Warning! Your Competitor’s Ratings Tanked!
By MPacker | August 1, 2008
When your primary competitor appears to be in trouble, and you’ve had a great ratings book, your first impulse may be to break out the champagne and celebrate with your team. After all, the other PD’s loss is your gain. Right? But, after the party, you may want to pause and think about the following:
Is Your Competitor’s Ratings Crash Real?
If they’ve had pretty steady ratings trends over the past year, a remarkable one book drop may be a statistical fluke. Break out their ratings especially the AQH and Cume audience composition Monday-Sunday and find out which of their demos bit the dust. Then check out Arbitron’s sampling in those demos. If they were significantly low and had to be weighted up, it’s possible your competitor experienced a sampling anomaly, and will bounce back the next book. You can only hope they WILL overreact and start fixing what is not broken.
DANGER! If They’ve Hit Bottom, Their Troubles May Soon Be Your Problem!
If they’ve been on a downward trend and just hit a new low, consider their troubles a warning sign!
In the book “Predatory Marketing” there is an excellent chapter titled “Never Underestimate The Competition”. Author C. Britt Beemer writes:
“When a competitor becomes desperate, he may become dangerous. Why? Because desperation inspires risk taking. And when people are forced to take drastic measures, they could do creative things they might not otherwise have done. “What do I have to lose?” they ask themselves.”
“It sometimes takes a down period or lost market share to alert management to a danger signal. When a company gets into enough trouble, high level management finally begins to raise questions: “How did we get into this mess?” This is followed up by “What do we have to do to rid ourselves of this problem?”
Warning Signals that indicate the Competition Is Waking Up:
They’ve just hired a consultant.
After several back-to-back ratings busts, it finally dawns on management that they might not have all the answers. Although a consultant is not necessarily a panacea, it can help to employ an experienced third pair of ears to listen to the station, provide insight from a national perspective and field local audience research. If the consultant has a successful history of helping management and talent get back on a winning track, watch out!
The PD has been canned and a New Program Director has just arrived.
The first thing a new program director must prove to management is that she/he is going to make a difference. That may mean the dust will fly, new programming philosophies will be instituted, some talk hosts will be fired or eased out, new liners, jingles, bumper music, and promos will hit the air all giving the station a fresher sound. Find out what the new PD’s ratings track record is. Is the PD’s niche in news, talk or sports? What’s the plan? Often, a PD will spill the beans to your local newspaper columnists and drop a few clues here and there about upcoming strategy.
Bottom Line: Avoid that feeling of SMUGNESS.
In today’s highly competitive environment, you can’t rest on your laurels just because the competition is having a tough time. When your competitor hits bottom, you may become vulnerable. Stay the course, continue to super serve your target, but carefully track your competitor’s efforts to re-assume a competitive position.
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Rock’n Talk
By MPacker | July 1, 2008
Congratulations! You are the program director of a music station who’s just been given the additional responsibilities of programming your sister station, the news/talker. To give you some idea of just how exciting and challenging you’ll find your new position, I’ll borrow some terminology from music programming. But, you’ll quickly see that the execution is very different.
Picking the “Hits”: In talk radio, the list of topics, events and issues that were burning up the phones yesterday are gone. So, you begin each day at ground zero figuring out which “hits” will connect with your target audience. If you are surrounded with an excellent group of proactive producers and talk hosts, they’ll usually be hours ahead of you in discovering what’s hot.
“Real-Time” Programming: Talk radio is just about as close to “real-time” programming as you’ll get. There’s no putting a hit list “to bed” and waiting until tomorrow to determine if it should be changed. A successful talk show is alive, surfing the currents of events as they happen. Five minutes from now, if a new “hit” breaks out, you’ve got to break in with it, which of course preempts that list your drew up just hours ago.
Spinning the Hits: In music, you can hand an Elton John CD to a jock, and when it’s aired, it sounds exactly like Elton. A talk host’s “hits” are in the form of “sheet music”. The quality of the sound will be determined by the host’s performance which may range from that heard in Carnegie Hall to a struggling garage band. So, depending on how it’s spun, it’s possible for a dynamite hit not to sound like one.
Music Director: Talk radio’s music director is the Call Screener. Every call is either an ear-opening, entertaining hit, or it’s a bomb. Can you imagine your music director opening the studio door every two minutes and tossing another CD to the jock for airing? A CD the jock has never even heard? Now you can empathize with the host who is at the mercy of the screener who must decide in thirty seconds or so if the caller will hold the attention of the audience. And once the call is on the air, good or bad, the host has to deal with it. This position requires some very special skills and innate programming abilities. Call screeners should be well trained and well paid because moment-by-moment, they help make or break a show.
Anyway; congratulations on your new challenge! Don’t be surprised if staying on top of the issues and current events every day, helping the talk talent, producers and screeners with their needs and keeping the production, promos and bumper music fresh take up as much time as your music station. By the way, we haven’t even touched on your responsibilities for news programming but oops, we’re out of space.
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Whoopi! Shooting Stars (and other news/talk wannabe’s)
By MPacker | June 1, 2008
Dateline: – Daily News – New York
Radio station WKTU’s decision to drop Whoopi Goldberg’s morning show may illustrate again that just being famous and well-liked doesn’t guarantee a radio audience will tune in. “It’s been a long time since celebrity was enough in New York radio,” says Sean Ross, vice president of music and programming at Edison Media Research.
WOW! They just discovered that little nugget of programming basics at Edison Media Research? Take a look at the following column I wrote over 10 years ago warning managers about this talk radio programming trap! It originally appeared in Radio Ink September 15, 1997. Some things never change. Don’t say I didn’t tell you so…
Scene: The Week Before:
The manager raced into Ms. PD’s office. “Sorry you’re the last to know”, he bubbled, “but we’ve just signed Mr. Big Name Marquee to a zillion dollar contract to host mornings.” Ms. PD immediately protested. “Mr. Marquee may be a well known personality who will attract instant Cume but,” she predicted, “the show won’t last because he has no experience as a news/talk talk host.”
“What a negative attitude”, grumped the manager. “Besides, it’s your job to teach Mr. Marquee how to be an outstanding host and turn all that curious Cume into large AQH Shares. See ya at the client party!” And off he marched to the sales manager’s office with plans to raise morning drive rates immediately to cover Mr. Marquee’s fat paycheck.
Week One: It’s Mr. Marquee’s big debut and he’s armed with his golden rolodex which is a virtual Who’s Who of all the buddies he’s made during his stellar career. A champagne breakfast is served to potential clients as they gaze through the studio window. Mr. Marquee is smiling as he kicks off his show by chewing the fat with his friends about the good old glory days. Read the rest of this entry »
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Promos: A Smart Inexpensive Way to Increase Your Ratings!
By MPacker | May 1, 2008
Back in the early 1980’s I noticed that while Television had promos running non-stop promoting their shows, talk radio was doing hardly anything.
TV would air 5, and 10 second liners teasing their upcoming local news and 10 and 30 second promos for their shows.
I was at Detroit’s WXYZ Talk Radio 1270. We had a weak signal in a three-way battle with the 50,000 watt “blow torch” WJR and all-news WWJ.
We had a great line up of local talent and carried one syndicated talk show, Larry King. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: promos, ratings | No Comments »