It was easy for him to see.

“What do you shoot?”, he asked, as I stood in for my first golf lesson.

I hemmed and hawed and said, “Well, I use to break 90 all the time.  But now I have trouble breaking 100 because I don’t play that often.”

That’s all he needed to hear. “People that can’t break 100 don’t hit the ball solidly.  Their fundamentals, like grip and stance, are out of whack.”

His diagnosis: simple and accurate.

What if that simple discernment could be applied to programming your station?

Breaking 100 is about the basics.  The correlation to programming is understanding what songs to play and what to do between songs.

If your talent don’t know what to talk about (or how to talk about it), they don’t understand the purpose of the format.  They don’t understand “why people hire them”, as Mark Ramsey would say.

If we understand that people tune to your station to be encouraged and entertained, to have their values in faith, family and community affirmed, then we have a filter by which they can choose what they talk about;

…whether at five o’clock in the afternoon on the way home from work…

…on Sunday morning on the way to church or…

…waking up and starting my day,

…which is when I actually heard a reference to “partial human remains” while eating my breakfast (I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say), an obvious sign of not understanding the format.

If you can’t break 100, you don’t understand why people listen.

On the next Frost Advisory; what if you can’t break 90?

We live in interesting times.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are among the worst-rated presidential candidates of the last seven decades according to Gallup.  Only the unfavorable rating of Barry Goldwater in 1964 was higher, and he lost in one of the biggest landslides in history to Lyndon Johnson.  I think it was Jimmy Fallon who said these candidates are lucky they are running against the only candidate in history they could beat.

The noise is everywhere.  One can hardly get away from it.

Outlandish statements.

E-mail scandals.

Ego.

Trust.

“To find a unique position, what you must do is look inside the prospect’s mind.  You won’t find an ‘uncola’ idea inside a 7-Up can.  You find it inside the cola drinker’s head.”
~Jack Trout and Al Reis.

Time magazine seized the moment of the 4th of July holiday and focused on 240 reasons to celebrate America!  The cover was branded 99.9% politics free!

The “Jack” format was based upon two preconceived perceptions.

1) That radio/music wasn’t as good as it used to be, and

2) that there are a whole bunch of good songs out there that we weren’t hearing on the radio.  The execution of the format was secondary (as was its specific design based upon the market).  Listeners bought into the premise without questioning whether KC and the Sunshine Band should be played next to Deep Purple, just like voters have bought into Trump or Clinton despite the outlandish statements or latest e-mail scandal.

When you tap into an existing idea or perception, you offer the listener a reference point for the value your station provides.  It’s kind of like the “You are here” sign at the mall.  Where Nordstrom is located in mall isn’t meaningful unless I know where I am in relation to it.

My guess is that your station is 99.9% politics free, as well.  And my guess is that you’re not taking credit for it.

“There’s something wrong!”,  declared the analysis.   Well, it must be true!  They had a nifty graph and everything!

It’s tempting to assume that something is meaningful just because it can be graphed, or just because it made the headlines, (never more obvious to me than after two weeks of staring at political conventions).  Those assumptions are often the result of what Dan and Chip Heath refer to as “The Spotlight Effect”.

“We are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that is right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that’s just offstage…

…The spotlight only lights one spot.  Everything outside it is obscured.  When we begin to shift the spotlight from side to side the situation starts to look very different.  And that, in essence, is the core difficulty in decision making.

What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision, but we won’t always remember to shift the light.   Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape beyond it.”

If we look outside the spotlight of this analysis of song themes we discover something else just offstage.  Maybe these songs were written, sung, and produced for something other than filling a theological quota.  Maybe they were written to inspire, touch the heart, and to be loved.

There is a natural and indisputable friction between art and science.  Great stations understand that art and science need to be applied distinctly.

I know of a radio station that had this so confused that they actually had created a place in the hourly clock for what they called, “The God break”.  (I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say.)  Yep, at 20 past the hour you could tune in every hour and hear some deejay obligated to say something religious.  Got to fill that quota, don’tchaknow!
This misuse of analytics is a reminder that a great radio station, like a magnificent piece of art or a much loved song, is never the result of paint by the numbers.

“The left hemispheres of our brains are wired for empirical, scientific, objective reality: absolute truth.The right hemispheres of our brains are sponges thirsty for impressions, symbols, metaphors, connections and patterns. These patterns can be auditory, visual or behavioral.

Auditory patterns are called music.   Visual patterns are called art.

Behavioral patterns are called personality.   The more complex the pattern, the deeper the beauty.”
~Roy Williams

The deeper the beauty.   Hmm.  Let’s see a graph of that!

I’m not suggesting that the lyrics to Christian music shouldn’t be meaningful and theologically sound, but to conclude there is “something wrong” because there are ten times more songs about love than fear infers that there is “something right” about some other possible ratio.   Maybe we could do 50/50 in morning drive, and adjust to 70/30 when the kiddos get out of school!

The best radio stations are those that apply the left-brained science (music research, clock structure, format execution) to create compelling right-brained art; art that inspires, offers hope, and helps connects us to God and our values.

As long as we’re creating some charts,  what’s the deal with all these songs about Christmas and none about The Feast of Unleavened Bread?

Our minds crave simplicity.

The doctor says to take a pill.  We eagerly agree because its simple.  Until he tells us that the pill will cause us to lose our hair.  Ouch!  Now it becomes more complicated and not such a great idea.

Just look at the presidential election campaigns.  Political viewpoints are compressed into 140 character Twitter feeds and 20 second soundbites.  Ask ten people why they are supporting Donald or Hillary and nine will respond with one sentence.

“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

Correlation v. causation

“Every time we see a link between an event or action with another, what comes to mind is that the event or action has caused the other.”*

That’s causation.

On the other hand “correlation is an action or occurrence that can be linked to another”, but “linking one thing with another does not always prove that the result has been caused by the other.”*

*www.differencebetween.net

Our desire for simplicity drives us to conclude that one thing causes another simply because they occurred at the same time.

The ratings went up because we added new jingles!

The ratings went down because we had fewer traffic reports!

Our biases cause us to value things we know, mostly things inside the radio station, and to undervalue what we don’t know, mostly things outside the station.  That’s why it is so easy to imagine how tweaking the Farm Report increased the ratings than consider how the meter/diary holder’s two-week vacation impacted our numbers.

Successful radio stations strive not for answers than are simple, but answers that are true.  But, darn it, that demands effort and thought.