I climbed inside in my rental car, threw my toys in the back seat and looked around for the key as I had done dozens of times before. I looked on the dashboard, between the seats, and above the sun visor but found no key. I looked on the floorboard, in the glove compartment, and in the side pockets.  No key.  

So with another traveling inconvenience “hrmph” I grabbed my stuff and headed back to the rental car office to give the innocent desk agent a piece of my mind.  “May I help you?.” “Yes,” I said, “I’ve just walked all the way out to my rental car and there is no key.” She looked at my contract and said, “Mr. Frost, your car is KEY-LESS.”

If your radio station went off the air would anyone care?

Recently, a station I work with had some signal problems. The PD told me they were inundated with listeners saying the signal was staticky and difficult to pick up.

I remember being in the control room at KRBC in Abilene, Texas, when a West Texas lightning strike hit our tower. The general manager stuck his head in the studio and said to me, “I want you to announce that we’re off the air.” He could be a little goofy but at least he knew whether we were on the air.

Did you see it too?

Hundreds of millionaire professionals willingly gave up a tool of their trade and replaced it with something that on any other day, in any other circumstance, would subject them to ridicule and harassment from their co-workers.

They wore pink.

This week I’ve had the unique opportunity to introduce a program director to our format whose background is exclusively in mainstream radio. That was me 23 years ago.

If I only knew then what I know now.

“People are really not coming to see us as much as they are coming to see and hear what we represent to the audience.”

Carole King

Even New Coke had a longer lifespan than CNN+.

Fewer than 10,000 people were watching CNN+ daily. I reckon’ that’s less than your station’s daily cume if you’re in a good sized market.

“What you have to do is offer some original content, unique value or have a significantly important archive of content and CNN+ didn’t offer any of those things. These were total retreads of the same shows you could get for free featuring most of the same people and to the extent that they even had other kinds of documentary content most of those things you could get on other platforms. Just not interesting.”

Michael Moynihan/Matt Welch on The Megan Kelly Show

Okay. Let’s talk about what we can learn from the demise of CNN+.

The folks at Nielsen World Headquarters tell us there are more “religious” radio stations than any other format category. They also say those religious stations have fewer listeners than any other. Gulp!

Having been involved in the CCM format for more than twenty years, I suggest that there is something we can learn from Easter.

A radio station cannot grow unless it is designed to grow. And that requires a different kind of thinking. Strategic thinking.

A Samsung Galaxy S21 commercial made me think. Of all messages communicated not one centered on the features of a cell telephone. Wow! A commercial about a cell phone that never mentioned a cell phone.

Made for the epic in everyday.

Philip Yancey shares in his book “Vanishing Grace”:

“Mark Rutland whimsically recalls a survey in which…

Americans were asked what words they would most like to hear.

He predicted the first choice: ‘I love you.‘

Number two was ‘I forgive you.‘

The third choice took him by surprise: ‘Supper’s ready.‘”

It dawned on Rutland that these three statements provide a neat summary of the gospel story.”

Unlike other formats people, don’t tune to your radio station because of WHAT YOU ARE. They tune to you because of who THEY are.

After more than 20 years in the format, I’m used to people ignoring me when I share that idea. It doesn’t make sense to them. That’s because they can’t read the label from inside the bottle. And you, my friends, are inside the bottle.

I first loved baseball because my dad loved baseball. In fact, my first game ever was a really big deal – I got to see my baseball hero Mickey Mantle get the first hit in the very first indoor baseball game: at the Astrodome in Houston. My dad simply said, “You should see this.”

I love classical music because my mother was a professional violinist and shared her love for classical music. I loved watching the high school marching band because my daughter played her saxophone in it. I have even learned to bowl (not very well) because a dear friend loves bowling. In fact, he gave me my own bowling ball.

That question probably doesn’t mean what you think. I am not talking about the X’s and O’s that constitute the formatics of your station’s clock.

Let me explain.