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.
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