The Art of Being Authentic

Being Authentic is one of those magical qualities that can make anything suddenly desirable.  You see it in nearly every brand, product, entertainment venue, media and personality somewhere.  The ones that can hold on to this perception are the ones that usually win in the consumer's images and desires.    

So how do you capture this unique trait in your images with the audience?  It's not an easy one to grasp.  You can't just claim that that your brand or personality is authentic -- you have to earn it.  To earn it you have to remain true to the core images of the brand. You also have to deliver the product at a pretty high standard for enough time to be recognized.  


The key to executing a plan that captures the Authentic image is to build a list of the most important qualities and traits that are the core or foundation for the brand.  Once you have those don't compromise them. Also build your imaging around those qualities, but be careful not to over claim or over-hype.  


Much like leadership or humor being Authentic is something you earn.   You can't buy it, inherent it or just claim it.  But, once you have it you often have a quality that goes beyond the superficial and that's where the magical power comes in.  


As you set your values in Music, Imaging, Promotions, and the Personalities that make up your station and brand take a long look at the core qualities -- they are your key to achieving Authenticity.  

Making Plans Into Reality

The biggest challenge working with stations often lies in making all the great ideas and plans we come up with into reality.  For programmers most of the tasks that get great ideas and improvements on the air revolve around 4 areas:

1. Music Systems - Getting your scheduling system completely organized, working efficiently, and in sync with your library.  Keeping up with the trends, new music (if you play it), resting/platooning, feature programs, weekend specials, and local events (concerts etc.) all take organization, understanding of the software and constant review.   
2. Air Staff - Keeping their momentum, training, critiquing, and show prepping are all crucial keys to turning voices into personalities.  You need a plan for everyone on your team and you have to keep working this plan to have any progress. 
3. Imaging - This is the soul of the station's sound and your biggest opportunity to work the audience.  You can recycle them, build images for your important station values, promote events/contests,  increase your web presence and entertain with the content between the songs and around the spots.  But, you have to constantly work at it - great imaging doesn't just fall from the sky.  So often we see spurts of work in this area.  Every 3-4 months we update it, when we should have been working on it every week.   
4. Promotion - Marketing - Building promotions, events and community presence.

When you break it down to 4 areas now you can get a handle on implementing the goals and tasks that lead to great ideas hitting the air.  The key is finding a reliable organization system - a few ideas:  

•  Go at it daily.   Make Monday - Music Day, Tuesday Air Staff Day, Wednesday - Imaging and work promotions on Thursday.  Every week you tackle your list in each area.  
• Go weekly - 1st week of the month is all about Promotions, the 2nd week imaging, 3rd for the Air Staff and music in the final week. 
• Divide up your day - An hour for the Air Staff, 1/2 hour for imaging, 1/2 hour for music, an hour for promotions and sales.   

Sometimes picking one of these organization systems depends on how big the challenges are in each department and also the style of the programmer.   If you are building a morning show from scratch and they are still learning the basics it might be a daily effort for them along with taking 1 day a week and working for a couple of hours on their show.   If you've just got a music test in or are overhauling your systems it might be something you need to spend a whole week on.   Getting ready for the book or a packed summer of promotions/events might mean spending 2-3 days focusing on getting everything set to go.   

We also see lots of programmers juggling multiple stations and having to make this model work on multiple platforms making it more confusing and challenging.   

The important point here is have an organization plan.  Not just a bunch of meetings on your Outlook calendar, but an overall theme/focus to a period of time on a regular basis.  Now you can concentrate on executing in that area to get the job done - not just pick at a few items and really never accomplish the task.  It takes time and focus to get it done.   

A New Meter for PPM

At least this meter looks like something from 2000 instead of the 80s look of the old pager meter.  While this may help get more of the panel to carry it more we still have the issue of a very small panel that doesn't change very often when you compare this sample to the larger samples we had (and still have in smaller markets) with the old diary system. Adding more sample would be a real improvement.

Perhaps the bigger news here is behind the scenes as Arbitron buys out IMMI - Integrated Media Measurement Inc.  You may wonder - who are these guys?  Here is their website.  They have been around for at least 3 years and have developed a full 'smart phone' system for collecting data on the media (radio, TV, Web, DVD, DVRs, maybe even more).  The system takes an audio sample from the smart phone every minute and then feeds the digital picture of the audio to the IMMI computer which compares the sample to what it has on file for any media it is measuring and matches up the data.  It is a lot like the BDS system we use to track airplay for music.  They have actually been measuring radio in a few markets but really haven't tried to sell much to radio operators focusing on the advertisers instead.

This could be the move to do all of the data collection on Cell Phones instead of PPM devices in the future.  And watch as Arbitron also moves into measuring all media usage with a cell phone system.

The Crowded Web Running Out of Room!!

This is going to remind you of Y2K, but it is a fact this time.  We are running out of room on the Internet for IP addresses.  The current system is based on an addressing scheme designed in the 70s called IPv4 and it has room for around 4 billion addresses.   Well guess what - we are almost there and they figure we will run out of IP addresses in the next 18 months, maybe even sooner.

There is a system update called IPv6.  But, only the really big players like Google and You Tube are set up for IPv6 - really only about 25% of the big servers are in for V6.  V6 and V4 also struggle to get along so we can expect to see slower searches, slower Internet loading, and more crashes as we struggle with translating from V4 to V6.

While we all see so much potential in the web world.  It seems as if the audience views it as a place where everything is free, or everything is real cheap, and a place where you can do anything with any device no matter how small.   The reality is it's a complex place that really can't live in a cost free world.  Space on the WWW frontier will cost someone somewhere and we are all going  have to pay.  We should also expect that this super highway will soon choke up just like a 15 lane expressway in L.A. does just days after the workers finish building it.

Sean Ross from Edison Research and Radio-Info noted in a recent newsletter about his struggles with monitoring station streams on his IPhone.   His monitoring was blown out by dropouts, distorted audio, stream buffers, and freezing audio on his way from home to the office on a regular basis.

Yes the new tech world has tons of potential, but with the crush of the world inventing new devices and ways to hang out in the web world we are running out of space and the web infrastructure to handle it.   Expect more news on this as we ride through more significant growth on an system that probably can't handle all this change.

To catch more on the Web Address Shortage - click here
And for more on Sean Ross' streaming article - click here

Working With Sales On Promotions

In most operations the days of having a big promotions budget for a contest or funding an event have faded away.  That doesn't have to stop you from building some creative on-air promotions and also helping the sales team work with some very valuable clients.  Yet we often see lots of the ideas we have in the programming meetings fall apart when we try to field them with the sales teams.  Here are some tips for both sales and programming to help build on air promotions together:  

• Plan Ahead - Walking into a Sales meeting on August 1st to lay out a Fall Client Promotions package is way too late.  You should be approaching the sales team 6-7 months ahead of the promotion start.  
• Bring lots of ideas and keep an open mind.  Walking in with a detailed plan that requires a Shelby Mustang for the prize and lots of rules/limits will probably end up with no clients wanting to join in.  Look at which clients have done promotions in the past, who is new or looking to make a move in the market.  Then consider what potential their products could have and look for a couple of 'example ideas' to pitch.  
• Let the Client Join In-  If you let the client have some ownership you will probably make the sale sooner and you'll also have a lot more cooperation during the promotion.  
• Follow Through: Once you have a promotion set to roll make sure to deliver 110%.  Make sure you get an A grade.   This does become somewhat of a marriage and you don't want to end up in divorce court with the client - it could be costly and tough on your reputation.   
• Be Patient - If you have enough lead time you can be patient and often it takes a while to get a client interested and find the common ground to build a good promotion for both the station and their business.  

Lastly remember that Job 1 in the sales world is not selling the promotions.  It's about selling commercials and helping the clients market their products, brands and services on the air.  Promotions may help that effort for some.  Also keep in mind that promotions take time from the sales team and that time could be a sales call somewhere else with dollars involved. 

Even though your Spring book is still in the field as I write this you should be well into working on your Fall promotions.  Your sales teams should be including invitations to key clients on participating with the station in Fall promotions and you should have a number of target ideas circulating through the sales department.     

Audience Research - The Future - Summary

With so much new media plus changes in entertainment and communications, as well as a revolution in our measurement systems we have many more questions than answers.  Asking the same old questions to a sample gathered in the ancient days of land line phones in a format that takes lots of precious time to execute will make it real hard to find the answers to so many questions.  

We have the tools and opportunity to blaze new trails in researching the audience.  But, like so much in radio we have to get our heads out of the 80s and welcome the new world.   Hopefully as we roll out of the recession some of the gains will find their way into learning about the audience in their new world.

The keys lie in moving more towards managed panels for our research base, moving more towards on-line resources with their rich databases.  The next step is to overhaul our questions to learn more about behavior instead of just reciting recalled images.  To learn more about the audience on these levels we need to look at new data gathering systems to get past the surface levels and also use new analysis techniques to get to the core of real audience actions.  We'll also need to move away from talking to them on the phone and interact with them in their world which as moved to the digital world of the web, cell phones, and smart phones/tablets.

It's not like we are really blazing a new trail here by ourselves.  A lot of other marketing research and industries have already started down this path.  Let's learn from them and start looking at the audience's behavior and how we can be a stronger part of it.

Audience Research - The Future - Data Collection

It's obvious that we are in the middle of a revolution in communication.  With cell phones and the Internet we suddenly have a whole new platform that is evolving in a full digital world following Moore's law.   The law is built on the capacity of integrated circuits which doubles every 2 years - and with it we double the capability the the circuits and their applications.  We no longer talk on our cell phones, we text, surf the Internet, blog, tweet, Facebook, take pictures, shoot movies, and now have millions of apps that do almost anything.

In the Radio Research world a lot of what we do still relies on talking on the phone or filling out pen and paper forms - like the diary.   Our measurement is moving away from this model with the PPM, but is our perceptual and music research following along?

When you think about the telephone perceptual it's a lengthy world.   We have to read off long lists of stations, music mix descriptors, personality names, image descriptions and if we want open ended comments someone has to transcribe them.  It limits the amount of information we can get from them and the time they will stay on the phone.  We also have that interaction with the interviewer which sometimes holds people back from their real actions and thoughts.

Moving perceptual research online opens up a lot of doors.  We often get a lot more open ended responses with very valuable impressions and images, we can cover long list of images, stations and other questions much quicker.  There are also lots of animation options that will allow us to use dial type scales and other ways to collect data that gives us more insight than just the 1-7 scale. Imagine what we could do with the I-Pad touch screen!

Online research also moves at the pace of the responder - not the pace of the music test or the interviewer, the sample can come back to the questionnaire/music list at their schedule.  And of course we can add audio, video and pictures/images into the mix with ease.

Having tried out a few on-line perceptual studies we've seen the potential.  While we have all done a quick survey on-line there is a lot more that can be done in this environment.  Some innovative researchers working with other product lines have started to push the envelope in questionnaire design and the potential is very impressive.

It's a whole new world of potential and possibilities that we haven't even tapped into .  Perhaps as we start to dig into audience research again in our budgets we'll have the courage to innovate instead of just replicate.

In our last post in this series we'll summarize the thoughts early next week.   Please feel free to add yours.

Audience Research - The Future - The Questions

The usual pattern in most research studies really ends up with the same questions.   We start with their 'cume' behavior/recall and then narrow it to most listened to stations then we move on to the body of the questions .  We craft music blends for them to evaluate, ask about Morning shows, other personalities, maybe at work listening, contests, marketing efforts and maybe a few questions about the web site (have you been there).   Sometimes we are on a format search where the music mixes or other descriptive moments take more time in the questions.  There's always the pressure of keeping it under 25 minutes on the phone so we really don't have that much time.

Notice that the only area that is about their behavior is in the Cume and which stations they listen to the most.  An even there we may see the most marketed station win even though we look down their answers and they don't really know much about that station in the other parts of the study.  Where do they listen to radio the most, and what are those stations?  How passionate are they? Are they super radio users or just casual tuners?  Do they jump around as soon as the music sets end?

Also what kind of people are they?  Are they innovators that latch on to new concepts or products or are they laggards who are just figuring out innovations that happened years ago?  Or are they in that mass in the middle and where do they rank in that segment?

A few more questions about them before we dive into their perceived listening habits would really help us learn a lot more about what their actual behavior might be.  Right now we are mostly learning what they recall about our products and not a lot about how they use them.  Recall worked in the diary days - now it's about real behavior.  We have to find the secrets to making our products perform on a different plane

Many products and industries have used this type of research for years - dating back to the 60s and while it's gone through a number of evolutions it's still in use today.  Finding the key links in the sample or population and building products that use the keys to open doors to the bigger groups has been a big element for many industries.  

Now how do we communicate with the sample?  A lot has changed in the last few decades let's take a look in our next segment later in the week.