Voices Carry

But are they really being heard?

You hear them everywhere, especially in morning drive ... the voices and antics of over-caffeinated "shock jocks, some with female co-hosts fielding vapid phone calls, comic characters and designated caller contests. Mix all this into a matrix of weather, time checks, lifestyle news, and the best researched morning songs and cascading commercials, and there you go, you've got yourself a morning show.

Radio is going through changes, but morning radio is about to really be changed. Rock radio is going to feel the effect of Howard Stern leaving terrestrial radio for Sirius and the satellite world. On the urban side, Steve Harvey has returned, just as he promised he would. The actor, comedian and morning show host left Radio One and KKBT in Los Angeles earlier this year. Just in time for the Fall Arbitron sweeps, Harvey returned to radio with a program on WBLS in New York. Premiere Radio is syndicating the show and is already scheduled to launch in Detroit and Chicago early next month with other markets to follow.

The reason for Harvey's return is simple: In order to maximize our ratings, we need talented people on the air. Voices carry, and what they carry are huge audience shares for listeners who want more than music. Recently, however, there is also a trend away from how these voices are used. Most of the new, pure Jack formats that have penetrated practically every decent market in America don't have live jocks. These stations fired dozens of on-air personalities and replaced them with "voice tracking," which allows a single host to do shows in several markets without ever leaving the home studio. Listeners are led to believe they're listening to a local broadcast. The Jack strategy is to use the money that they would have had to pay top talent for extensive marketing and research. They poured the money they saved into lots of television commercials, bus sides, newspaper ads, direct marketing and an upgraded website. They wanted to help the voices that "play what we want" to carry. Voices do carry, but are they really needed or being heard? Depends on who you ask.

Format pundits claim we are driving or have driven some of our most loyal listeners to satellite radio or the iPod. One of the reasons listeners have moved away from radio, say the pundits, is a lack of variety. Another is clutter (things that happen between even the most well researched jams that are turning listeners off). Is it the voices? What they say? Or what they don't say?

When you do audience research, you see a lot of answers to both questions that say, "Yes." Yes, the voices are turning listeners off. And yes, there are things that air personalities are both saying and not saying that bothers listeners. There are basic things they would like to hear (like the title and artist of the songs they're playing, for instance). They want their favorite air-talent to tell them between songs things about the artists. They want to know where they live. How they live and what they like. All we have to do is listen to our station's voices like a listener and we will know right away what's wrong with the voices and their content. Then we need to re-write the show-prep manual to include or exclude the things we discover as a result of our research and we're well on our way to solving one of our biggest problems -- helping our voices to carry ... on.

You may work for a station that is part of a large group or conglomerate. Many of these stations have developed the "studio envelope" concept. This is where the company houses all of its stations at one site to let them reduce the number of workers and share management, studios, news and sales forces. One of the advantages to this type of set-up is that it allows for a great deal of sharing. For example, if an idea or a bit developed on the rock or country station down the hall, that idea or joke could be shared and visa versa. If each morning show within a format cluster would share just one idea a week, soon you would have dozens of ideas banked. I know that some of this type of sharing is going on right now on those national conference calls, but there is not enough sharing with formats in the same building. If you couple the strongest talent with some of the best ideas and then provide some guidance, you've got a winner.

I believe some of the most talented people radio has ever had are on the air right now. The problem is that they all need guidance. They need a program director who will listen to their shows and help them to improve. The capacity of the human mind to be creative is infinite. There is lot of new talent out there that just needs to be developed and given a chance to evolve. Talent development sessions are missing at many stations, and there are many reasons for that. The program director is too busy. He/she didn't come up as an air-talent so they don't know what or how to critique or instruct. If you're a programmer who never sat in the "air-chair," there are going to be some things you just don't know and the talent can sense this. Programmers who are experts at scheduling music but absolute failures at developing talent are failing to carry the voices, so that the voices can carry.

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