Monday Memo: Radio’s New Fall Season
By Holland Cooke
Consultant
As TV is touting its coming attractions, take a step back. We – inside the box – live-and-breathe radio.
Listeners have their hands full just living and breathing. Their day is time-crunched and financially-challenged, and we want to be its soundtrack. But listening is free, unlike umpteen other purchase decisions they agonize. So what’s high-stakes to us is low-stakes to them.
We only matter if we matter, and we’ve never had so much audio competition.
- This month, as the school year begins in so many places, the listeners local retailers want as customers revert to “normal.” Their tempo changes, and builds to a holiday season climax. Do they know who you are and how you can help?
- Off-air promotion (remember that?) merely says give-us-a-try. When they do, does what they hear deliver? Even with scant (or no) off-air promotion, much of what you can do to become more habit-forming costs nothing. As consultants do, I’m talking about “the fundamentals,” the blocking-and-tackling stuff. For starters, think: recognition and relevance.
Who are you?
- Are call letters or station nickname delivered frequently? PPM myth: call letters matter less. Baloney. Awareness drives use. Ditto your dial position(s) and how to listen via smartphone, smart speaker, and streams. Name-and-address.
- As your listeners cume 3 stations this week, help ’em remember yours more than the other 2 (not to mention streams and satellite radio and podcasts). And are you selling — or merely reciting — call letters, dial position, and slogans? This is often an issue with veteran talent, creatures of habit.
“Who cares?”
Or as my WTOP successor Jim Farley (RIP) asked: “W.G.A.S.?” He hung a sign in the newsroom there, meaning “Who Gives A Shit?”
- Are topics relatable and useful? Enable listeners with helpful information, and they’ll keep coming back.
- Do you say “you” and “your,” a lot? It’s a litmus test for relevance.
- Do you keep setting the stage as audience tunes in? Someone JUST got in the car.
- Are you teasing the next quarter hour? And what you’ll offer same-time-tomorrow?
- Even with apps in the dashboard, weather and traffic are super-local and can be super-impactful.
- Is your on-air imaging about the station? Or about listeners’ lives? “Because ONE traffic jam can jam-up your whole day…”
There’s more from radio’s right-now To-Do list at HollandCooke.com
Holland Cooke is a consultant working the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow HC on Twitter @HollandCooke and connect on LinkedIn
Next month, as the school year begins in so many places, the listeners that local retailers want as customers transition back to their “normal” routines. Their tempo changes and builds to a holiday season climax. And we – and our advertisers – want to be their soundtrack.
Having written thousands of commercials and promos, I’ve become a copy connoisseur. And, admittedly, a tough grader when it comes to delivery. Sell me and you’re good.
Mark Twain reckoned that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”