Me? Oh. I Don't Listen To The Radio Anymore. (Part II)

Last week, Paige concluded that, "Now, more then ever in the history of the medium, what's BETWEEN the music is what will determine the life or death of this industry." This week, he offers up some suggestions to beef up your station's perception in the minds of the listeners.

Show Business

We're in it. I bet you'd forgotten. It's easy to. My niece was a Production Assistant on "The Young And The Restless." She was excited going in - the glamour - but was soon desensitized and was quickly just another lackey slaving away, doing killer hours for peanuts, surrounded by massive egos. (Wow. That sounds familiar.)

So, would a member of the Show Business Industry give away a trip to the Grammys, a musical celebration that not one member of your audience will ever have a chance to go to unless you send them, by rolling the touchtones and qualifying people for a random drawing? Seems to fall short of the Show Business Litmus Test doesn't it?

Radio isn't Minimalism. Radio is Maximalism. Think "Let's Make A Deal" or "The Price Is Right." Bob doesn't just pull some bozo from Topeka up on stage and say "You won a washer and dryer set. Go back and sit down."

2% of people play contests. Why? Because they're boring and they suck. How pathetic a statement on our marketing efforts that we can't get more then 2% of people to try and win concert tickets. "The Incredible Free Money Cash Call." It doesn't mean anything. We've so desensitized our audience with "free money" that it isn't even picked up on their radar. It's WHAT you do with it that matters now.

Play to the 98%. Make your contests entertaining. Listenable. Compelling.

NTM

Non-Traditional Marketing. Your audience is barraged with 2500 messages a day. Maybe one or two slip through the radar and imprint themselves on the audience's brains. The rest? They're just roadside clutter.

Radio is no longer in the position of sticking up some boards and buying a schedule of TV spots (that were filmed three years ago in Nashville and that they've courteously super-imposed your logo in). It doesn't move the needle.

It's near the end of the third quarter and our playbook isn't relevant anymore. Would a coach keep trying to run the ball when he discovers that he can't anymore? No. He draws up some new plays. We need to TOTALLY re-think everything that we do...the way we image music, the way we do contests, the way we sell radio, and the way we market it.

Play to our strengths. I'm fortunate to consult KXJM in Portland, a great, great Rhythm station. And the PD is also a consultant. A smart guy named Mark Adams. We were laughing about stations trying to compete again iPods and Satellite on music. You really can't win. You can be competitive. But it'll be hard to win. Mark's suggestion, and I'm paraphrasing: "Focus your efforts on your unduplicatable attributes." Or something like that. (It sounded better when he said it.)

What can't an iPod or a DJ in a booth 1000 miles away do? They can't walk up to you at a fair, festival, parade or remote and shake your hand. A billboard doesn't earn loyalty. Giving away cash doesn't earn loyalty. Buying a TV spot doesn't earn loyalty. Meeting a person and taking 8 seconds to treat them like a real human being will earn you a LIFETIME of loyalty. Because you're in show business and they just got to meet a celebrity and you were nice and polite and civil. It's possible to overthink marketing. People have no loyalty to radio. And it's near-impossible to beat something/someone that people are loyal to. Will they try you out? Sure. But at the end of the day they go back to their good friend.

Whoever shakes the most hands wins. Which leads me to the #1 Analogy of N.T.M:

Election 2006

Two or four times a year your audience steps into a voting booth and votes for their favorite radio station. Everything we do needs to be focused on politicking our stations in the community. If you take what Mark Adams suggests, the one hole in the iPod/Satellite gameplan is that they're machines. Or beamed in from a million metaphorical miles away.

Remember this: if you launched a radio station tomorrow and if the music didn't suck, and you went out and shook hands with 25% of the people in your market in the first 90 days, you'd be number one in the first book. Period.

This is no longer being about #1 in the medium. This is about the survival of the medium. We need to personalize radio. How else can you do that?

Be Local & Topical

It's not just about talking about the baseball team and that awful trade management made last week. It's about whatever the #1 issue is with your audience this week. And finding ways to address is. WPGC in Washington DC - which is beyond being a radio station, it's a juggernaut - marketed itself for the first eight years in it's current format solely on the strength of it's Stop The Violence campaign. Clifton was doing a brainstorming session at the station. He asked the staff, "What is the #1 issue with your listeners?" Unhesitating, they responded, "Violence."

Any other consultant would have moved on. Why? Well, because "we can't talk about violence on the air." WPGC has been #1 for so long that I forget when they weren't. And it was BUILT on the strength of this single, community-based campaign.

Be topical. Topical is topical for 15 minutes. If everyone in town is buzzing about the bad trade, then have the morning show reach out to the other team and try to lure him back by trading some interns and a case of good local beer. If people are talking about something and you aren't, then you'll sound foolish.

Know The Listeners

We've become such an industry of research nuts. Never leaving and going out and meeting the listeners. That goes for jocks. That goes for sales. That goes for the PD and the GM.

I know a PD who probably hasn't met a listener in a year. He has no clue as to what they're about. Who they are.

Here are some simple questions that, tragically, a lot of programmers can't answer:

- Where are your listeners at this very moment?
- What is the #1 summer recreational choice of your listeners?
- What do your listeners do on Saturday afternoons?
- Where do your listeners shop?
- Where do your listeners go on vacation?

There are about 100 of these questions. I love what Wild in San Francisco has done in the past. New AE's spend their first week on the job as members of the Street Team. They wear t-shirts. They go out. They banner. They flyer. They hand out stickers. They MEET the listeners. They come back as educated in the format and the lifestyle of the audience as anyone in Programming and Promotions.

How many of your AE's would qualify as that?

Give Till It Hurts

If 2% of listeners will try to call and win tickets, what percentage will contribute to a charity because you told them to? About .001%

Radio's efforts in the charitable field are by-and-large failures that have no meaningful impact in their specific markets. It's not wholly our fault. These giant black hole charities aren't tangible. So, I send my check to a P.O. Box for the (insert anonymous sounding charity). Where does it go? Hell, we don't even know.

There are thousands and thousands of terrific grassroots organizations out there that do wonderful things, and are ignored by us, and are struggling to survive.

What can we do that an iPod can't? We can ride in on our stallion and save the fair maiden. Few stations have legacies. But look at V-103 in Atlanta. #1 for over a decade. Last year, a local agency that works with thousands of handicapped adults and their families was about to shut its doors. They got written out of the city budget. They needed $300,000 to stay afloat. V raised it in a week.

Radio has the ability to do great and miraculous things. I think that sometimes we forget about that.

2006 can be the year that we rediscover the magic that drew people to us, that made people passionate about us, that made people fans. Or we can hunker down, be safe, try to cut our losses and slide into being an obsolete music delivery system. We really do have the choice.