What game is over?
The game of data-centric, company focused, cluster fitting, competitive landscape, Arbitron manipulating marketing and programming. Anyone who knows me has heard me say one thousand times we must develop a "unique definable position" in order to cut through and achieve not only programming success but long term SALES success. Unique and definable to listeners that is.
Some examples of how we might fall short:
- A station does a music test (are there still stations doing music testing?) and the "cutoff" is, let's say, a 70 score. A song gets a 69.7 and the song doesn't get considered for airplay. Ridiculous!
- A station gets the PPM ratings and drills down and notes that when the jock reads the liner card the ratings dip. Solution: reduce the chatter even more. How about talking about things LISTENERS care about instead of a "work day liner?"
- A station website is nice to look at but misses the chance to truly interact with listeners by not having personality blogs, music sampling and polling, or other interactive listener-centric content that might emotionally connect listeners with the station.
- Talking in radio-ese. (see picture below)
- Fish where the fishes are. That means be out in your community at festivals, events, concerts, and any other well attended places where you can shake hands, kiss babies, and communicate a positive impression about your brand--even if there's no sales component.
I could go on and on...but you get the idea.
Creative thinking has all but disappeared from the programming process due to workloads, less people, and too much group think. I should also include fear since many times "creative" doesn't always yield instant results.
There's no naïveté here. I like big ratings and I understand the importance of cluster strategies--not too mention economic realities. However, we shouldn't be programming radio stations only in conference room bubbles. We need better outreach and LISTEN to our desired audience--they might have something worthwhile to say.
Listen, appropriately filter, and get creative! Sounds like a plan.
As I regularly do, I like scanning Slideshare looking for cool presentations worthy of sharing with you. Today, I found a great one!
Check out this slide and then take a look at a short 17 slide presentation.
