved up to first chair and eventually my band director encouraged me to enter a regional solo competition, I suppose I was good enough.

However, that Saturday morning in Canton, Ohio, in a school room when my piano accompanist got to the place where I was to come in, I cracked.

Suddenly, my memory was gone.  I had practiced.  I had rehearsed.  I had memorized, but when it was my turn to perform, I lost everything.  My embouchure collapsed.

I didn't play very much, and what I did play was terrible.  I had sounded better in my very first lesson many years before.

I wanted to run and hide as the pianist played her part perfectly.

What I learned:  it's not enough to "prepare." 

From then on, I vowed to always OVER-prepare.

Prepare beyond being ready, beyond knowing your part, past perfect execution.

How did it work out?  A few years later, auditioning for my university band and orchestra, I made the cut.  I've won more than my share of broadcast awards in the intervening years as well.

My hope:  you never have to go through the complete humiliation I had to experience as an adolescent in order to learn how crucial over-prep on everything is.

 I've always wondered what and who (click to read his parents' story if you're not aware of it) it took for the likes of Richard Sherman or Russell Wilson (another powerful tale) to learn that lesson at such a young age.

No Words

Sadness.

"Our plan may not have been the most elegantly or artfully executed of all possible plans, but we actually understand what it is we think we are trying to do and why we think we're trying to do it," Mr. Metheny told the Tribune in 2010.

A Toast: May we all be able to say as much when our time comes!

The Biggest PD Mistakes

1. Forgets that the most important part of the job is to protect the station's license.
2. Still thinks that it's a sales versus programming world and as long as (s)he gets ratings (s)he has done the job.
3. Doesn't worry about heavy radio-users or passionate fans of the kind of music the station plays.  Targeting takes care of itself.
4. Does whatever it takes to win.  Ethics and fair treatment of his/her employer and coworkers do not matter as long as the station is winning and profitable.
5. Has a 'not invented here' attitude about new ideas and approaches.  Doesn't bother to network or seek objective opinions of knowledgeable counsel.
6. Under-estimates the competition.
7. Sees radio as a craft, not an art.  You can get everything you need to know by copying winning radio stations in the same format in other markets.
8. Feels that people are replaceable.  As long as everyone is working as hard as possible, everything is fine.
9. Thinks that business management is the GM's job and time management is a sales thing.
10. Doesn't need research.  (S)he knows what listeners want.

Three Parts Of Prep

The last in an enduring series written by my friend and hero, Jay Trachman:

One of the nice things about teaching is that it helps one to organize his own thoughts. While explaining to a Jock Doc student recently about how to create Life Content, it occurred to me that the process has three distinct parts, which ought to be kept separate, lest they pollute each other.

Life Content: you, talking about your own life; Sharing the little emotion-causing experiences with your one listener. A lot of them seem so trivial when you're experiencing them, that you forget them by the time you're on the air. Yet these are the kind of raps that individualize you, reach your listener, and bond you to him or her.

Part one of the process is "research": gathering, "standing outside yourself" and noticing that something just caused you a significant emotion.

Then, "getting it down," saving the thought until you can deal with it more thoroughly. The best tools for doing this are a pocket pad, a microcassette or mini-sound recorder. When something happens that you think you might enjoy Sharing with your mate or your best friend -- make a note of it!

You see, when you're talking to someone in real life, the two of you go back & forth in conversation. Eventually, something will remind you to mention the experience in question. When you're talking with your listener, you get no such outside cues; you have to do all the work. That's why you have to make the notes. My own, collected over the past few days: "hummingbirds" ... "wind while biking" ... "radishes."

The second step is your show prep. Here you take the notes you made, and flesh them out into raps. "We've got hummingbirds in our garden! I never saw one in my life until yesterday, except in books, and I'm out watering the garden when all of a sudden, this thing that looks like a fat butterfly swoops in and *stops*! I mean, he's hovering in mid-air, wings beating a mile a minute, this pint-sized miracle, right in front of me! Then off he goes! For a minute, my heart was beating as fast as his wings!"

• "Did you ever notice while biking, that you're always pedaling into the wind? Whenever I go to the post office, I can feel the wind in my face as soon as I turn the corner, and I always say to myself, 'Brisk wind today; it'll be nice when I'm coming home...' And then when I'm on the way back, instead of a nice tail-wind, it's still blowing into my face... Because, obviously, there really isn't much wind; it just seems that way when you're pedaling... Sometimes I think life's a little like that, don't you?"
• "I guess this is the end of the cool-weather crop season; my radishes and lettuce have both started to bolt; we're picking them as fast as we can, but they're still setting flower heads; one of the radishes blossomed overnight -- which means it's no longer edible, right? Right. Another little lesson, learned the hard way -- pthbthbthbt!"

Notice how I've led to a feeling at the end of each bit; with any luck, you (or my listener) experienced some feeling in response. That's the whole reason for doing the bit.

Now comes part three of the process, and I can't over-emphasize the importance of keeping it separate from the other two: the editing. You don't ever want to be editing while you're gathering or writing, because it shuts down the creative process. I'd rather throw a bit away later, than miss one because my "censor" was working, and I told myself, "Naah -- that's not worth Sharing..."

Editing means taking the bit I created, then examining it to decide which details are necessary to set up the ending ("kicker") and which just add time. Also, does the structure set up the ending? Does the kicker express my feeling strongly enough so there's a good chance my best friend will respond?

The research is your life... The prep is taking your experiences, identifying the emotions you experienced, and figuring out how to make your best friend feel something, too... The editing is making it fit within the format requirements of brevity and structure, making sure the kicker is strong enough. These are the three distinct parts of creating raps. Keep them separate. You'll enjoy the process more, and find yourself working more productively when you do.