Orchestra Of Ideas

What Got You Here Won't Keep You Here

Generation gaps and fresh ideas are not new to radio programming strategists or to the culture at large. It's a fact that change is a necessity, so what got you here won't necessarily keep you here. In other words, if you have had a nice ratings run, you can't count on that run continuing in what I like to call the "Iraq era."

The Iraq era is defined by the distinctly different attitude between the 20-year-old draftees, the older career officers and senior enlisted men who command them. There are observable generational differences. These are some of the same challenges that are faced by today's Urban programmers. To put these challenges in proper context, any assessment of the formats' potential must look beyond the current formulas, rules and guidelines. Generation Y's presence may force us to adopt broader, more far-reaching policies and reforms that can take advantage of the format's special strengths and appeal.

Sound Processing & Audience Fatigue

When we examine the orchestra of ideas, we have to look at the overall sound of the station. Even if you get the perfect staff and playlist, if it sounds like it's being filtered through a wind tunnel, you've still got big problems. If your engineer can't tell that the sound of the station is flat, shallow and "muddy," compared to your competition, you've got a tough fight.

It will be noticed right away by your listeners, who constantly make comparisons -- even subconscious, left-brain ones -- between you and your direct (or indirect) format competitors. So you better take care of it. You must convince your chief engineer, GM, owner, consultant or group PD that there is a need for some new audio processing equipment -- an area that is all too often overlooked in Urban radio. With HD, those flaws become even more obvious. So when you upgrade, you should upgrade with an eye toward the future.

Now let's check out the signal itself. Regardless of your power, you want to sound as clean and crisp as possible. One of the ways Urban stations often lose, especially with the blurring of formats and music lately, is when your competition plays the same song, often at the same time you are playing it, and it sounds better over there. All of a sudden, it doesn't matter who plays 10 songs in a row, because all that hum, hiss, cross-talk, vibration and distortion in your audio signal is going to take its toll. It's called audience fatigue. Let's face it, tuners and other audio equipment in homes, cars and portable versions are now digital and getting better, cheaper and smaller all the time. This is making even the younger members of your audience somewhat purist, if only by comparison.

If you're skilled, persistent, or fortunate enough improve your air talent and audio processing, get your station lean and on top, naturally you are then expected to keep it there. The problem, however, is that chances are your GM may even add more duties and responsibilities and ask you to understand. They've got pressure, too.

What Is The Right Direction?

Just what is the right direction for Urban formats in the orchestra of ideas? What do Urban and Urban AC stations need to do? The smart ones are going to learn some new influence tricks and reduce the number and type of commercials. Design the presentation and arrange the music and other elements so that your heavy users will love your station and not be tempted to try any other format.

You may remember a few years back, when Alan Burns developed a new format called "Movin." While it wasn't an Urban format as such, this Rhythmic AC format captured some new cume in a lot of markets. Like Jack, "Movin" changed the game. Many current and even some Oldies music formats became "Movin'." It was a "female-friendly" format. Depending on how strong their Urban competition was, there were a few markets where these female "music freaks" were attracted to these "Movin'-isms" or format tricks.

Urban formats are almost always going to be affected in many markets by the female-leaning music formats. According to its architect, Alan Burns, Movin' is a format that relies on old and new music, rotated and recycled in a non-formatted way -- in that way it is different from its predecessor, "Jammin' Oldies," because it plays some currents and therefore isn't as tiring. If nothing else, Movin' caused a new direction of thinking, which had a definite bearing on many music formats

A famous psychiatrist (probably Dr. George Sheehan) once said, "We only know about 50% of what we should and half of that will probably eventually be proven wrong someday."

From Oldies, Hot AC, Mainstream Top 40, instrument-driven Smooth Jazz and AC formats to the funky sounds of Rhythmic and Urban formats, they're all in competition. Even smaller-market stations are affected. Some listeners went to sleep with Urban and suddenly woke up to another format-similar station. When that happens, it's time to step up your game.

With the new competition, every station is looking for a way to grab and keep more listeners. With the advent of cheaper downloaded CDs and all the online radio stations that allow you to hear exactly what you want, the real problem is that to be successful, Urban radio has got to attract young, middle-aged and even some older listeners. Eventually, a new hybrid Urban format may emerge. If nothing else, research will drive its discovery.

Power Songs Format Penetration & Influence Tricks

Not everybody understands that what separates and distinguishes is being in a position to provide some musical identity. Some music fits very well and reinforces the station's core identity. Other music expands the variety within the format. Unfortunately, music test mean scores often do a poor job of telling which songs play well with other songs. Urban programmers have to know more than the mean score.

Power songs are not just songs with a high test score. They should be the songs that influence and reward the people who believe in who you are. They should say "thank you" for sitting through a six-minute stopset. They should say "yes," you are rollin' with the right station. They should buffer weaker, non-centered and unfamiliar songs.

Another very effective "trick" is to closely monitor format penetration. If your station is really on target, its format fans should choose your station more often than those listeners who are not the pure core Urban format fans. It is a very compelling analysis when those listeners are your own.

Your station should be a club that listeners want to join. It will be if its music is on target, if the jocks and imaging are hip. Listeners will want to join your "club" if your air personalities can consistently make the audience think, laugh or chuckle. The really great jocks can do all three, over an intro and across the quarter-hour.

Urban stations are going to have to take a serious look at their vulnerabilities, particularly on Sunday morning, when many still run public service and live religious segments. If you're in a market with a full-time FM Gospel station, that may not be the way to go. Saying "but we've always done it that way" is no longer valid. In fact, it's downright dangerous. Radio must still be a dependable source of predictable entertainment.

If you've been reading these editorials over the last years, you know my passion about the "growing-shedding theory." The growing-shedding theory impacts all formats. But even though Urban radio, unlike Rock or Hot AC, may have time on its side, it's still affected by the theory. What that really means is that we have to always grow more audience than we shed. We've no time to waste.

The fact is that as our audience ages, it will also become more affluent and more mainstream. Those kids who go off to college may wind up in a town with no Urban station. They may be forced to listen to satellite radio or the Internet when they're in the dorm or when they're in the car with their friends. When they return home, their matrix and listening habits will have been influenced and may have changed.

Generally speaking, our continuing research shows that even those in their teens and early 20s seem to be more open to accepting other forms of music, including reggae, grunge and even some synth-pop. Another trick of the new influence game involves increasing Urban radio's time-spent-listening. There are some new influence tricks to this old game.

First, we have to determine who the heavy listeners or users of the station are. Most average quarter-hours (AQH) still come from the heavy users, not from our casual listeners. So to fight off the competition and improve our TSL, we must concentrate on the heavy users. We should design our presentation and arrange our music and other elements so that our heavy users, as well as the Urban "music freaks," will love the station.

Make certain the music is properly dayparted and balanced. Are the rotations set up properly? Does the format offer the variety, tempo and texture that research shows the audience prefers? The TSL could suffer if we're sidetracked by industry trends, weak research, no research or a program or music director who pays no attention to the research. I've seen situations in which a lot of program and music directors who didn't grow up on research, even though their stations pay for it, ignore it or don't use it to its fullest.

Redesigning Stopsets

One of the often-overlooked "tricks" that can make a difference is improving and limiting the stopsets. Everybody has commercials, yet some stations seem to keep their audiences right through the stopsets. What's the real trick here?

For one thing, listeners will find it a lot tougher, more irritating and frustrating to sit through stopsets that include a series of local commercials that sound bad because they were poorly produced and written. Fortunately, most agency-generated commercials are not the problem. If the production is sharp, well written and well produced, about useful products and services, you have a chance to hold your audience through the stopset. Before they know it, they are back to music, the jocks and the fun.

An overwhelming majority of stations have a problem with length. Many salespeople who write their own copy tend to write lengthy copy that they believe will help their client. The reality is that if the audience tunes out because the commercial is both long and boring, nobody benefits. Many salespeople are not trained writers, and they tend to think that newspaper or print copy will work on radio, and it simply will not. Bad copy or poorly written and produced commercials can ruin TSL -- even if the music and other elements are right.

Your TSL is the byproduct of keeping your valued guests happy. Understanding this is one of the new tricks of the game. Some of you may remember when Hot AC was born. It was born out of a need. There was a need to keep their young adult listeners happy. There was a need for a format that Hot AC eventually became. Hot AC really took advantage of the hole when Top 40 over-rapped and over-danced. Now, in 2009, there are other formats that promise to save their audience from the blight of too many interruptions, too much repetition and too many alternatives.

What Urban radio needs to do is influence its audience with the right dayparted and researched music mix. We need to offer a strong personality approach, one that whenever possible is filled with local content that its audience can identify with.

Musically, Urban radio needs to create new stars for the format. An iPod can't create a new star. Recent studies have shown that people still have to come to our stations to find out what to download or put on their iPods.

All of these things we've mentioned will affect how well our stations do this winter. For those who see the big picture, the other trick is to continue to market effectively and use your influence well. We have to learn to really listen to each other, feel each other, and respect space, dark and light, personal and public. We have to understand we can live together without living alike. We can talk without saying the same thing. We can conquer the final frontier the same way NASA did -- with a new space program.

Branding Builds Top-Of-Mind Awareness

Creating the sort of intense loyalty that companies such as Coca-Cola and, more recently, Apple, have built is a goal to which most companies and radio stations aspire. Things have changed a lot in the past few years. The consumer marketing landscape has shifted dramatically with the advent of new communications changes that were but a twinkle in the eye of a 1990s marketer.

It is only by understanding and using these channels wisely that a station can hope to establish the types of relationships that turn listeners into brand evangelists. In 2009 we're really dealing with a multi-channel media environment; therefore, today's promotions and marketing departments have a wider range of vehicles and channels to utilize for establishing the brand. The overall thrust of the branding process has not fundamentally changed, but the tool kit that the branding process has to work with has grown tremendously.

It's not necessarily a mistake to talk about buzz or word-of-mouth (two concepts that are all the rage in marketing and promotions circles these days), but one must remember that after you get a listener's attention, no amount of buzz or hype can sustain a relationship over the long run.

It has been my belief for a long time that the most successful brands are those that are able to make the leap from buzz to evangelism. They create communities of listeners who form a deep attachment to the brand and then attempt to persuade like-minded people to become part of that community.

The reason evangelism works so well is because when listeners are talking about the brand (their favorite radio station), they're not just saying it's a great station. They're saying, "I identify closely with this station, and you seem to be like me, so you will identify with it, too."

This approach has worked wonders for companies such as Coca-Cola, Apple, Harley-Davidson, McDonald's, and any number of local shops and service providers. A community is a fragile thing, however, and it can easily scatter if you fail to nurture it.

This explains why it is so important to truly understand your listeners.

If a relevant relationship is established so you're really talking to the audience about something in they want to hear about, use the channels that make sense to them. That's what really establishes the relationship. It's being with them at the right place the right time. It's not only playing their favorite songs and entertaining listeners with air personalities who can consistently make them laugh, chuckle or think, it's making them feel that you are a part of their lives.

Remember your product or service itself is also a point of communication. It's tough to have a strong cult-like brand with an ersatz or poor product. To get cult-like commitment to a brand or radio station, we've got to recognize that there are always at least "two kinds of people at the dance" -- those who came to dance and those who came to listen and observe. We want to reach both. When we do that, we will automatically reach the "players" -- and we're not talking about the "players" who went hiking with Governor Mark Sanford.

If we can successfully build that level of branding, we will find there is an opportunity to score. We should never underestimate the power of a strong brand. A well-designed, branded product will provide the best chance of standing out and will help achieve the ratings credit we seek. Just keep in mind that even if all this useful information makes an appearance, it takes time to sort out and apply. That's part of the "orchestra of ideas."

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