Frost Advisory #305 – Programming Lessons Learned from… Our Faith?

April 19, 2016 John Frost Leave a comment

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.

springfield-church-2

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.

Tommy Kramer Tip

Tommy Kramer Tip #150 – One Word

April 13, 2016 Tommy Kramer Leave a comment

Just one word can change the listener’s perception of you. Indeed, in the moment, one word can change anything.

“The woman screamed when she saw a moose” is very different from “The woman screamed when she saw a mouse.”

“I took my daughter Angela…” tells me who this person is. “I took Angela…” doesn’t.

“We have Taylor Swift tickets to give away” is about you. “You can win Taylor Swift tickets!” is about me, the listener.

Choose your words carefully. Craft what you do on the air. Stop thinking of what you do as a shift, and think of it as a show. You’re here to be good company, to catch me up on things, and to entertain. Don’t just be “radio” good; be “down to earth, but definitely the life of the party” good.

It’s all about the performance.

And every word matters… both said and unsaid.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Mason Morning Minute

Let’s Talk About Leadership

April 11, 2016 Alan Mason Leave a comment

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
~John Quincy Adams

I hate it when an ancestor has more clarity on a subject of today than I do. That’s because I have a lot of people ask me what leadership is. While they don’t like it, my response is always to ask, “Why do you want to be a leader?” Few are ready to answer that.

It’s a real killer for many people when I ask. They start to tell me about what they can do with the organization, or how equipped they are, or how bad existing management is.

What they don’t often say is they have a vision for what the future can hold, or what they can do for the organization in their position. Their perspective is inward looking, not outward looking. They care about what they will be doing more than how the organization will be doing. It’s not about what they’ll add, but what they can get. Wikipedia, the proven expert on everything, says, “Leadership is both a research area and a practical skill, regarding the ability of an individual or organization to ‘lead’ or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organizations.”

If you’re only thinking about what’s wrong now, or how much better you can do than existing management, you’re not thinking about leading. You’re probably thinking about a competition, and how you’ll “win”. How you can do better than the person in charge now?

There might be some truth to the part where you can do a “better” job than whoever is in charge now. But it also could be a combination of ego, hubris, or lack of information. If you spend more time thinking about how much better you can do than the existing leadership rather than what you can do to move the organization ahead, you might be in the leadership business for the wrong reason.

Frost Advisory

Frost Advisory #304 – If Only

April 10, 2016 John Frost Leave a comment

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.

madeleinestamps

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.

Tommy Kramer Tip

Tommy Kramer Tip #149 – The Power of Certainty

April 6, 2016 Tommy Kramer Leave a comment

Obviously there are exceptions, but for some reason, a lot of things I hear from jocks on music radio stations these days sound somewhat tenuous in their delivery. So let’s focus on that for a moment.

Here’s the goal:

Be SURE of what you want to say when the mic opens. Stumbling over words because you haven’t really digested them yet, or hemming and hawing around because you haven’t fully fleshed out the “story board” for this break, just makes you sound unprepared or weak.

CERTAINTY carries more weight than anything else. People who sound hesitant, or like the information owns THEM, don’t pull the listener in closer. They’re just audio wallpaper.

– – – – – – –
Tommy Kramer
Talent Coach
214-632-3090 (iPhone)
e-mail: coachtommykramer@gmail.com
Member, Texas Radio Hall of Fame
© 2016 by Tommy Kramer. All rights reserved.

Frost Advisory

Frost Advisory #303 – The Number to the Left of the Decimal Point and the Number to the Right

April 3, 2016 John Frost Leave a comment

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.“

switching

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.

Tommy Kramer Tip

Tommy Kramer Tip #148 – The Basics: a Tutorial

March 30, 2016 Tommy Kramer Leave a comment

Many air talents these days can be virtually crippled before they even get to the point of a break. New theories of what works best for PPM are bandied about every month – many of them “incomplete thoughts” (like the “you have to do a tease at the end of each break” virus that’s going around now) – and many of them are based on faulty (or no) research, or are simply opinion without experience to back it up.

Let’s work on that a bit…

The SIMPLEST formatics are the BEST formatics. All you really want is an efficient package of very basic things, but they should VARY from break to break. Here, in order, are the techniques to work on.

Say the name of the station first, every time. (There’s a reason the Jif label is on the OUTSIDE of the jar, not mixed in with the peanut butter somewhere.) The longer you take to identify who you are, the harder it is for the listener to remember you. And no, you can’t just rely on PPM devices to reflect that, because first of all, not every market is a PPM market, and secondly, PPM is simply the report card on listening AFTER the listener has decided to tune you in, which he wouldn’t have done if he didn’t know who you are and where to FIND you – which is easiest when they hear the name first.

To PD’s who complain that this sounds the same every time or it’s boring, I remind them that this is not a reason to hide your name. Every single time a network TV show comes out of commercials, they flash the logo on the screen, first thing. We have to do it vocally. So this means that you have to coach the jocks to say the calls like they MEAN something; like we take some PRIDE in working here. (I coach many subtle techniques for this – matching the tempo of the song, matching the emotional vibe of the song, and for advanced students, even starting on the same NOTE that the song is playing.) Burying something because you do it poorly is not the answer. Get BETTER at it, instead.

Music stations’ basics should include the Artist and/or Song Title – but not always both, and certainly not always in that order. (And sorry, but album titles don’t matter. Who buys albums anymore? We just download the 4 cuts we like from iTunes. Stop thinking like an early 1970s audiophile.)

In “drive” times, time checks should be given at least every time you stop down. DIGITAL time ONLY. “8:16,” not “16 minutes after eight o’clock.” It’s a digital world. Live in it. (I had a talent once who said “it’s twelve minutes after the hour of ten o’clock.” I told him “I don’t have TIME to listen to your time checks.”) And no “double” time checks (“3:15, that’s 15 after 3.”) The listener isn’t an idiot; stop treating him/her like one.

Your name, somewhere… not always in the same place. And not every break. Once in a while, in a song intro. Always, when you stop down.

So the template is: Name of the station first, everything else varies.
I used to write little symbols for each element (calls, artist, title, temp, time, my name), and just switch them around each break, so I didn’t repeat the same things in the same order over and over again. It worked like a charm. And of course, except for the name of the station, not every element was in every break.

Now comes the real art. With the opening “basics” out of the way, get into your Content in ONE line, two at the most. Any longer than that sounds needlessly wordy. Think “newspaper headline” (assuming that anyone remembers what a newspaper looks like).

If you do this right, you’ll be consistent, but you’ll have slight variations every break, which makes the brain receive what you say as NEW information every time. (Brainwave mapping has proven this. It’s not just an opinion. It’s called the Fourier Transform, and was developed at Cal Tech.)

It won’t take long to master this stuff – if you start NOW.

Frost Advisory

Frost Advisory #302 – Don’t Be One of Them

March 28, 2016 John Frost Leave a comment

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?

movingcompany

“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

Mason Morning Minute

Looked In The Mirror Lately?

March 28, 2016 Alan Mason Leave a comment

“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”
~Pema Choldron, “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult times.”

Most of us are familiar with the Hans Christian Anderson story of the emperor who has no clothes. Many aren’t clear of the facts behind it, though.

In the actual fable, two weavers promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, no one dares to say that he doesn’t see any suit of clothes until a child cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”

I’ve often told people that the first step between management and leadership is an understanding of self. We’re all ready to tell others about our strengths, but not many want to acknowledge their weaknesses. When they look in the mirror they see part of themselves, not all of themselves. We tend to want to hide from our weaknesses and only see us as it is in our minds.

Unfortunately, that’s not leadership. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not leadership. If I could only give one piece of advice to those seeing themselves in leadership it would be to be diligent about seeking out your weaknesses so the truth is revealed in the mirror.

Tommy Kramer Tip

Tommy Kramer Tip #147 — The Last Logical Place

March 24, 2016 Tommy Kramer Leave a comment

One of the major themes in science fiction is that as the technology gets better, the skills atrophy. That’s why you see those old monster movies where alien beings had giant brains, but machines and computers did all the work for them, since their arms and legs had gradually degenerated to being useless twigs.

On our own planet, in Music radio, we’re hearing more of this “the machines are taking over” factor all the time. In a music sweep, for example, a song’s ending is a chord that hangs for 3 or 4 seconds, but one-tenth of a second into that hang time, the next song slams in (or the antsy jock starts talking), abruptly cutting off both the previous song and the mood. Cue tones on music, Imaging, and commercials are often set to fire the next element too soon, so the last word obliterates the beginning of the next thing, or gets drowned out by it. Or a song will end with a fade, but instead of hitting the next element at the end of a sentence, where it would seamlessly appear, we hear an extra couple of words (“And…if…”), then BLAM!… next song. Woof. Clumsy.

When it doesn’t even sound like you’re engaged with what you’re doing, why should I be, as a listener? I constantly hear stations with live jocks that sound voice-tracked because of their lackluster board work.

As a Talent Coach, I want to help everything you do, not just what you say. Try this exercise: run the board manually for a few days, only putting it in “auto” mode when you go into stopsets, and your board op skills will get razor sharp. An element of FEEL will enter the picture, and then the cue tones can be changed to match it. Slamming songs (or elements) together is careless and random sounding. But waiting too long to hit the next thing makes the momentum stall out. The right timing is somewhere in between. The right place to hit the next element in a sweep isn’t “at the last place” in the song you’re playing. It’s “at the last LOGICAL place.” Let that little artistic touch into your brain, and you’ll sound alert and in control – and like you’re actually listening to the music with me.

Then, when you open the mike to say something, maybe I’ll pay more attention to it, because something as simple as your board work drew me in a little closer to you.