I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking the upcoming Fall ratings book is going to be one of the most important in recent history. Yes, they’re all life and death – and don’t let anyone tell you any different. But the rating period that finishes off 2021 is going to be telling – about radio’s rebound, the trajectory of the pandemic, the economy’s recovery, the holiday season, and whether we really return to some concept of “normal.”
So, I ask you: With so much on the line, what plans do you and your team have for marketing and promoting your radio station?
I can hear you laughing from here. No one’s got any money. And among those with any kind of budget, it is modest at best. For most broadcast radio stations, that’s not a result of COVID – it’s been that way for years. Marketing money has been at a premium for a long time, reserved for new station launches or when a usually solid brand goes into a slump. Many programmers have simply stopped asking for marketing dollars because they know what the answer will be.
But following up on a recent blog from superlative talent coach, Randy Lane, last week, the fact is every station has a healthy budget – that often
goes underused.
Randy’s post – “Are You Giving Away a Million Dollars a Year?” – made the point that many stations have tremendous potential to “market” its best personality shows on their own air. Randy goes on to list some of the more successful promo styles – “Best of” and listener testimonials among them. Good points, all. It’s a blog post well worth reading.
But it was this line that just about jumped off the screen:
“So many stations don’t take advantage of the free advertising on their own station to promote a star morning or afternoon show.”
I’ll double-down on that, and say many stations don’t use their promo inventory strategically – period. Oftentimes, promos are randomly placed, if scheduled at all.
Many programmers meticulously schedule their music each day – sometimes requiring 90 minutes or more – but neglect to spend much time considering, much less mapping out their promo content marketing strategy.
There’s an old saying you’ve heard before:
“The shoemaker’s children go barefoot.”
That’s right. Hundreds of clients get the best from a station’s reach, exposure, and credibility. But the station itself often suffers because while the expertise, the knowledge, and the promos are at hand, there often aren’t enough hours in the day to address the opportunity of marketing a station over its own airwaves.
The management tools are there. RCS’s Linker was designed to do just that. But to effectively use promo scheduling tools, PDs need to think like sales managers. MusicMaster has a tool called Airplay Affidavit that provides great insight about a station’s promo schedules.
The sales department thinks about their inventory like precious metals. Yes, some avails are more valuable than others, depending on the show, daypart, and day when they’re scheduled. But all their units are meaningful, particularly because they are finite.
Unlike a carpet store or a brewery where you can walk in the back to grab another roll or a case, there are only so many advertising opportunities on any radio station – commercial or public. You have to sell them – and utilize them – surgically.
That means radio station avails are more valuable than an average company’s inventory because they are limited. All the more reason why PDs need to find the time to manage it.
Many programmers don’t see it through that lens. In fact, a station’s programming inventory often is under-utilized, and in some cases, rarely considered. This is the case on both commercial and public stations, where promos are often afterthoughts, randomly scattered throughout the broadcast day.
It is not uncommon to hear a host do a live read for a station event, immediately followed by a produced piece for that same event. Or hearing promos for something upcoming a handful of times during a daypart, followed by a gap of several hours before it is mentioned again. Much of the problem is that these avails are scheduled more by chance than by design – not a particularly strategic way to handle valuable inventory that reaches thousands and even tens of thousands of key listeners.
So, if a value was placed on avails controlled by the programming department, what would that amount to every year?
We do know this – when there’s a buy on the line, PDs and sales reps run the numbers. They add up the cost of :30 and :60 spots that make up the pitch, and then place a value on included “mentions” and promos.
My back-of-the-cocktail-napkin-math is at right.
If you figure there are 4 avails per hour to promote station “stuff” – personalities, events, features, contests, charitable campaigns – that means there are nearly 35,000 of these opportunities a year.
If I price them at just $50 each (which is lower than many stations would charge a client), the value of an average station’s inventory comes to:
$1,747,200
That’s nearly double Randy Lane’s estimate of $1 million, and it underscores just how much value a station’s promo inventory has. Of course, your math will vary, depending on avails and how you price them.
It also makes your station – and by extension, your PD – the biggest client on the station by far. Based just on the value of ad spend, “the client” in this case – you – deserves to have this inventory professionally managed. And that means asking the same key questions an advertiser ought to ask:
1. What’s the focal point of the day? Or the week?
Programmers in television or shows like Today or Jimmy Kimmel Live! look at both that day’s show – and that week’s shows. If they know they have something really amazing coming up later this month, they’ll factor it into the messaging mix, too.
It helps to have a grid, a white board or some other tool that helps programmers visualize what’s coming up, what needs to be promoted, where it should be promoted, and how often. It’s also useful for seeing where there are “voids” – where very little is going on.
2. What types of promos work best?
As Randy points out in his blog post, there are several ways to architect your messaging, depending on what you’re promoting. If it’s a promotion with a personality attached to it, a testimonial/live read might be most effective. Or maybe a produced spot would make more sense. Or a mix of the two.
If it’s a major promotion or event for the station, it likely deserves more than just “mentions.” Letting the airstaff know what needs to be emphasized or a sign in the studio isn’t going to get it done. (“Hey, J Dub, hit our contest once an hour or so this week, OK?”). You wouldn’t do that to a client. And remember, YOU are the client.
3. What’s the reach and frequency analysis on your “schedule?”
That’s right. Calculate the reach (how many people will hear your message in a week) and the frequency (how many times they’ll hear it) on the current plan you want to go with. Study the results. You might not know exactly how many times you want most of the cume to hear the message over a week, much like you think about the rotation of songs. But by also watching the results (registrations, festival tickets sold, sign-ups on a landing page), you will get a feel for how many avails it will require to get your message across.
4. How do you manage two, three, or more promotions at the same time?
Chances are, you’ve got multiple contests, events, promotions, and features going on simultaneously. Prioritize them because they’re not all A-level. When you know how many avails you have, and where they are, you can begin to plan your day (or week) based on which campaigns deserve a more robust promo effort.
You might also decide the campaigns that need fresh creative – especially promotions and events that run for several weeks. At what point do you swap out old copy and production for new, updated messages?
The bottom line?
Most stations have a million dollar nuclear promotional weapon that’s just a mouse-click away. But programmers need to find the time and energy to put it to work.
Now, I know some of you reading this post want to scream at me for creating more work for you to do. I know – you’re slammed, you’re swamped, and you already wear more hats than you should.
I hear that, and I am seriously empathetic. But let me ask you an important question:
How are the nation’s biggest companies – iHeartMedia and Audacy – utilizing their promo inventories? What have Bob Pittman and David
Field told their marketing departments to do on a company-wide basis?
They are each throwing a ton of local station promotional weight behind their podcasts, their apps, their streaming channels, and their corporate events.
In other words, they are managing their promo inventory across the scale provided by their hundreds of radio stations all over the country. That’s a lot of megaphones all churning out the same messaging at the same time.
On a smaller scale, every radio company – or any station – can and should do this, too.
Radio works – and that’s why the biggest of the big are ensuring their avails are strategically deployed, doing the heavy lifting.
Shouldn’t you do the same for your station’s local assets?
Now, if your market manager or your SVP from corporate calls this month to tell you they’ve found a slush fund of promotional dollars for the fall, go for it. But for the other 95% of you that will have to get through the Fall book on your wits, your creativity, your innovativeness, and your abilities, spend a few hours now architecting your plans, your promos, and your messaging.
You just might come up with a million dollar idea.
And now, you’ll have the promotional firepower to pull it off.
Jacobs Media has consistently walked the walk in the digital space, providing insights and guidance through its well-read national Techsurveys.
In 2008, jacapps was launched - a mobile apps company that has designed and built more than 1,300 apps for both the Apple and Android platforms. In 2013, the DASH Conference was created - a mashup of radio and automotive, designed to foster better understanding of the "connected car" and its impact.
Along with providing the creative and intellectual direction for the company, Fred consults many of Jacobs Media's commercial and public radio clients, in addition to media brands looking to thrive in the rapidly changing tech environment.
Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
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Excellent article. Hidden value in every minute. Yes, every book is/was “life and death”….in the old daze. Amazing how many owners, group PDs and GMs simply “Let it Be” with consistently anemic ratings and allowing wannabe amateurs to eat our lunch. Will this be the best, new fall season? Sure hope so….Let’s do it to it!!
“Fall season” is the way to think about it, Clark. Use your promo inventory to make this fall sound great. Thanks for chiming in.
Great read Fred! My kids used to ask me, as they grew up watching me in the business.
“Why don’t radio stations just tell me what they want me to do and why it makes my life better!?”
Yeah. Why not ?
Why not, indeed? Smart kids. Thanks, Dave.
Two basic reactions:
1) Only one of the things (corporate events) that radio’s two biggest companies are throwing their promotional weight behind (“podcasts, their apps, their streaming channels, and their corporate events”) are even remotely monetizable.
2) I remember when radio stations routinely ran their promos in first position in stop sets and (at least we did) used Optimum Effective scheduling (https://www.rab.com/whyradio/WRnew/faq/pdf/faq26.pdf) to determine how many spots to run and where. Some sticker shock warning – with radio cume pretty much unchanged and PURs way down, its going to take a lot of spots to meet the OES criteria and that’s something that sales should understand too. A 12 spots/week schedule doesn’t accomplish anywhere near what it used to. Take note if you sign up a client who plans to measure results.
Bob, thanks for these observations. Regarding your first point, the monetization piece is important, of course, but the other angle is encouraging listeners to tune in for special things (content, contests, etc.). At worst, they will become more aware of them.
And your second point made me laugh. I was thinking about OES when I wrote the post, but I didn’t want to date myself (yet AGAIN!). So, thanks for doing it for me. Yeah, it takes a fair amount of frequency to reach the cume more than once, all the m ore reason why PDs need to promote more frequently than many do. Appreciate it.
This was one of the things Jarl Mohn (a.k.a. Lee Masters for the commercial radio folks) focused on as CEO of NPR. He started the SPARK program to get more listeners for Morning Edition. NPR produced monthly promos on top of the usual daily promos and asked stations to play Morning Edition promos 100 times a week – most stations OES lands somewhere around 100 so it’s an easy number suggest. You know what happened? Morning Edition ratings spiked across the public radio. NPR now regularly suggests stations focus on a few priorities over trying to promote everything.
I personally have been working on this and it’s not easy. There’s a lot of things people want to promote on the station so you need to make hard decisions. Then you get into having departments outside of programming understand this and it becomes a bigger challenge. Every second is important – programmers should stress over their promo inventory just like they do their music logs or morning shows. These are the details that can make the difference compared to your competitors.
Jeff, I am so happy you brought up Jarl’s SPARK program, pretty much the first thing he initiated when he got his feet wet at NPR. I was at the PRPD Conference when he announced it (and he gave away a FREE year of “Morning Edition” who did the best job marketing the show), and it was very bold for public radio. But necessary, and long overdue.
Your second paragraph is very important, and sums up the care, skill, and nuance necessary to successfully use your inventory to market your key assets.
Thanks so much for reminding of part of Jarl’s legacy. He believed the NPR product was first-rate, but that station self-marketing left much to be desired. Public radio program directors would be wise to stay engaged on the promotional front.