What would you think if you heard a dj on the radio saying: "I have two pieces of papers with letters on them specially for you, be caller 100.000 and win those two pieces of paper". Would you get exstatic and run for the phone? Ofcourse not! But why do so many stations keep selling their concert ticket give aways in this fashion on the air?
Most of the time I ask the same question to the talents that still do 'sell tickets', they admit they never really put some thought in it. "My PD says we're giving away tickets, my tease sheet says we're giving away tickets so I say we're giving away tickets." When you do think about it, it doesn't really sound attractive for your listener when they hear they can win two pieces of paper. Even when you add the sound of fumbling with some paper as I heard on a station yesterday, it keeps sounding lame and boring. It keeps sounding as paper!
It's the talent's job to make the prizes sound interesting and exciting. You're a sales person on the radio! So start thinking about how you could make two pieces of paper something worthwhile calling for.
Try to sell the experience the listener is going to have when he or she wins the tickets. Make them envision the experience: "imagine yourself standing frontrow with your best friend eye to eye with Justin Timberlake. Be sure to look good 'cause he might catch your eye, yeah that close!"
You can also make the tickets sound more interesting selling the benefit of having that ticket. Relate to real life: "I know all your friends are going to be unbelievingly jealous of you when you are standing eye to eye upfront at the completely sold out concert of The Fray". Or even relate to real life in a completely other way: "wouldn't it be awesome to stand front row, experiencing JT upclose and personal and hey, you can even make some of your friends happy 'cause you get to take 5 of your friends with you! God you're gonna be so popular!"
Especially if the tickets come with an exclusive limo ride to the concert and a backstage pass, try to tell how it would be if they really won. Tell them a story, tell them what they're thinking, help them envision the experience. But please don't sell them tickets anymore.
By Roadkill Creative
If you’ve been at production for more than a few weeks, you’ve probably noticed the most time consuming task in the studio (or at your desk with Adobe Audition or Pro Tools) isn’t putting the pieces together for a great promo — it’s taking the time to find the pieces to produce that great promo.
A few years ago, I remember my PD coming into my studio asking me to cook up a promo that featured some caller audio. I had the voice tracks from the voice guy, picked out some music and effects for the promo, but I was at a loss for having just the right mix of callers to pull it off. What’s next? The daunting task of blindly listening to old talk shows for the just the right byte from a caller. There has to be a better way, right? Yes, there is and here are two suggestions.
1 – If you’re lucky enough to have a local talk show, ask your engineer if they can set up a “phone only” feed from the talk studio. No annoying talk show host to step over the caller or music to make the call unusable…just the caller. If you’re able to set this up in a logger, aircheck machine, or even a DRR in NexGen to automatically record this audio, you’re golden. At the end of the day, pop open your DAW, look for the pieces in the waveform that are not silence, and go fishing for some callers.
2 – Now let’s say you don’t have a local show at your station or you’re not able to get the “phone only” feed from engineering, there is another option. Listen while you work. No, I’m not talking about some trite positioning statement from the AC station across town. While you’re producing spots, writing copy, or working on the next Mercury Award winner, listen to your station. If you want to be hi-tech, create a task in Outlook with the day’s date and give it a title of something like “Promo Notes”. Yes, you can be old-school and write it down on a piece of paper. But if you’re like me, you can be left with scraps of meaningless notes at the end of the week if left unchecked. When you hear an audial gem, write down the time and a description of what you heard (this works for clips from local and syndicated talk show hosts too). When it’s time to produce your next promo or when you just want to switch things up a little, go fishing for some great caller or talk show clips…and know where the fish are.
Good news for all aircheck fans! The aircheck links in the right column have been updated and now feature even more sites where you can listen to great radio and download airchecks from. Enjoy!
A few more years and every station has to live with the reality of PPM, the Portable People Meter of Arbitron. Obviously the system has lots of advantages in comparison to the traditional way of acquiring radio ratings. But more and more radio veterans seem to question PPM's accuracy because listenership reports have frequently been quite different from those of the old diary system.
Dr. Barry Blesser, Director of Engineering, 25-Seven Systems, Inc. published a study August 18th. examining the reliability of the PPM system. He concludes "that this system appears to be technically sophisticated and well conceived; it can be expected to be extremely reliable when tested under "typical" conditions."
However, a more careful analysis by him suggested that "there may be real-world scenarios that dramatically degrade PPM performance." So there are situations where the station may not be recognized adequately because of different reasons. Let's take a look at what could hurt the reliability of PPM's hearing.
PPM Watermark
"The PPM system is just one example of "watermarking" technology, which has been subject to extensive research for the past two decades," explains Dr. Barry Blesser. "The Arbitron PPM system embeds watermarks with station identification codes into the audio program at the time of broadcast using an encoder in each individual radio station's transmission chain. Portable PPM decoders then identify which stations the wearers of these "people meters" are listening to."
So how strong should the watermark be in comparison to the audio signal? Blesser's study points out that "in order to embed the digital bits that make up the identification code, watermarking modifies the original audio by adding new content or changing existing audio components. The goal of an ideal audio watermarking system is to be 100% reliable in terms of embedding and extracting the watermarking data in all "typical" listener scenarios while remaining 100% inaudible for all "typical" program material."
Blesser explains that "these goals underscore a paradox: 100% encoding reliability requires audible watermarks. Conversely, to achieve total inaudibility, watermarks cannot be present on some material, which sacrifices reliability. Anecdotal reports from radio broadcasters say that Arbitron lowered the watermarking energy in response to complaints about the watermarking being audible in certain circumstances. Trade offs must always be made in audio watermarking systems to balance audibility and reliability."
Listening Environment
But how about the environment that the station is listened to? You can imagine when a radio is being listened to in a factory with lots of noises of heavy equipment or in any other situation with lots aof background noise, the 'hearing' of the PPM could get disturbed.
Barry Blesser says his examination of the PPM system is purely speculative, based on patent disclosures and anecdotal reports distributed in radio industry trade publications. Nevertheless he agrees that certain listening environments could give distorted PPM data. As he states "my best guesses at the scenarios most likely to fail are:
1. Audio program material with low-level high-frequency content, implying low-level watermarking tones.
2. Listening in a noisy environment or with the monitor positioned to receive only a muffled signal, increasing the likelihood that the PPM monitor will not correctly detect the stations' ID."
Listening unwillingly
Ofcourse there's also the possibility that you're listening to a station unwillingly. For example you're in a store or in a cab and you're 'forced' to listen to the station playing there. How reliable is that data? In his study Blesser concludes "that there will be some cases where the PPM system fails simply because the program content and listener environment do not match the assumptions made by the designers of the PPM system."
What can your station do?
Ofcourse you want your station's ratings to be the best, so when working with PPM what can you do to besides the content to enhance the results?
You can forget about gaming the system says Blesser: "A radio station has no direct way of modifying how portable decoders behave, nor should it. Gaming the system at the listening end would be no different from stuffing the ballot box or falsifying paper diaries. It is in the industry's best interest that a firewall be maintained between stations and individual participants in the audience measuring process."
"Nevertheless, insuring that audio leaving the station is optimized for successful PPM encoding is every station's business. A program director who understands which audio makes the PPM system more reliable has an advantage over a competitor who does not. Knowledge that is not public has high monetary value, not unlike that used for insider trading in the stock market."
So test your station!
Finally Blesser gives a few pointers on how your radio station can test its programming as well as explore the listening assumptions in the world of PPM. There are two basic approaches to evaluating your environment he tells.
"First, the input to the PPM encoder can be subtracted from the output of the encoder to create a "mix-minus" of the encoding. The subtraction removes most of the original program and allows the channels to be seen clearly with a spectrogram analysis of the difference. This will indicate which channels are being used to encode data and measure the total power in the watermarking information. Given this measurement technique, every program can be evaluated for its watermarking robustness, showing the ability of the PPM system to carry watermarking information on specific audio samples without examining the encoding itself."
"Moreover, the Arbitron decode confidence monitor provides an output that indicates if watermarking decoding was successful. If the encoding process is marginal because of weak channel encoding, then it may take longer for the decoder to find the embedded data, if it finds it at all. A long response time to acquire the station ID watermark serves as a warning that a non-ideal listening environment may result in a failure to detect the ID."
"Second, the Arbitron confidence decoder monitor can be placed in a listening setting deemed by the station as typical of its real-world listeners. For a drive-time talk show, the environment might be a truck or automobile with the windows rolled down. For a late-night show, it might be a bedroom. The microphone used by the decoder device as its input source may be at some distance from a radio loudspeaker and there may be "environmental" obstacles, such as a chair blocking the high-frequency channels but not the low frequencies. Effectively, one can determine the required signal-to-noise ratio in the listening environment for successfully decoding a specific received program for that program's target audience."
Important to keep in mind says Blesser is that "there is no evidence that the performance of a station's confidence decoder monitor is the same as that of the portable PPM carried by listeners. The confidence monitor is fed by a direct-wired connection, has a large power budget, and is seemingly without constraints on the computational power dedicated to decoding. In contrast, the portable decoder may have severe constraints related to power consumption, volume, and computational capabilities. On the other hand, the portable version may have front-end analog processing and filtering to optimize the extraction of the acoustic signal. Obviously, the portable device is a better test vehicle since it mimics the real world."
You can download the original study
here!
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.
Getting your music scheduling ready for the summer? How do you handle those spice summer songs? You could fit them in manually after compiling your log but that takes a lot of time. Then there's the option of creating an extra category of summer songs but how do you implement that in a clock in order to work?
If you want to spice up your playlist with summer songs, don't want to spend extra time massaging your log and still want to have a degree of control over those summer titles then consider creating an extra summer folder in your music scheduler for each era category. Then adjust what percentage per hour, per era category should come from the main folder and how much should come from the summer folder and there you have the easiest way to summer spice up your playlist. Just don't forget to adjust the settings to 100% main folder when the summer is over or the weather is bad anyway. If you're handling your spice songs in a different way, feel free to share your solution.
In addition to the original piece a question from a collegue music director. He followed the advice but it resulted in too much summer songs playing in one hour. Ofcourse that can be prevented by sound coding all your summer songs with a label like 'Summer', then adjust the settings for the policy to your liking. For example maximum 2 songs in 60 minutes with that specific coding. You can also add a minimum separation between songs with that same sound code to prevent them from playing both titles in one quarter hour an create a more spread play.
J Nice & Julian
See Z 100's production director Dave Foxx like you never seen 'em before in a sketch about voice overs. He even takes his cap of for this one...
How will your station remember the King of Pop? Consider playing one Michael Jackson every hour depending on our format of course. CHR and AC may lean towards 2 titles an hour. Also think about having a biography and some Youtube videos featured on your station's website. Finally listeners will appreciate a place on your site where they can leave their wishes and message. For the weekend consider a specialty show looking back on the career of Michael Jackson, get a host and the production guy on it right now!
Here's an example of how Z-100 New York is remembering Michael Jackson
Z-100 New York Special.
Aaahh don't you like it, the days are getting longer, the sun is shining brighter and you've finished all special summer imaging elements that your PD aksed for. Finally some time to relax...sounds tempting huh?
Think again! This is the perfect time for you to screen all of your imaging elements for the fall season. Get ahead by conducting a thorough screening of all ID's, sweepers, jock elements, toth-segues etc. Do they still sound fresh? Do they still comunicate the station's brand the way they're supposed to? Is the energy level still compliant to the station's needs? And does the VO deliver the desired sound?
Start by forming an outlay of all sorts of imaging you feature on your station. Divide them in categories and label these with certain purposes and put each element in a categorie. Now you have a good overview of your complete imaging arsenal.
Check the balance between eacht category. For instance, do I have to much short ID's in comparison to the long brand descriptive positioners. Ask yourself if you really need everything that is on this outlay? Less is more! Check what you could lose without hurting the station's positioning. Anything that doesn't help the listener to understand what you are, what you do and what sort of feeling the station is about, can go out the window. Also check for unused stuff and lose it, it's time to clean up!
Get together with your PD or brandmanager and inventorize what elements could be replaced or enhanced to give the station that fresh sound for the fall season. Try to understand what he or she is trying to accomplish with the station and translate it in imaging.
Focus on:
Positioners
These are the elements that brand your station. Let the listener know, hear and FEEL what your station is about. Don't tell 'em "the best of the 70's, 80's, 90's and today" or something obsolete as "the best mix of yesterdays classics and todays best hits". That's just ingredients, you can work that in your music image promo's.
Positioners need to relate to real life benefits; how does your station assist the listener in their busy day. Is it with uplifting music that makes you happy, accurate news and service info that keeps you up to date or entertainment that makes you laugh? Be one with your PD or brandmanager on what selling points you want to expose in the positioners. But always focus them on feelings, emotions, fears and needs and how your station can help the listener with that!
I recommend starting with 10 positioners, use some dayparted for relating to the listeners daily routine. Then as you go into the third week of the season, throw some out and replace them by fresh new ones.
ID's
Here's where you need to get creative in a more productional way. ID's often just identify the station and nothing more so textual you can't really jump out of the box here. One way to stand out is to re-think the deliverance of the ID. Does it nescesarily have to be the VO that says the call letters or station name? Maybe you can have it said by different listeners every hour, throw in the place he or she listens to your station and voila...you also made it local. Or have your core artists say the station's name and area or city you transmit for.
Imaging Promo's
Ever listened to the commercials on your station? They're getting better every day. So be sure the commercials for your station are even better. Because just like commercials are selling a product, promo's are selling your station! Be very cautious when you start building an image promo. Find out what your PD's opninion is on what to sell and try to work that in a masterpiece. Always focus on one benefit of the station per promo. Don't try to squeeze in to much information; only one message for each promo.
Music Image Promo's
Of course here you want to spotlight what is important for your listener musically. Get together with your PD and MD and brainstorm on this. Does your listener really care that you play "the best of the 90's and today"? Or does he or she want to hear the FEELING of the 90's and today's music? Even with music promo's try to relate to what your listener is experiencing on a ordinary day.
Feeling Promo's
What sort of feeling does the station have overall? Is it a fun station, obnoxious or is is it the station to relax to and is safe for your children to listen to. Make these promo's a collage of everything that confirms that image.
Local Promo's
It has never been so important as now to be local. An iPod or any other MP3 Player for sure isn't local, so claim this position. People love something that is from around the block, something that's 'ours'. Make these promo's about how your station is unique and important to your market.
Toth segue elements
Most US stations have this worked in to their ID's but often European stations have a Top of the hour that introduces news or the start of a new hour of programming. Does this key positioner sell the most important benefits of you station? Does it reflect the feeling of the station? And ask yourself, aren't we doing the segue around the Toth for way too long in the same old fashion? Can you make it make it fresher by rearranging the elements. Do something completely different with the music and fx mix or for example rearrange the parts of your VO versus other voice elements.
Jock elements
Beds, drones, fillers, whistles and bells...the jocks love 'em. But does the listener? Moderation is a good advice. Be sure the elements are in tune with the music format of the station and provide elements in three basic energy levels like uptempo, medium and slow. Keep this category fresh and prevent them to burn out.
I hope you'll get some inspiration from this to clean up your imaging. Good luck!
If we knew then what we know now, we wouldn't do a lot of things the Kidster does in this fabulous aircheck from the 90's but still...we sometimes could use some more energy and entertainment on the radio these days. Click, turn up the volume and enjoy the good old days from the top of the Empire State Building! Or follow Kid today on Twitter.
Are you still running those billboards with just your station's name, frequency, slogan and morning show hosts on it? You really think that grabs the attention of your potential listener? You want to stand out, do something that is out of the ordinary. Here are some examples on how to do just that...
WAKS-FM/Cleveland (CHR)
KISW-FM/Seattle (Classic Rock)
KOMP-FM/Las Vegas (Rock)
WCPR-FM/Biloxi-Gulfport (Rock)
WKLS-FM/Atlanta (Rock)
WKLS-FM/Atlanta (Rock)
WHYI-FM/Miami (CHR)
WNCI-FM/Columbus (CHR)
Check out this interesting presentation. Sorry, only in Dutch.
This site blog will be under heavy construction for the coming weeks. Later you'll be able to find everything about radio...RIGHT HERE!
