I’m often in discussions with PDs about freshening the sound, changing things up or being less predictable. These can be productive conversations, but if you don’t know the guardrails you can end up in a programming ditch subjectively running FROM things rather than running TO things.

Conversations about “changing things up” often end up replacing something familiar and popular with something that is neither familiar nor popular. Not good.

Here is an example:

I work with a rather famous radio station that has basically played the same feature at the same time every day for years. I understand why they designed it that way; to create a benchmark that gives listeners a reason to tune in. The problem is that listeners would hear the very same feature with the same voice every day. It’s as if were playing the same song at the same time every day, (something we work hard in preventing, I might add).

So, this is how we took that feature and changed things up…

We changed the voices every day, added celebrities, artists, or community leaders saying words that connected with the values the feature represented. We changed the production values and the music transitions.

In other words, it was the same core idea but delivered a fresh new way every day. That feature is now the highest testing feature on the station because it is a flag in the ground to the station’s beliefs and values.

It could have easily been thrown in the trash can under the logic of freshening things up. (If you’ll e-mail me, I’ll send you an example of what that feature sounds like now. You’ll be impressed and may want to give me a shiny new penny.)

The brilliant advertising guru Roy Williams shares this perspective…

“Have you ever used a zoom lens? think of your brain as having one. As you zoom in, you exclude the context to focus on the tiniest details. but when you zoom out, you see those details fold in on themselves to reveal the ever-expanding context of “the big picture.”

The key to keeping your … listener off-balance is to zoom in after zooming out, and zoom out after zooming in. Take them on a journey with you. Make them think they’re going to see one thing, then show them something different. unexpected elements make stories and photographs and paintings and music and everything else more interesting.”

“Tactics are short term, for the here and now based upon the circumstances. Strategy is long term and never changes. It’s the ‘why we exist’ stuff.” A kid from West Texas