Format Care & Maintenance

Measuring The Immeasureable

Some very successful Urban and Urban AC programmers have experienced ratings dips recently and naturally nerves were frayed and questions were being asked by their bosses. In many cases, these ratings dips were caused in part due to the tightening of purse strings and the increased burdens placed on the programmers who have little time to do care and maintenance, let alone develop new concepts. Often all these programmers can do are the basics.

Some of these guys also have to do an air shift. While the owners and managers understand the necessity of supporting the programming and marketing needs of their stations, they claim they are trapped with sales revenues being off as much as 30%. So they are forced to depend on their talent, production, entertainment value and promotions to survive.

The problem is that current market conditions for most Urban stations have caused acquisition behavior that grossly over-valued station purchases and financed them mainly by debt. Then the owners had to rely on consolidation to make up for their overpriced acquisitions. Now with sluggish sales, the major players have been forced to further consolidate their operations in an attempt to service over-leveraged debt commitments.

Now, with the combination of the recession and station sales being down, managers are forced to resort to unwise consolidation practices. Yet they still hold programmers responsible for ratings. The answer is rebuilding value, not simply cutting costs. Those are the critical factors for Urban radio's survival. You can't save your way to success. Careful reallocation of current expenditures can, in most cases, provide increased value with little or no net cost increases. Then the overall value of the average station or cluster can be appreciably improved through systematic implementation of proven operating methods and new multiplatform revenue strategies.

Callout & Spin Maintenance

Another programming problem that refuses to go away is our inability to obtain reliable samples and more passionate listeners with traditional callout methods (for those stations left that still have access to it on a regular basis). Because of changes in society, callout results, when they are available, are often extremely slow and this pace may only get worse.

This year we find many programmers are looking more and more at national charts to determine the hits. As a result, they are projecting songs into power rotations based on those charts instead of real, valid research. Many top tracks are just "turntable hits" based simply on the amount of spins they get. Because Urban callout is so limited these days, and because many labels are releasing records too quickly for most stations to absorb, the problem is exacerbated.

Labels are playing the chart game and jamming stations for spins. As a result, spin maintenance is now the name of the new game. It's often just as important as getting the add. With programmers jumping on songs based on national ranks, we run the risk of the national charts deluding us into believing songs are huge hits when they really aren't.

If you're a programmer or MD who plays that game and moves songs up in rotation for any reasons other than feeling that it will build or maintain audience, you're taking a huge risk, especially if yours is a market measured by PPM.

Balance & Demographic Challenges

There are new demographic changes taking place as part of what I like to refer to as the ongoing "growing-shedding theory. Balance is becoming even more important with the demographic shifts and as terrestrial radio becomes an aging medium. With the agency focus over the last two decades being towards the 25-54-year-old listeners, there has come a concurrent decline in younger age tune-in. This has led to a change in how radio is perceived by younger listeners.

In short, youth-based radio will have to become compelling again. This leads to still another problem, which is overcoming the 18-34 male sample problem. Arbitron has had the problem for years. Arbitron's 18-34 ethnic samples invariably fall short of their proportion of the population. The solutions vary from weighting the numbers (meaning they assign greater value to them) to re-designing the packaging of the diary, increased compensation, more effort to reach cell phone-only households and the placing of additional diaries or meters in a given household. Since so many of these solutions for increasing the samples have had little effect, Arbitron has been forced to continue to weight so that the results of both meters and diaries equal the proportion of the population. As a result, the lower sample in the 18-34 males demographics has resulted in a dip in reliability and huge wobbles with a few isolated heavy listening areas.

We have to come to the realization that we all probably missed a few classes and then ask ourselves are we prepared to attend the make-up classes necessary in order to grab the grade we want? Remember, there are no mak- up classes and that while our background and circumstances may influence who we are, we are responsible for who we become.

Word.