We added a new jingle package and our ratings went up!
We ran that new promotion and our ratings went down.
I know of a general manager that wanted to change the shifts of the deejays based upon weekly or monthly ratings. I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say.
Our minds crave simplicity. We crave the Silver Bullet.
Continue reading“People are drawn to black and white opinions because they are simple, not because they are true. Truth demands serious effort and thought.”
Donald Miller
The Prime Directive was the guiding ‘mission statement’ in Star Trek.
Here’s ours, in music radio:
Whatever you want to say needs to be as good as your best song.
If it’s not, why are you saying it?
This manifests in two ways – Subject matter, and Delivery.
Subject matter should be top of mind, and you want the listener to be able to easily see himself/herself in that situation.
Delivery: “as good as your best song” can be in the WAY that you say something. Sounding like you actually care (with some degree of emotional engagement). Painting a good word picture. Or simply being a good companion to the music, rather than an interruption.
Unless I’m working with you, I can’t tell which of these you need to work on. But I’ll bet there is one.
Just this week I found out a friend’s middle name is the same as my first name. But wait… wait… there’s more!
We also discovered that my middle name is the same as his first name. We’ve known and worked together for most of ten years and we never knew.
How do your listeners get a sense that your station has lots of listeners? Because they hear lots of listeners. It’s like an audio version of a crowd shot.
Trust me. I’m going somewhere with this.
In their book “Made to Stick,” Chip and Dan Heath share the story of a newspaper with a remarkable 100% circulation rate: everyone in his small town reads it. The publisher’s country wisdom was simple: “Names, Names, Names,” reasoning that people read his newspaper because they wanted to see their own names (or someone else’s).
Continue readingWe’re not taking a car trip together. We’re taking an elevator trip together. I’m gonna go up three floors and then get off. You need to be done by then.
BREVITY. We owe it to the Listener to be concise.
Perhaps you’ve heard it said that the church is known more for what it is against than what it is for.
“A business is no longer what it tells customers it is. A business is what customers tell other customers it is.”
In his book “Know What You’re For,” Jeff Henderson recommends that you consider the gap between these two questions:
The gap between the two answers will illuminate how your station moves from a transactional relationship with your listeners to one that is more relational.
Continue readingRadio used to be populated by “big” voices, guys with a cannonlike delivery who ANNOUNCED or PRESENTED things.
But then it changed, and one of the best examples of how is my friend Robert W. Walker. Rob didn’t have a huge voice, but it was an ultra-easy-to-listen-to voice. He wasn’t “jokey” funny, but his insights (especially when he made himself the butt of the joke) were often hilarious. He pulled you in toward him. It seemed intimate, one-on-one.
He also was a brilliant writer and Production talent. Some of his station promos raised chill bumps when you heard them.
But I would classify his main talent as something that sounds very simple: People just LIKED him. He was what everyone in radio thinks they could sound like, but not that many actually can.
I think there are two main things to learn from Rob:
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. Having worked in the format for more than twenty years now I’ve believe the reason is fairly obvious.
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:
Sometimes, something 180 degrees away is what works best. You can’t do it all the time, but it’s one of the first things that I consider. Here are three examples.
Try the Opposite once in a while. It opens up brand new roads.
We radio folk tend to think of tune out as a benign little concept akin to teenagers button pushing looking for the latest Taylor Swift song. While that does happen and we should do our darnedest to minimize programming that results in tune out, there is a far more ominous idea lurking in the bushes.
Some people leave a brand and never come back.
A friend of a friend told me that when people leave a car brand they seldom come back. Eek! Specifically, when folks have an accident they are far less likely to purchase that brand of car again. Maybe it’s partly psychological (“It’s the car’s fault”), or maybe it’s the potential embarrassment of the folks at your dealership pegging you as the one that side-swiped the delivery truck of kumquats headed toward the orphanage. (There’s a sentence you don’t see real often!)
What if we radio folk considered the seriousness of “tune out” as if the listeners were NEVER going to tune back in? That is, they were likely to leave the brand once and for all.
Continue readingThe old comedy axiom is that the 3rd time gets the biggest laugh: watch any old sitcom or comedy movie and you see it over and over. Something gets a laugh. A few minutes later, it gets repeated, and gets another laugh. Finally, much later, there’s a “call-back” and it gets said again, and that’s the “big” laugh. That’s the Rule of Three.
But now, that’s outdated. Everyone’s attention span is shorter now. The Rule of Three doesn’t apply anymore. Now it’s just 1, 2 instead of 1, 2, 3. To sound like TODAY, you need to shorten that rhythm of yesterday. If you do it a third time now, it usually just sounds like you’re trying too hard. (Or maybe it doesn’t even make sense, because Time Spent Listening is so much shorter now.)
