Last time in the 'Critique yourself series' we talked about the proper preparation for a radioshow. If you haven't read it, please scroll down and don't miss the first part of this series.
2. Rehearsal
This time we're talking about rehearsal. Lots of air talents I meet, think it's strange or stupid to rehearse something or they think they're good enough to just go ahead and put it on the air. Or it would inhibit spontaneity! Ofcourse you want spontaneity but you want calulated spontaneity. It's up to you to make the rehearsed material sound as if you've just thought of it.
The same thing as with preparation, everyone needs rehearsal! What do you think Tiger Woods does when he isn't playing competition or what a muscician does when he's not on stage? Right, he's rehearsing!
Practicing what he or she is going to do later so you can get better at it or even detect some things that seemed right when you thought of it but just don't work when you would put it on the air. Don't take the risk of confronting your listeners with something you could've known it wouldn't work by simply rehearsing it.
There's a big chance that the first time you do or say something it is not the best way to do or say it. So take your idea or voice-break and polish it, make it perfect by speaking it out loud. All the flaws will become eveident when you rehearse the break at least once or twice. When rehearsing try to get your point across to the listener as clearly and concise as possible. Also try to think about how you position the station, maybe do a tease for the website or how to talk up to the phone bit you've got lined up. Critique yourself on these points you want to be perfect in your break. Check if you are brief, bright, natural sounding, logical, relating to your audience and personal.
When you go live with the rehearsed stuff don't be afraid if you don't do it exactly as rehearsed. Main thing is how you get into and out of the break. Make sure you already know how you wanna get the listeners attention and where you wanna go with your piece or story. Afterwards check again if you were brief, bright, natural sounding, logical, relating to your audience and personal.
Finally when rehearsing something pre-recorded, get someone else at the station to listen in or ask a friend or family that's in your station's target to give their opinion about a bit you're thinking about to do.
Next time we'll talk about station ID-ing and station positioning. It's not just mentioning the station's name, it's about creatively working in the station's name in your program. So the listener will remember what they listened to without irritating them with yet again that name.
When coaching air-talent on the art of teasing/preselling I always emphasize on using a time frame in which the teased subject takes place. Last week when doing some renovation to my backyard, it struck me again how important that time frame really is. I was waiting on the truck to deliver my dump container and the driver couldn't tell me what time exactly he would come. He only said to me he was coming in the late afternoon. Clearly this frustrated me because I had to wait for him at home while I had so much other things to do!
The same thing with radio. Too often I hear air talent going out of their way to tease or presell something and then end with "...and today it's gonna happen at...". Give me a time frame so I know when to tune back in. Because believe it or not, your listeners have so much more to do then just listening to you! So tell your listeners when something is gonna happen! "This afternoon between 5 and 5:15". After all...today it's all about cume!
In my 'Critique yourself' series I already emphasized on the need for more listener-focused content. Try to get in the heads of your listener and talk to and with them about what they're passionate about and now there's a new study that underlines that advice!
Radio consultant Alan Burns did an extensive study that shows that less than 10% of the average radio station’s content is “listener-focused”! He analyzed an hour of twenty CHR, Hot AC, and AC radio stations in US markets 10-100 in middays and afternoon drive and found that a radio station’s positioning – whether produced or delivered live by jocks – comprised 72% of its own content. Listener-focused content was only around seven percent.
The jock break where a talent relates to the listener by talking about something of interest to the listener that isn’t somehow tied to the station, is down to a minimum. One of the thing that lead to this situation might the recent “cut all presentational elements to the bone” mentality that accompanied the arrival of PPM ratings measurement.
So why isn’t station content more listener focused? And is it dangerous for ratings in the long run?
For starters, relatables require writing ability, which is something that we haven’t taught or prized in our announcers for a long time. The decline in on-air writing skills also coincides with that of the personality who had “over the intros” content --- the ability to tell stories in 17 seconds, whether about a song, a station contest, or something goofy a city councilman did. Anybody with a lot of content wanted to go to mornings and talk for more than 17 seconds, even though that didn’t suit many of our talents.
Relatables were also heavily prone to abuse. Nothing was more painful than hearing the afternoon jock read the same story from the daily paper that the morning team had already used twice, while the traffic person tried to gamely pretend they hadn’t heard the payoff at every other station in town. As Burns points out, it’s easier to clamp down than to coach better content. And I don’t miss having the paper read to me, although these days you can’t count on listeners having read the newspaper for themselves.
And even without reading a printed newspaper, listeners have become pretty good at circulating their own relatables to each other. Got a great “news of the weird” story for afternoon drive? It may have already been shared extensively.
Then there’s celebrity gossip, which has somehow been designated the one topic that is still acceptable for relatables. And that isn’t just the case on the radio. You could be saddened by the death of Michael Jackson and still stunned by the extent to which that story consumed the news hole in every medium that month, even at the expense of home, health, hearth and world events.
Here are some excerpts form the study by Alan Burns. For the complete study go to Burns Radio. When a music radio station talks, does it talk about things the audience wants to hear, or about things the station wants the audience to hear?
How much of music radio’s verbal content is driven by the station’s needs, and how much by the audience’s needs and desires? We have felt for some time that music radio has come to be dominated by talk about the station, rather than talk that is driven by a focus on the audience. So we set out to discover whether our opinion was accurate.
Alan Burns and Associates conducted a content analysis of AC and CHR stations across the U.S. designed to answer these three questions:
How often do these stations address the listener with a comment or message about the listener?
How often do music radio stations talk about music?
What does music radio talk about when it’s not playing music?
To address those questions, we monitored twenty AC and CHR stations in markets between 10 and 100, and coded the content of each break. A summary table of results is included at the end of this report, as is a discussion of the methodology of the study.
Headlines
1. Music radio dominantly talks to the audience about radio, rather than about the audience or about music.
On radio, the most intimate of all media, what would be most-common topic be? Wouldn't you think it would be the listener, or something important to the listener?
And on music radio, would you think perhaps the #1 or #2 most-common topic would be music? The answer in both cases is a resounding “No.” Instead, radio stations dominantly talk to their audiences about the radio station.
The typical music radio station in the U.S. has 14 breaks an hour (think of it as 12 songs, 2 stopsets, and a transition into each as a "break"). The results of our analysis indicate that: 10 of those will contain station positioning language, either live or recorded. 7 of them will contain contest, promotional, sales merchandising, website and/or text program information.
ONE of them, on average, will contain something said/designed solely because a listener might be interested in it, having nothing to do with the station.
However, that's an average. On 8 of the 20 stations we monitored, there were NO statements targeted solely to the listener’s interests or needs.
And on a typical music station, a song (or multiple songs) are identified 4 times an hour. Other than that, on average there are NO comments about music. Even when combined, listener-focused and music-based comments (total 9.5%) are so far down the priority ranks that web/text liners (21%) or contest liners (20%) are much more common topics.
Other notes from the data:
2. Stations in larger markets send more positioning messages…but they also talk to the listener, and about music, slightly more than smaller markets.
Top 50 Markets Markets 51-100
Positioning (either recorded or live) 95% 48%
Music 4% 1%
Listener 9% 5%
It may be that while larger and arguably more crowded markets feel a greater need to constantly position themselves to the audience, their (also arguably) more highly-trained and directed air personalities may better understand how to incorporate more of a listener focus.
3. There is wide variation between stations in these measures.
The table below shows the average, and the numbers for the highest and lowest stations in each content area. Note how far from the average those extremes can be:
% of Breaks
Total Low High
Recorded Positioning & Other Station Attributes & Benefits 46.0% 7% 86%
Live Positioning & Other Station Attributes & Benefits 25.8 0 50
Title/Artist (both/or) 24.8 0 79
Website or Text Program 20.7 0 71
Contest/Promotion 19.6 0 46
Station Name (only) 15.8 0 39
Listener 6.8 0 23
Client/Sponsorship 6.2 0 29
Hollywood 4.8 0 33
Weather 3.0 0 15
Music 2.7 0 14
Self 1.0 0 7
Public Service Announcement 0.4 0 8
There are stations that talk about their web sites, text messages, or contests in half or more of their breaks. One station had a combined web/text plus contest/promotion total of 114% - meaning that the station averaged having slightly more than one of those mentioned in every single break.
4. CBS is a bigger “positioner” than Clear Channel.
% of Breaks
CBS Clear Channel
Recorded and live positioners 93.0% 37.6%
This may reflect different conclusions by the two companies re how to behave in a PPM world.
5. AC and CHR position equally often on average.
Within those genres, Mainstream AC positions a bit more frequently than Hot AC (72% to 60%) but Hot AC is more contest-prone than Mainstream AC. In CHR, Rhythmic stations broadcast positioning messages twice as much (100% to 49%) as Mainstream CHRs.
Commentary
The radio industry is under enormous pressure from revenue challenges, new technologies, and the fight to maintain relevance – especially among younger consumers.
In the long run, maintaining relevance is the most vital of those issues. In fact, maintaining and increasing relevance may be the solution to the other challenges – in the long run. The more relevant and important radio’s content is, the better it competes with less intimate media – such as online – and the greater the perceived importance of the medium to the public and advertisers.
By not engaging listeners fully and intimately, radio has created a generation or two of listeners whose involvement with the medium is less than their predecessors. And we’re falling into a self-perpetuating, increasingly tight spiral: the less attention listeners pay to us, the more we have to pound home our messages – and the less attention they pay to them.
We aren’t suggesting that we stop positioning and promoting. Far from it. But music radio does need to find ways to make what we do more about the listener and the music, and less about the station. It’s a lot like trying to interest a newly-met girl when you were single: the more you bragged about yourself, the less interested she became; but the more you talked about her interests, the more interesting you became.
How Did We Get to This, and What Can We Do About It?
Radio stations have valid needs they’re taking care of – particularly the “Three Ps”: Positioning, Promotion, and Platforms. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for talking about music or the audience.
In addition, most air personalities are...
not trained to think about the audience
not taught how to talk to the audience about the audience’s world efficiently
easier to shut up than to teach.
All that being said, we feel there needs to be greater focus on and inclusion of listeners’ interests. Program Directors can...be aware of the need to leave room for listener addresses in clocks, show their air personalities how to build lists of what the audience is doing, thinking, and dealing with in their lives, even down to hour-by-hour during the jock’s show. Encourage their air staffs to use, every opportunity to talk to listeners about their lives and their interests. Those opportunities can come via focus groups, informal listener advisory panels, and one on one conversations. Many smart programmers do try to craft station messages in listener benefit terms, and that can increase the listener’s interest level. But that’s still talking about the radio station rather than the audience or the music.
General Managers and owners play a crucial role as well, since they set priorities, incentivize behavior, and frequently decide how much “business” has to be built into the air personalities’ content slots. Those who plan to be in the radio industry for the long-term stand the most to gain, or lose, from music radio’s battle to remain relevant.
In todays radio world with tighter budgets and less creative time it's getting harder and harder for an air talent to get decent critique and guidance form his or her programm director. Nevertheless, now in financial uncertain times it's more important than ever to keep your presentation fresh, unique and up to date. So how do you do it? Try critiqueing your self! Not easy, not fully objective but absolutely effective!
Especially with these helpfull tips and guidelines that point out the most important areas to monitor and make your self critiqueing more objective.
1. Preparation
2. Rehearsal
3. Station ID-ing
4. Back announce
5. Teasing
6. Time and place reconstruction
7. Your name and personality
8. Showprep
9. Station promotion
10. Checklist for every voice break
1. Preparation
How much time do you spend preparing your show? So many times I hear "I don't need to prepare, I have 20 years of experience! If that ain't enough preparation...". How did an outstanding musician like Eric Clapton become the superstar he is today. Yep, practice! He's been in the business since the 70's and when he does a live performance, what do you think? Will he still prepare for it or just wing it?
There are even talents that think they shouldn't prepare because it makes them sound 'manufactured' or not spontaneous. Most of the time it's the (in)ability to implement your preparation in a natural way where it goes wrong and the preparation gets blamed.
Everyone needs proper preparation, whether you're an athlete, actor, rockstar or an on-air talent. The key to any confident and consequent performance is preparation! So where to start? It's not just getting some prep of the internet and recording some fun bits.
Find out what the demographics are for your targeted listeners. Get as much information as you can get from your PD or Brandmanager on age, jobs, income, education and social status of your listener. Try to get into the minds of your listener. Live and breath like they do...read magazines they read, watch tv shows they watch and even listen to other stations than your own that they listen to. Then when you've become 'one of them' it's easier to talk about the things your targeted listener is into. It makes it even easier to talk to them like a friend that shares information and opinions on the things they're passionate about. Also a good excercise is to take a day off and go in to town during the time of your airshift and find out what the people that are listening to you are doing meanwhile. They're not glued to the radio, they've got lives! This gives you an excellent opporunity to relate better to the situation the listener is in while listening.
Okay, you're waiting for the prep story? Ofcourse good showprep is eminent within the preparation. Entertaining the listener besides playing their favorite songs becomes more and more important. Radio shows just playing music and and entertaining listener loose everytime from the iPod or on demand music channels.
But showprep isn't just getting the most talked about stories out of the newspaper and reading it on the air. First you'll have to edit the text to a not 'written style' but a 'you know what I've heard' style. You wanna be a friend to your listener that tells them something they're probably interested in. So talk like a friend and do not just read the newspaper story out loud! You can even prepare the text with some key words and throw away the original piece. It helps you to tell the story like you would off air to for instance a collegue down the hall.
Know where you wanna go with this piece. Is it something you have an opinion about, is it something you find shocking or hilarious? Let the listener know how it makes you feel so you can make the story your own. Do you want to follow it up with a phoner in a serious way or in a more comedy like style? Always ask yourself what the purpose is of telling any story on the air. If doesn't do anything for your targeted listener, it isn't for your show.
But should you even go for the most talked about stories? Not always! If they're the most talked about stories, chances are every station is doing the same thing. Some stories ofcourse you just can't afford not to talk about, like the death of Michael Jackson or let's say the marriage of one of your station's core artists. But when digging for showprep don't always go for the easy way out. You know what I'm talking about, those strange funny stories that everyone in your market has an instant joke ready for. Digg deeper and come up with entertaining stories and topics that DO relate to your target but DON'T pop up on every other show.
Make every bit local! Even if the story is about something that happened on the other side of the world, there's a way to make it local. Let's say you're not in the market of Munchen, Germany and an elderly couple has been pulled over in Munchen on the Autobahn because they were driving in their disabled vehicle on the freeway at 25 miles an hour. You could just say: "wait till your hear this, a German couple has been pulled over on the freeway in Munchen". Or you can say: "if you're driving on the (insert local freeway here) right now. Imagine driving past a disabled vehicle going 25 miles an hour, think that won't ever happen? Well in Germany...". You can do this with every bit, really. All it takes is some creativity and preparation!
There's much more preparation to think about especially if you do prerecorded bits and phoners. Don't THINK it will be a great story or bit, KNOW it will be great by preparing!
So how to critique yourself with all this info? First ask yourself how much preparation do you really do? Aircheck yourself and critically listen to how your stories, bits and phoners sound. Are they focused on your target? Do they entertain? Do they have a clear vision of where you wanna go with the story? Does the break have a good flow. Did I give the listener the possibility to envision the story? Did I talk in a way a friend would on the street? Did I make the story local?
Finally, if you're doing a 3 hour shift then 3 hours of prep is nescesary. If you're not even close to that, simply do more prep! Good luck! Next time in the 'Critique yourself' series we'll get into the rehearsal of some important things for your show.
