“How many different items are on the menu?”  It’s a question no one at a restaurant has ever asked.

And yet… “how many songs are on your playlist?” is routinely asked as though the answer might actually be significant.

The familiar and the unfamiliar; the all-time-favorites and the never-heard-of; each viewed simply as a quota, no one more important than another.  But, alas…

Everyone’s favorite music station is the one that plays their favorite music.

And that, my friends, is the fundamental challenge in growing Christian music stations to be market leaders.

A well-known researcher recently told me that he had never seen a format where so much of the music was unfamiliar – even to its fans.

So, what’s the better idea?

In a world of unfamiliar, successful program directors design familiarity into the brand.

That’s how six unknowns can get the loudest ovation of the night at the ballpark – the common ground of love of country connects six thousand fans in the stands to the six returning airmen on the field.  It’s how strangers become friends because they are both parents of kids on the same team.  It’s how neighbor meets neighbor as everyone pulls together to clean up after a storm.

“To move an audience, especially a diverse audience, from where they are to where you want them to be requires common ground…  Where you consistently begin and what you consistently assume determine who consistently shows up.  Why?  Because your assumptions create the common ground for the journey.”
~Andy Stanley, “Deep and Wide”

Familiarity is the fruit of common ground.  Common ground is the fruit of knowing your listener.

Knowing your listener is the fruit of putting your listeners’ perspective ahead of your own agenda.

The question isn’t “How many different items are on the menu?”

…the question is, “What do people love here?”

They say there are more “religious” radio stations than any other format category.   They also say those religious stations have fewer listeners than any other.   The reason for that is quite simple.

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

A growth strategy is one that incorporates big picture concepts such as…

Why does the radio station exist?
Who are our listeners?
What do they desire and expect from our station?
Who and where are other people like them?

It’s ironic to me that most Christian radio stations aren’t strategic.   Ironic because our Christian faith may be the most strategic thing there is.

Our faith flows from the ultimate big picture.  There is a God.  He made everything.  He created us for a purpose.  He desires a relationship with us.   Jesus Christ is the focal point of that God-man relationship.

Most Christian radio stations ignore strategy and focus only on the day to day tactics – the songs, the contests, the liners, the deejays.   Oh, and reacting to complaints.

Your radio station can be transformed if you’ll answer two simple questions:

What do people want and expect from your station?

How consistently to do you that?

Congratulations!  In answering those two questions you’ve begun the journey of thinking strategically.

It’s the shortest title of any of the 304 Frost Advisories.

If only.

If only we didn’t have those limitations.  The budget.  The staffing.  The signal.

Limitations!  There are just 12 notes on a musical scale, only 100 yards on the field, just 90 feet between bases, and barely 24 seconds on a shot clock.

All art has boundaries.

“Embracing the limitation can actually drive creativity.”
~Phil Hansen

Embracing it can result in a mural made from nothing but postage stamps, 60 foot sculptures of four presidents chiseled into granite at Mt. Rushmore, or a TV sitcom with no music other than a bass guitar.

In the world of radio, the limitation is… time.

We sell time, we schedule time, and we even measure time spent listening.

But often the creative aren’t disciplined, and the disciplined aren’t creative.  The result is either three minutes of babbling… or nice, concise dullness.

What if we embraced creativity and discipline as two sides of the same coin?  “Necessity is the mother of invention”, Plato said.  Or was it Frank Zappa?

All musicians want to jam.  All hits are three minutes.

So, what is more important?

Trying to keep listeners from tuning away… or attracting people to tune in?

Many would say the former.  Almost all discussions inside the radio station – where to place the spot sets, traffic reports, and contests – focus on this.  And for good reason.  After all, listeners are already listening.  It’s easier to get blood out of a turnip then to have to plant another crop.

But what does the data say?

“A major new study… reveals that nearly two-thirds of radio station listening occasions consist of listeners ‘turning on’ a station and end with them ‘turning off’ a station, as opposed to ‘switching in’ from and ‘switching out’ to other stations. “*

“Coleman Insights and Media Monitors… found that 62.7% of all occasions are Turn On-Turn Offs.”  (It’s even higher – 77.9% – in the Christian format.)

“These findings are about the strongest reinforcement of the value of brand-building for radio stations that I can imagine,” commented Coleman Insights president/chief operating officer Warren Kurtzman, who co-authored the study.  “The ability of a radio station to generate listening occasions through Turning On is dependent on having a strong brand, which is based on having high awareness, a clearly-defined position, association with multiple product attributes and eliciting passion from the audience.“

I wonder what would happen if you spent 62.7% of your time creating a radio station that is relevant, meaningful, and entertaining enough to have raving fans, and the rest of your time eliminating obstacles for longer listening.

“In the share of every station there are two numbers, the number to the left of the decimal point and the number to the right (e.g. 6.0, 6.3, etc.).  The number to the left is affected by the big things that a station does, like what it is known for and the big benefits the listener gets from the station.  The number to the right is based on the tweaks and minor modifications that the station does to the music, the commercial sequencing, etc.

You can make a mediocre station only slightly better by working on the number to the right all the time.  You can make a mediocre station great by working on the number to the left of the decimal.”
~Michael O’Shea

*“The Components of Tuning Occasions – Switching vs. Turning” study… an analysis of nearly 37 million listening occasions by Coleman Insights and Media Monitors.

We didn’t sweat like the other kids, and that made everyone else really envious.  You see, we were the first classroom in the school to have air conditioning.  That’s about all I remember about being in the sixth grade.

What do people remember about your radio station?  What is memorable gives light to what is meaningful. What is meaningful (thinking) is what they care about (feeling).  What they care about determines how much they’ll care about your station.

Do you know what your listeners care about?  Or maybe a better question is… do you use those things to design your station?

“Trying to control what other people think is a trap.  At the same time that we can be thrilled by the possibility of flying without a net and of blazing a new trail, we have to avoid the temptation to become the audience, to will them into following us.  Not only is it exhausting, it’s counterproductive.  (Success) happens because you’ve made something worth buying, because you’ve outlined something worth believing in.”
~Seth Godin

Our format is, or can be, about things people already care about… and… this is really important, they would still care about those things even if your station wasn’t around.

“Lots of people are trying to sell what people don’t want.  Don’t be one of them.”
~Roy Williams

The knee-jerk reaction is to come up with STUFF!  We pay far less attention to whether that STUFF makes a difference.

“In the share of every station there are two numbers, the number to the left of the decimal point and the number to the right (e.g. 6.0, 6.3, etc.).  The number to the left is affected by the big things that a station does, like what it is known for and the big benefits the listener gets from the station.  The number to the right is based on the tweaks and minor modifications that the station does to the music, the commercial sequencing, etc.  You can make a mediocre station only slightly better by working on the number to the right all the time.  You can make a mediocre station great by working on the number to the left of the decimal.”
~Michael O’Shea

I first stumbled over this thing called STRATEGY when programming a Smooth Jazz station in Dallas in the late 80s.  After twenty years in the business, well, I knew how to make the station sound slick and smooth and all that stuff, but until I met Alan Mason I didn’t know how to make a station matter.

I’ve come to learn that EVERYONE lives in the world of TACTICAL.  The tactical approach is “what things can we do?”  That’s the world of Jack in the Box, Radio Shack, and probably your station.

The world of STRATEGY is a different kind of thinking.  That’s the world of Apple, Starbucks, and Tom’s Shoes.  That’s the world that asks, “will this stuff make a difference?”

…I’d have paid more attention to what I wrote, to paraphrase the great philosopher Groucho Marx.

Malcolm Gladwell suggests that if you do something 10,000 times you’re an expert.  I’m not quite sure how 300 of something stacks up but I’m honored to know that I may have helped some folks along the way with my 5.769 years of insights, allegories, and umlauts into the fascinating world of strategy and programming and stuff like that.

Frost Advisories have been penned in the middle seat on Delta and the back seat of Uber; on mission trips to the Dominican, and poolside at the Motel 6 in Denver.

Since I can’t think of something worthy of this historic milestone I’ve tapped into the talent of my friend Nelson at The Fish in Portland.

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mppDhpvrLo4

Click here for the video edition of Frost Advisory #300!

It was a rude awakening.  How could they not know something so familiar to all of us at the radio station?  A tour of schoolchildren made their way through the production studios, the FM control room, and down to where the AM stations are located.

We then heard the words.  “AM station?”, one youngster inquired.  “What is that?  A station people listen to in the morning?”

Perspective.

On the recent 9-11 anniversary my friends Ellis and Tyler at Z88.3 shared how the University of Central Florida displayed American flags all over their campus.  But the reason why is what amazed me!  They shared because incoming freshmen are too young to remember the events of September 11, 2001.  They would have been only 3 years old.  Do the math.

What’s your listener’s perspective?  What do they feel at their core?  What makes them stand and cheer?

At a recent Houston Rockets’ game the loudest ovation – a standing ovation – wasn’t for the home team or their bearded superstar James Harden.  No, the loudest ovation was for the six airmen that walked to center court during halftime.  And it had nothing to do with basketball.

When was the last time your station did something worthy of a standing ovation?  Perhaps your station needs to stand for something they care about.

*Next week’s Frost Advisory is #300, a milestone perhaps, and a surprise, no doubt, to my 5th grade English teacher and anyone that worked with me at my first few radio stations.  It’s also the debut of my first video!  (That’s a tease, don’tcha know).

My, the lessons we can learn from this remarkable time in political history from a certain Donald John Trump, Sr., and Bernard “no middle initial” Sanders.

This tip of this political iceberg can start with the notion of common ground.  Both the Donald and the Bernie have tapped into values that already exist, not that which Madison Avenue has to concoct like the Super Bowl commercial that showed three dogs hiding under a trench coat to buy Doritos.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say.

Donald Trump has created common ground by creating a common enemy – Washington insiders with perceived failed promises.  In 2004 Barack Obama created common ground by proclaiming “the audacity of hope.”  Ronald Reagan created common ground in 1980 by asking, “Are You Better Off than You Were Four Years Ago?”

Our format’s shared values run two thousand years deeper than any other format, and yet I find stations frequently miss the opportunity for common ground by defaulting to the smallest possible audience – those who are already fans of the Christian music industry.

If the answer to your quiz is “Building429”, guess who will participate?  Those who know and love Building429.  If you talk about a Christian music industry cruise, guess who’s interested?  Those who are already fans of the Christian music industry.

BREAKING NEWS: Most of your listeners can’t name their five favorite songs, much less name the individual members of Hercules and the Chicken Fat People.  (It’s what the songs mean to them that matters, but that’s a Frost Advisory for another week).

“Where you consistently begin and what you consistently assume determine who consistently shows up.  Why?  Because your assumptions create the common ground for the journey.”
– Andy Stanley

This just in: We’re just a couple of weeks away from Frost Advisory #300 (a milestone unimaginable to my 5th grade English teacher and the guys in the fantasy baseball league) and the world premier of my first video!  Yikes!  That’s a tease, don’tcha know!

Is local TV news like this where you live?

I see promos with four young, attractive people either right out of college or right out of the health club, nattily attired with ever so white teeth.  They nod at each other like kids having to pose for home movies, packaged inside captions like “we’re here for you”, “depend on us”, or “news bulletins first”, “severe storm coverage first”, or “bowling scores first.”  (Can everything be FIRST?)

But if you actually dare to WATCH their newscasts… it’s wall-to-wall car wrecks, 7-11 robberies, drug busts, people doing bad things to people, and escaped killers with funny looking noses.  Jeepers, there is hardly any time for cute, witty repartee between these manicured men and women of the press.

What’s going on here?   Do they think we won’t notice that they are claiming to be something they aren’t?

Well, before we throw our TV brethren under the proverbial phony bus, perhaps we should check the log in our own eye.

Christian music radio is now inundated with stations that zip zap over bongo music that they’re Positive, Encouraging, Uplifting, Inspiring, Invigorating, Exhilarating, Energizing, and Revivifying.  But when one tunes in they sound about as positive and encouraging as Donald Trump talking about the Pope.  (I actually heard one station do a “Positive Thought” about the wrath of God.  I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say).

C’mon, kids.

It’s not against the law to smile and sound likable.  Last I checked it wasn’t a sin to laugh and love on your listeners.

Recently I was a part of a research project where “Fun to listen to” was the one of the top needs of the audience and a top attribute of the station.  Their listeners really like them because they’re likable.  Of course, any good idea can be done poorly and I’m not suggesting you hire Bozo the Clown for afternoon drive, but as those wacky Latins used to say,

“Abusus non tollit usum”

(the abuse of a thing does not invalidate the proper use of a thing)

Here’s my suggestion:  if your station claims to be positive, uplifting, and well-groomed, then maybe it’s a good idea to actually be that.  Which brings to mind me a riddle I heard as a kid:

How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?

Answer:  Four.

Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.