No doubt, if you want low risk, there are plenty of other careers for you. However, I want to place this finding in context.
It has always been thus!
I went into high school in 1957, having decided I wanted to follow in fellow-Ohioan Hugh Downs' footsteps as smart career counselors advised me that radio stations were downsizing due to the arrival of mass appeal television. Every station had staff live musicians, full time studio engineers and those positions were being eliminated everywhere and pundits called it "the death of radio."
Google that phrase and you'll learn that that prognostication comes back at least once a decade.
My first full time job in broadcasting came in 1961 and after a lot of great working years I am now enjoying a great retirement thanks to having chosen amazing business partners, I can assure anyone who today has a passion for making the most of audio technologies that it remains a wonderful, rewarding career if you're willing to be your very best.
Over more than five decades I was fortunate enough to:
Break Guinness World Records and raise funds for many deserving charities along with the help of my listeners.
Work with a terrific team of broadcasters in building an Armed Forces Network in Southeast Asia, the most rewarding two years of my working life.
Was challenged to compete in ways that mandated constantly upgrading my knowledge and skills at the highest level in recognition of how terrific the competition was.
Get to know entertainers and music business pros on a first name basis, including playing basketball with Kenny Rogers and his band, interviewing a guy who claimed to be Elvis and not dead, having "weed with Willie" and a dinner for four across the table from Taylor Swift before anyone knew her name.
Emcee a "No Show Jones" show both when he was and was not a no-show.
Along the way, I was named to a couple Hall Of Fame lists too (thank you, Nevada and CRS!).
So, don't become a broadcaster if you expect a no-risk life, but if you feel the need to passionately find the most creative and innovative "you" while working alongside some amazing people who are driven by the same energy, broadcasting is the BEST worst job you can choose!
Each time a station I've worked with over the years has been directly attacked I have publicly said: "Competition makes us better."
For the listeners and the air staff, that's true.
But, generally, from a business point of view I have to privately admit it's simply not, especially in markets where media buyers generally refuse to buy two country stations at good rates.
Doubly so in PPM measurment markets where direct format competition has often driven down shares, making point levels shrink.
The same thing played out a decade ago in San Diego. Local observers claimed that neither Lincoln Financial nor the company formerly known as Clear Channel made any money during a costly fight, but when it ended KSON rose back to the top of the audience and revenue rankings, where they remain today.
iHeart's K-102 and CBS' Buz'n have been going at it in a virtual tie after three years in the Twin Cities in what has been a costly battle for both companies. The last time KEEY had an attacker in this position they purchased it, leading to two decades of revenue and audience dominance. This time, BUZ'N came out just as Taylor Swift was on the upswing.
Back before PPM measured Boston a very competitive fight went on between WKLB and WBCS (Boston's Country Station) from 1993 to 1995. The victor in that battle was Greater Media. They have been extremely powerful from a revenue and ratings perspective for the 20 years since then. Fighting for format ownership in country can be lucrative, long term.
Is this the beginning of a new post-consolidation age in competitive format battles?
In the past, new stations launched as formats were on the upswing. Is this a good time to launch a new radio station in the country format against a strong competitor?
This I know: the listeners are going to love having a choice. The air staffs and street teams are going to have fun going at it.
1. As Mike O’Malley told Inside Radio last week, studies of country listeners going back more than a decade consistently find that less than 20% of country P-1 listeners say they’d be very interested in having their country station play all Christmas music while half tell researchers they wouldn’t be interested at all, making going solid Christmas tunes a very risky tactic in a competitive country battle unless your company owns two country stations. In that case, it can benefit them both, one gaining 35+ female tuning and the other one acting as an alternative for younger and male country music fans. The more new music intensive you are, the more dangerous it can be to go more than a month without exposing and familiarizing the core with fresh music. When you go back to playing the country hits you need to refamiliarize your core with it, which can hurt familiarity scores that drive TSL and passion as the new year - and a new PPM month - begins.
2. In diary markets it has always appeared that all-Christmas helps the upper-demo contemporary get a cume boost in the first month of two of the Winter survey. Now, thanks to PPM, we know that’s more a result of top-of-mindness impacting what people write in diaries than it is real usage. Once, all-Christmas was seen as a strategy. Now, we know it’s just a tactic. In PPM, normal listening patterns resume on December 26 and don’t have any residual impact in January or February. Thus, in a PPM market any station contemplating solid Holiday music in November and December needs to pre-sell the event in advance. Diary measurement may make it appear that buying those great Christmas season ratings in January and February is a bargain, but PPM proves that would be overpaying.
3. PPM permits a microscopic view of usage patterns not possible in diary surveys as long as the sample is large enough to be reliable. As a result, aggregating multiple markets, it’s possible to uncover precisely what drives month-to-month changes in cume and average quarter hour. Most months, any sudden changes are likely driven by sample weighting alterations or households coming into or leaving the panel. As Christmas music starts to dominate one or two stations in a market, it’s now possible to dig into it directly and see exactly how each station in town’s average monthly users react. What we see appears to be more than a sample wobble. It looks “real.”
4. A&O&B has been carefully studying PPM, thanks to the help of direct marketing and rating analysis vendors, from the very first month of PPM measurement going all the way back to the first tests of the technology in Wilmington and Philadelphia many years ago. Here’s what we’ve observed, thanks to help from Arbitron and Nielsen analysts: the normal pattern of daypart and day-to-day recycling tends to continue as usual for a healthy country radio station. However, non-stop Christmas music on a station that always shares 25-30% of the country station’s audience month after month does something astounding during the Holidays. It creates NEW DAYPARTS for itself, times of the day and days of the week from that group of panelists when the country station’s average listener wasn’t even using radio in most months!
5. PPM “time spend exposed” (TSE/AMA) per hour for that country station when under attack from a 100% Christmas music competitor remains steady. Morning show, at work and weekend usage are generally more or less unchanged. Except for one group of listeners, the ones who seem to want to get into the Holiday spirit as they prepare for Christmas. They go Christmas shopping, wrap presents, decorate the house, the workplace. They host and attend parties. They plan for the family event. They continue to listen to their usual morning show, don’t listen much less than normal to their favorite 24/7365 country station, but they also find themselves using the solid Christmas music station a lot - as much as an extra day a week of their total time with radio - at lunchtime when they go out to shop, in the evening and over every weekend at home when they wrap presents, decorate the tree, write Christmas cards and organize their wardrobe for a busy Season Of Giving.
To deflect such a tactic when half the audience really doesn’t desire all-Christmas is next-to-impossible, though you can, we’ve found, at least minimize the damage — by creating your own extra special, lifestyle-driven extraordinary depart usage drivers.
The challenge, of course, is that playing 500 popular Christmas songs over and over for six weeks is relatively easy when compared to the creativity, innovation and hard work it takes to build enough of the kind of content that can compete with it in listeners’ minds for six to eight weeks every year.
Attempting to cure your first headache can make for a pretty big second one too.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 hasabout 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
-
*This blog is no longer updated because Albright & O'Malley & Brenner's
prep producer Dan Van also maintains a blog for our client personalities.* *Bookmar...
This Applies to Programming Too!
-
If you are a Programmer Director, air talent, or anyone who interacts with
clients, event partners and listeners, you need to pay attention to the
“Sales ...
