For a program director, coaching air talent can be one of the most challenging tasks.

First, your talent must understand the vision and purpose of the radio station and for which specific group of people you are designing your radio station. Unless they understand who they are talking to, they won’t be able to prepare content appropriate for the audience and they’ll just as likely end up giving football scores to people who don’t listen to your station for sports.

We’ve chatted a lot over these 655 Frost Advisories about how to grow your station. Growth is the fruit of adopting common ground; of making the unfamiliar familiar.

As we’ve discussed, common ground is the biggest barrier for growth in our format because the music is generally unfamiliar to new listeners. And let’s not forget that everyone’s favorite radio station is the station that plays their favorite music.

I was driving along minding my own business when the announcement came on the radio for “The National Bereavement Conference 2023!”

“Egad!” I thought.

Were they talking about an amazing get together of caring people that come alongside those whose lives are forever changed due to the loss of a loving spouse? You’d never know it by what sounded like the label to a file folder.

There is no promotion so brilliant that it can’t be made utterly ineffective through the presentation of data, such as a list of dates and times.

In my other life I announce some baseball games for the St. Louis Cardinals. Last week, a Hall of Famer member of their storied franchise passed away. While he had a significant 21-year playing career, he was mostly known to recent generations for being a broadcaster announcing 29 consecutive post seasons in a row on national television.

In hearing the tributes to Tim McCarver, I ran across an interview with the talented Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post Dispatch where he talked about the craft of being a broadcaster.

The “leaky bucket.”

That’s PPM-talk for stations losing listeners by tuning away or turning the radio off. The traditional thought is that it is easier to keep listeners than to get them back. And darn logical that is, I reckon’!

But that’s only half the story. Or, should I say, two-thirds.

A recent study of 37 million listening occasions conducted by Coleman Insights and Media Monitors found that…

“Nearly two thirds of radio listening occasions are the result of a consumer turning on the radio, listening to a station and turning the radio off.”

Inside Radio

In a world before computers, my classmates and I would gather by a bulletin board in the school hallway to find out our class assignment.

Did we get the good teacher or the one nobody liked? Did we get the teacher that would allow you to have some fun or the one that was strict? (My fifth grade teacher Mrs. Lay actually invited us to her house to watch the World Series. Those were different times, don’tcha know).

Seeing which teacher we got wasn’t the real goal of checking the bulletin board. No, we wanted to see if we’d be with our friends. I wanted to be with Rodney, David, Buddy, and Julian. And just maybe that pretty girl Marlene.

Happy drivers make better drivers.

A recent campaign by Hyundai Sonata ignored the usual data drivel typical of automobile advertising. Instead, it captured an emotional moment that most of us have experienced while driving: singing along to a song on the radio.

There are sights and smells from our childhood we never forget. I grew up in the home my grandfather built.

I can still remember the sound of the grow ups talking downstairs while I was upstairs pretending to go to sleep. I remember the sound of the grandfather clock at the bottom of the staircase chiming every fifteen minutes and chiming the specific number of times on the hour.

My grandmother also lived in our hometown. The sights and smells of her home are just as vivid.

Writing every week for 648 weeks is not for the faint of heart. That’s every week for 12-½ years for those scoring at home.

I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?”

Fortunately, that’s the easy part. My answer is, “Everywhere.”

In those 648 weeks I’ve also learned where ideas DON’T COME FROM.

I reckon’ the beginning of a new year is a good time to consider how we internalize the values in our organizations.

Andy Stanley suggests, “Just start celebrating what you value. People will value what you celebrate, and they will celebrate what you value.”

I’ve recently been reading “Breakfast with Fred,” the conversations and ideas of Fred Smith, Sr., a mentor for many leaders such as Zig Ziglar, Philip Yancey, John Maxwell and my friend Steve Brown.