It was once the way that radio people knew the jock they were listening to was a newbie, or worse, just unprofessional. That person went through a break, maybe more than one, and did not give the call letters or name of the radio station.
It was once the way that a radio station gave itself away as semi-pro. Not only did the jocks not give the name of the station, sometimes the imaging and other elements did not either. You might have to listen to the top of the hour to find out what station you had wandered into. Once satellite radio, then other networking, took hold, hearing the calls became the sign of how much a station cared about localization.
It was certainly easy for a radio station or on-air personality to use the station name to the point of risibility — saying it twice in a break, jamming it in over the last second of an intro – and not always on time. Overusing the calls was often the hallmark of the jock who also needed to wedge in a frontsell of “Summer of ’69” or “Hotel California.” Or the station that let the jock do nothing other than read station liner cards. Listeners did notice and complain about being bludgeoned with the call letters, even those who complained about not ID’ing even the most obvious song titles.
The first place that call letters began disappearing was a.m. drive. Syndicated morning shows had to rely on a produced bumper to make sure the calls were in there. Local morning shows chose to emulate that. It was part of a larger process of even local shows sounding disconnected from the station around them — no references to music, no station events other than their own.
Call letters were also heard less after PPM ratings measurement took hold. I first wrote about hearing stations that did not ID themselves nearly a decade ago. Some programmers sided with those listeners who wanted to escape the tyranny of the endlessly repeated station name. Others pointed out that while a station did not necessarily need rote repetition to be remembered, it still needed to be found or sought out.
Now, it’s not unusual to encounter a jock break with no call letters. Five years ago, it was usually a station using primarily national jock content. Now, it might be a station so reliant on voice-tracking that the difference from a national format in real time is mostly nominal. Those hosts, responsible for multiple stations, often seem to be reusing content without customizing it — meaning that their breaks for PPM markets and diary markets alike are equally anonymous.
Often, those jock links with no calls may feel like generic throwaways in other ways — more content block than jock break, with content ripped from yesterday’s celebrity news. They may line up with an intro or they may be carelessly placed between songs to stop the music unnecessarily. They often result in a station not being formatted the same way from one personality to another. With programmers similarly overextended, these issues won’t necessarily be noticed, much less addressed.
Complaining about not hearing the call letters might certainly strike you as the most old-mannish of old-man complaints. Some PDs have long chosen to delegate the station positioner (as opposed to the name) to the imaging voice; actually, I support that one. Some programmers have deliberately moved away from any vestige of “hit-the-post” radio, including, recently, SiriusXM’s ’70s on 7. When radio presentations steer to the overly casual, it takes something like Mike Joseph’s more regimented “Hot Hits” CHRs to force an industry shift, and there’s not one of those on the horizon.
Call letters are different. It is truer than ever that radio stations need to be found and sought out, since there will not likely be the external marketing to make that happen. Personality sets radio apart from streaming, but so does stationality. KRTH (K-Earth 101) Los Angeles is a radio station flourishing in PPM, and yet its signature contest has been the evergreen where listeners win by saying the call letters repeatedly. I’ve most recently heard “Say It and Win” on sister KOOL Phoenix as it teaches listeners the new Big 94.5 handle.
In K-Earth’s predecessor, late 1960s KHJ Los Angeles and its Bill Drake-formatted Top 40 sisters, there is one possible back-to-the-future solution, jingles or some other sort of logo preceding every break, so that giving the station name isn’t reliant on the personality. (Even then, though, there was usually a station nickname or positioner in the jock break itself.) CKNO (102.3 Now Radio) Edmonton, Alberta, the successful conversation-based Hot AC that I’ve written a lot about lately, gives even the job of call letters to the imaging voice — but that imaging voice is heard first thing before the hosts.
At this moment of proliferating choices and diminished loyalty, brands shouldn’t be casually dismissed. It is often the oldest, best-remembered brands that are most durable on today’s shifting radio landscape. The call letters or station name are indeed the oldest talisman of “good radio,” but even if we don’t have the same notion of what that is now, they remain a matter of survival.
