Serving The Significant Minority

Underestimate Your Audience & Watch It Shrink

Something that seems to be on the minds of everyone we talk to lately centers around the question of how to effectively serve today's urban audience - the significant minority. It's a significant minority that must be served with the right music and compelling content between the songs. This significant minority has taken a dramatic step forward into the public consciousness. If you underestimate them, you could instantly go from a P1 to a P3.

So what do they want to hear? They want to hear the hits of course, but they also want freshness. They want to hear some songs that are about to become hits. Songs that were once considered special or fringe are not only attracting a large following, but also sometimes even surpassing the audience for mainstream formatted urban stations.

There's no doubt that there is a lot of new music that is legitimately happening and should be considered and played even in the spring book. Unfortunately, some will never get aired. When you combine this with the fact that a lot of re-currents and gold titles have been played into the ground in the hope that their exposure will help bring some adults with diaries to the dial, and you can easily see we've lost an edge.

Currents Vs Gold - Subjective Evaluation

What are the advantages of currents vs. gold? Should a station try to keep its sound completely fresh by concentrating on only those researched current hits or try to balance the list with some well-researched hits from the past? The answers depend on the market and who you ask. Some experts feel the highly visible victories of mega-market stations, playing little or no gold and winning is enough to force some urban programmers in similar or smaller markets to change their minds and their mixes. Yet obviously, very few have gone to the all-currents extreme. Most still keep some short-term re-currents around for flavor, tempo and balance, especially with the increasing number of hit ballads out. Detractors of this type of music technique say it tends to favor familiar oldies over fresh currents and can lead to staleness. Call-out supporters naturally say that such criticisms are being made by those who haven't done it right or don't understand how oldies research really works and/or how to apply the results of an auditorium music test to your gold library. We feel that in either case it should be done on the basis of subjective evaluation.

Ironically, during the first phase of the spring Arbitron we find ourselves at a point when both the previous winter sweeps and the current spring sweeps place even more pressure on us to maximize ratings. The advantage with more currents is increased freshness. But stations utilizing too many re-currents and gold, especially during the cume-building weekends when the younger adult demos have been shown to be more available and controlling the dials, could see their cumes collapse. You run the risk of turning off the people who can keep your station on and if these people just happen to have a diary, well we all know what kind of difference that can make. Between the months of April and June, even gold-based urban adult stations have to be fresher and add more tempo to their mix, if they want to score.

Think Young

Forget what you may have heard about the new, so-called urban adult format for a moment. If you want strong, young adult numbers this spring, numbers which the urban formats are designed to attract, you simply can't ignore or bore your listeners with a bland diet of soft funk, little or no personality and burned-out oldies.

Despite what your research or consultants tell you, it won't matter if you slam ten-in-a-row, if it's the wrong ten-in-a-row. The results will be the same. And especially during the current spring sweeps, a shared radio can easily become a switched radio. To score, you have to fight the power and the switch. It's really nothing but a language though you have to learn the words and what they mean.

Some of this language includes words that have to come from rappers. Today's young generation grew up with rap and some hit rap records are just like any other hits. They bring energy and familiarity to the format, if they're used and rotated properly. Many of these rap records are adult party jams. For those urban programmers who are still looking to callout for results, pause! First of all, you can't expect callout results from only a handful of daytime spins. Second, you should probably lower the demographics of the audience you're testing to include some 18-34's and become more musically aggressive. This can help to keep your younger, active P1 "music freaks" happy.

We've got to find and play the adult party records. Some of them are rap records. But once a hit rap jam is established, the familiarity precept takes over and young listeners are hard to fool. That nearly $350 billion worth of buying power they represent is not just pocket change. Those urban adult programmers who fear that playing even a few rap songs will run away your adult listeners or who feel that for adult stations, playing any rap is a "violation of expectation," are wrong! Not only will you not violate their expectations, you'll exceed them! Urban adult stations take a huge risks when they become too conservative musically. To those who still place all their faith in call-out music research, tight play lists and high rotation to maximize market share, we say you can play it too safe and become predictable and boring.

Serving the significant minority is really about developing a custom-tailored format with dominant ratings potential and attractive demos for advertisers. The objective is to build a successful station that has large ratings potential and a new revenue stream. To do that, you've got to be willing to take some chances

musically.

Urban stations that limit themselves based on imaginary criteria of incompatibility (fearing to overstep the intelligence of their audience) are following a dangerous philosophy in today's competitive environment. Urban formatted stations are mass-appeal. And the demand for quality and depth suggest that this significant minority can not be force fed or fooled. Their sophistication and available choices allows them to display a diversity that encompasses junk food for lunch and a good wine for dinner. If their influence is ignored by programmers and consultants who forget there are alternative ways to find out about a new CD, television show or movie, this audience will continue to be less dependent on conventional media. I believe in risk reduction. I also know eliminating all the risks and negatives might appear be a safe and sure way to program. But eliminating all the risks could also mean limiting or reducing your audience, as well.

Word.