Over Hype - The Core of Un-Authentic

In today's radio world we seem to gravitate to Hype almost naturally. Look at our positioning. There is hardly a station that can't avoid falling into- the BEST - The MOST or The Number 1 trap. The contesting is also filled with it - we can't just have the Winter Escape - it has to be The Ultimate Winter Escape. Then you look at the features, special programs and weekend themes and we've added another layer of hype. The air staff often falls into the 'sound' repeating the hyped up positioning with that 'extra' hype in their sell and fills the breaks even more fomatic hyped up billboards.

What really lies at the core of HYPE is making claims that you can't justify or that are subjective. Who is really 'the best?' Can you prove it with words? Rarely can you make claims like we do and expect the audience to ever really believe them. But, for years radio programming has followed the old marketing model. The reach and frequency game of repeat the same message so many times that it reaches the whole audience and then do it enough till it becomes drilled in. Hypnotize them and they will do anything or believe anything.

This game worked well when we only had a few media to work with and were not saturated with marketing. Now that we are swimming it in all the time and so much of it follows the reach and frequency hype model the audience is not believing it any more.

Getting rid of the HYPE in your station will be a tough task but one that you have to accomplish if you are going to stand up as a hip and credible brand with the under 40 year olds. Cleaning it out of your imaging, contesting, jock presentation and your marketing will take years. These habits run deep in our products and we won't get a lot of recognition for the efforts for a while. The audience expects hype from radio - it's become cliche.

OK so what happens if we commit to cleaning out out the hype - how do you sell the product to the audience? That's what we'll explore in the next segment building Authenticity Back Into Radio in a few days.

Authenticity - The Key To Reviving Radio - Part 1

We've all recognized radio's issues and concerns as we've watched our 'stock' fall with the audience over the last 10 years. In the end our media just isn't 'hip' anymore and with so many new media entries to choose from the job of taking on so many challenges looks daunting from the product and sales side.

While all of these challenges may seem new, radio has actually faced many of them before. As FM radio was taking shape we faced a lot of the same core issues. AM Top 40 radio ruled the land and it was packed with hype. Phony DJs, overly tight playlists often playing the top song every hour, and imaging that was anything but authentic. A lot of the audience was expressing the same issues we see now that radio had sold out and was no longer hip or a source of music discovery.

In those early days of FM being authentic was a core value. Even if you picked a phony name you had to have one that was more of a natural nickname than a hyped up image. Stations didn't position themselves as the Best or the Most they strove more to be unique. The presentation was more 'laid back' and the messages between the songs were more informational than fixed on selling the product. The playlists were a lot wider and deeper than the top 40 AMs with a freedom that lead you on more for what you might discover than what you already know. While you may feel that the description here was mostly about 'progressive radio' or the origins of the AOR format these values were also present in the Beautiful Music Formats and the AC stations of the era.

Radio began to regain it's ties to the audience and the shift to FM was on. In the early 70s only 10 to 15% of the listening was on FM, but by the end of the decade it was over 50%. Of course it moved to the 80% range through the 80s.

Looking at today's 20 something and younger generation that seems to be at the core of radio's woes the one thing they are looking for is AUTHENTICITY. In the oversold world that they have grown up in they can smell a sales pitch miles away and usually run from it.

Radio is full of gimmicks, hype and illusion -- all detractors of AUTHENTICITY. From our 'THE BEST XXX' claims to the over dramatic contests, gimmick names for the stations, and endless formatics designed not to entertain but to drill images into the audience's head.

If we want to revive our product with the audience under 40 AUTHENTICITY will have to be at the core of our values. Over the next 2 weeks let's take a look at some ideas you can use in your station's culture and foundation that will breed authenticity. Hope you can make it back and I also hope you will add to the party with a few comments.

Exposing Your Content

What are you really doing with your content?


Are you just putting it through the transmitter?

While most of our audience uses the transmitter we all know and see all the expansion of distribution channels.

For example look at a cable TV show like Mad Men from AMC. The whole first season can be watched on DVD, On Demand/Comcast Cable, and on the web site. You can also watch the shows on Mondays (it airs on Sunday night) on line or through On Demand.

With all that distribution you may wonder - isn't this killing their ratings. Why would anyone tune in on Sunday nights for the regular broadcast? Well the reality is that it doubled the numbers for the show as the new season began a couple of weeks ago. They went from around a million viewers to 2 million and now the award winning show is starting to catch on. Watch as AMC pulls off a hit. Much of the work was done by spreading the distribution. Now that the audience has started to discover the show from all the distribution channels they are developing P1s. Otherwise AMC would have had another award winning show that got missed in the maze of 300 cable channels and so much other media.

Could Rock Radio benefit from a similar strategy. You bet.

1. Pod casts - Some stations use them but I bet 90% of you have only 1 or no podcasts on your site.

2. You Tube clips - How much as your station or team posted from station events, guest shots on the morning show, or even just a tour of the station with some pranks from the staff.

3. Collections of morning show bits.

4. Replay the phone calls from your afternoon show.

5. How about a new rock pod cast every week that doesn't air on the transmitter but only on the web with comments on new artists and songs.

6. Maybe a place for local bands to showcase their videos and music complete with reviews and chats.

Most sites I visit don't have much that really pertains to the station or it's content. In Rock we seem to have lots of girl pages (as if there isn't any more revealing content in this genre on the web), RSS music news feeds (wow Billy Joel is on tour), some corporate stuff (the Clear Channel web feeds), the link to streaming, maybe a list of the last songs played, a chart so you can buy songs, hype for the database, bios of the jocks, and hype for the contests.

Where's the audio - this is supposed to be RADIO. And is it local? In the content arena this is supposed to be our biggest card to play.

Are we worried that if we leave the content on the web that the audience won't dial us in to hear it? We are way past being exclusive - now is the time to be INCLUSIVE.


We all know the problem here. Most stations have no resources to get their content to the web. It takes human effort to get it there and with so many stations running so bare boned on staff we can't get ahead. As we come out of these tough times hopefully we can put asside some of the resources to start building a purposeful world here. AND SOON.

Sales Solves All Problems?

In the 80s as a programmer I heard the claim in a station strategy/budget session that 'SALES SOLVES ALL PROBLEMS.' In that case we had a solid product and really the sales effort was doing well but the potential to grow was clearly there and the team responded. While the revenue gains didn't really solve ALL problems it did exceed the budget and on paper we had won.

At that time we all bought in as the extra sales effort meant more resources to keep the product competitive and ahead. That statement has popped up a number of times and in many ways it became the mantra of business strategy for many station and group strategies for our industry.

Clearly sales generates the revenue and that is the lifeblood of any business. But, you still need a product to sell. In our case we still need a strong and healthy audience.

Does the business plan of your station or group still living in a world where you expect sales to solve ALL problems? It's obvious that we need content and product to sell. With all the new media in the advertising holding and building an audience has never been more challenging. Are you investing enough to get the job done? It's a simple question, but one that we are obviously not asking enough as we watch new media invading on our shares of the market more and more every day.

Building a product that draws both audience and advertisers is a careful balance. Throwing money at the product or making it all product and slighting the sales side doesn't work but, making it all sales and ignoring the product doesn't work either. It's all about balance - are you balancing your resources?

The Air Staff Critique

Sitting down with the air staff one on one with a trusty air check is probably not on the top of most PDs punch list most days. Over the years it's become almost a forgotten PD art. With voice tracking, digital/computer studios, and more and more formatic rules I bet most of the talent on the air has had very few of these meetings in the last few years.

In fact I've run into studios where you can't even run an air check, unless you tape the whole show off air. These are important meetings and you probably should be meeting on on one at least twice a month with everyone.

So where do we start? Just cue up the breaks and hit play?

Really the better meeting comes when the PD has taken a half hour or so and reviewed a show before the talent arrives. Although I usually review a whole station over a number of dayparts one of the tricks I use is recording the station's stream and going back with a generic wave editor and running through a couple of hours of breaks. You can get stream recorders from a bunch of on-line download sites (www.topdownloads.net - Absolute Sound Recorder 3 - is one of many shareware programs you can use).

The keys to look for in most presentations:

1. Is the talent COMFORTABLE on the air?
2. Are they talking TO the audience or announcing over them?
3. Do they know WHO the audience is?
4. Are they TOPICAL to the target audience?
5. Are they PREPARED?
6. Are they EXECUTING the basics - call letters, billboards, liners, and most important interfacing with the music.

The key is picking one of these topics for each session and focusing on just that area.

To get the talent into it - try brainstorming instead of preaching to them. Get them involved in answering these questions and let their ideas and thoughts jump out. If you do you will make a lot more progress with each session.

Selling THE MUSIC

One of the biggest complaints on radio that we constantly see in focus groups, listener panels, and just talking with the audience in passing is 'it's the same list of songs over and over.' We've all heard it and for the most part just thrown up our hands over this BIG issue with the audience.

We've all done the math and know that the minute we expand the playlist the ratings fall off as the audience can't keep up with the depth of the playlist. If we don't play the top testing current hits 20 or 30 times a week the audience's time spent with the station won't allow them to hear them enough to become familiar. The ratings consistently show that the bigger the list the harder it is to attract large enough cume to deliver a competitive share.

It's all translated by the audience as tight corporate playlists that don't challenge them or match what they can now carry around on any MP3 player.

We've faced this before. Many of you may not have been around at the time. Back in the early 70s top 40 radio ruled the world and was mostly on AM. As FM was building one of the cornerstones was the 'progressive rock' and early AOR formats.

Most of the AM - Top 40 stations had playlists of around 100 songs. At some the top song of the week was played every hour at the top of the hour. It truly was the same songs over and over. The top 40 DJs talked over the music with hyped up voices, on air gimmicks and a bunch of one liner jokes in some cases.

The complaints we heard as FM was launching on radio programming are not much different than what we hear today. As rock radio planted it's seed there were 4 rules:

• The DJs pick the music
• No talking over the songs
• No Hyped up voices - be laid back and just talk to the audience
• Blend the music together with segues and fewer interruptions in the hour.

While the FM rock audience didn't seem that big at first it grew as more and more got FM radios and by 1980 FM Rock radio had evolved to race past most of those top 40 stations and built a bond with the boomer audience. Yes we did build a controlled library with card systems and did play the hot current songs in a rotation over the day. But, the perception that the DJs picked the songs was still central to the format.

As music scheduling systems came about the jocks were taken out of the music selection process and pretty soon they were more used to sell liners, billboards, and maybe toss in a little audience interaction on the phones.

What would happen if we brought the air staff back into the music selection process now?

We've all watched the launch of the "Jack" formats and their positioning statement - Playing Whatever We Want (or something close). Often the first adaptors for the Jack stations come from an audience that remembers the day when the jocks picked the songs. We often found in the early research that it was Classic Rock and Rock listeners that jumped on the Jack stations and cited the positioning as a key reason to try the station. Of course most of them didn't stick around when they played ABBA and other train wrecks trying to prove their point. Also not having jocks on the Jack formats made you wonder - who is the WE in playing Whatever WE Want.

Is there a way to get the air staff more into the music? We all know there is and it's time to start experimenting. We all know that the listening 'math' won't allow a jock free for all, but just going around with the air staff sounding clueless and totally uninvolved in the music isn't working either. There's a middle ground here that need some exploration.

A Lesson From WKRP

All of us in Radio have laughed hard at WKRP over the years. The bumbling GM, the sexy receptionist, the geeky news guy, the sold out sales guy and the jocks trying so hard to be cool. In typical sit-com structure the jokes and stories all revolved around the personal problems of the characters. It was all about their lives within the halls of the radio station. We rarly saw any interaction with the audience. Once in a while we'd get a caller on the air and a few storylines showcased contests or concerts but that was about it.

Part of the plot of course is that WKRP was a losing radio station. It sat at the bottom of the ratings and we can only imagine that it was also at the bottom in revenue. We never got to see a budget meeting - I don't think they had a budget. KRP did climb to 6th in the ratings in one of the eposides in the final season. But, the humor and drama came from the characters within the building.

Perhaps WKRP could have been a winner if the team had been paying attention more to the audience than how much office space Les Nessman had or who Jennifer was dating this week.

But that wouldn't have been funny. KRP is not real it's a sitcom.

How much effort and time is spent in your building with the internal drama? Could spending all that effort on the audience drama be more productive?

Cell Phone ONLY Households

The National Center for Health Statistics has released the bi-annual survey on cell phone only households for the 2nd half of 2007 and the 18+ percentage of cell phone only households is now up to 15.8%!!!!!

This percentage has grown from Jan-June 2004 at 5% to nearly 16% in just 3 years. And the growth is really increasing. The percentages grew 14% in the last 1/2 of 2007 compared to the first half. Looking further back the percentages from the first 1/2 of 2006 were up 6% over the last half of 2006. At this rate of growth the numbers will quickly hit 20%, it could happen when they release the first half of 2008 around September. So it's likely that right now we are over 20% of the adult population in cell phone only households. By the end of 2008 we will probably be over 25%.

They are also tracking the people who may have a land line but take nearly all their calls on the cell phone. That's another 13.1%. So nearly 29% of the households really don't use the land line as a phone. When Arbitron calls - 29% of the adult population is out of the game. And I repeat it's growing every day.

Now look at the data by age cells:

-------Jan-June 2004 ---- July-Dec 2007

18-24 ---10.3%--------------30.6%

25-29---- 9.9% --------------34.5%

30-44-----4.4%-------------- 15.5%

45-64----- 2.3%-------------- 8.0%

65+ ---------.9%-------------- 2.2%

This is not just 18-24s and college students - look at the rate of growth in 30-44s and now the biggest percentage is 25-29s. If your target audience is 18-44s you are well over 20% of the households using only cell phones. The number is even higher if you factor in the land line households who really don't take calls on the land line.

You can read the study here.

Using landlines for Arbitron samples and research in general is quickly becoming a very biased sample that leaves out big chunks of the population. Obviously we NEED new answers here. Find a way to call cell phones or start using the web, email, myspace?, maybe text messaging, or other new ways to contact the sample. Our data is quickly becoming too in-accurate to be credible even with People Meters we still don't have a reliable and accurate sample with land line phones as the base.