In the last five weeks, I’ve come across two pieces of station imaging I wanted to immediately tell radio people about.
One was a legal ID on WKRZ Wilkes-Barre, Pa., which bragged that the heritage CHR was “entertaining Northeast PA by air, by stream, and by your phone.”
The other was a series of listener sweepers on KRTY (Country 95.3) San Jose. The first was a listener who said he was in his 60s and was listening on Amazon Alexa. The next sweeper featured a listener who was listening on TuneIn from Asia.
Since then, I’ve listened and heard KRTY running a listener sweeper approximately every 15 minutes. Some are more straightforward than others. But there was Mindy, listening to the morning show on TuneIn from Tel Aviv. Another listener talked about listening to the station via Alexa, the station Website, and the car radio.
The WKRZ ID differed from the litany-of-devices promo that we have all heard frequently in the last few years only by dint of its more distinctive wording. The KRTY sweepers are not so unlike the “I’m Sean Ross and I am K-Sean-FM”-type campaigns we’ve heard for the last 25 years. They feature somebody who listens at home, at work, and in the car, but not in those words.
Device promos are so ubiquitous on radio as to be largely unnoticeable. Other than contesting, they may make up the bulk of the station business that jocks and promos talk about. The differences in the promos I like are subtle, and certainly radio may need more than nuance to be effective these days. But I noticed them. The KRTY sweepers in particular did several things I thought were important:
- They engage for listening everywhere. I once gave what was clearly a wrong answer in a radio-station group meeting because I thought smart speakers were the most important place to pursue streaming. The client was most concerned about station apps and the connected car. But the battle is everywhere. And since that meeting, COVID has redrawn the battlefield.
- The listeners always identify themselves. They sound like real people offering credible testimonials, not the anonymous voice in the big-pile-of-imaging-work-parts declaring “I love it!” and “I listen all day, every day!”
- They contain local geography, something often encountered only during a stopset elsewhere.
- In addition, they make a case for KRTY as an international brand, like Spotify or Apple Music.
Stations often struggle to come up with authentic sounding listener testimonials. But KRTY’s Nate Deaton says the station is up to 75 rotating sweepers now. He also says that it’s the most positive listener feedback that he and PD Julie Stevens have encountered to any campaign in station history.
It’s also important to note that in the 10 a.m. hour of KRTY I heard on May 4, it ran two stopsets. One was under three-and-a-half minutes. One was three minutes. The ads were a mix of local and national advertisers. There were none of the national ads that I’ve heard tonnage on in my recent listening; e.g., Progressive’s ad with the finicky voice actor and his exaggerated vocal warmups (an amusing series, but not endlessly so).
For comparison, I went back to four other stations that I’d recently run tape of in the 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. hours. KRTY had 6-1/2 minutes of ads. Two of the stations I listened to had 13 minutes. One had 12. One had about 10:30 worth of spots, but they were all in one bloc.
In those four stopsets, I heard a lot of Progressive ads, along with Zip Recruiter, Lowes, and other streaming perennials. I heard two stopsets made up entirely of morning team promos — not bits and sometimes the same ones. I heard ads cut off. I heard songs cut off. To be fair, I did not hear a lot of filler PSAs. I did sometimes hear the other stations trying to be creative in promoting device usage.
But many of the streaming experiences weren’t much better than the ones I’ve been writing about since 2007. When I chose KRTY for my short hops in the car that afternoon, I heard music most of the time, rather than finding myself stuck with the wrong streaming experience.
I’ve made many a Ross On Radio reader glaze over by railing about station streaming, or maybe I’ve just made them feel powerless to change anything. But the streaming experience is worth discussing again because broadcasters are asking for the order so repeatedly in the course of any hour. When we are not asking them to “take us anywhere,” we are directing them to our podcast platforms. If they choose one of those podcasts, they will more likely encounter 4-6 minutes of spots than 13. In other words, we are reaffirming an experience that we could be offering ourselves.
I hear the same thing on WIIS (Island 106.9)/Key West, FL — one of my favorite stations — where they frequently run liners from people around the country or around the world (or what street on Key West) identifying themselves, where they’re from and why they like the station.
When radio became fueled by Wall Street money it was financial analysts that insisted on the massive increase in the number of spots. Here in LA, KLSX-FM was playing stop sets as long as TWENTY-FOUR MINUTES twenty years ago. Two long stop sets an hour destroyed Howard Stern’s ratings here in LA. In speaking with the station’s PD, he defended this insanity by stating that his research indicated that listeners liked commercials. I told him he was an idiot and needed to use some common sense and ignore the research. I also told him of my personal experience as an advertiser that my ads were no longer effective because once people learn the clock, they just tune out and come back after the break, so ads are not being heard and thus are ineffective and worthless. It wasn’t long after this conversation that Howard Stern failed in LA never to return, until the move to Serius.
Listeners will tolerate a short stop set, that was the standard until Wall Street money took over radio. Bill Drake programmed two-minute stop sets, Music radio drove it’s audience away with long stop sets in an era when listeners have so many choices of commercial free listening and self-programed options.
Fact: listeners hate commercials! So it’s great to hear of at least one station that has some common sense. Unfortunately, the numbers of available listeners are no longer what they once were. The audience has move on to newer, more listener friendly, entertainment offerings.
Music radio stations sales people will tell you they have a young active audience and support their claims with ratings, but the proof is in the results, not the bogus ratings and the pitch. As an advertiser, I can tell you that my last one-week radio campaign of NINETY spots on a #1 market dominating CHR garnered no visible response. This was long ago in 2005, the audience for my nightclub had already move to social media. A place where I could communicate with them directly for FREE. SInce 2005, I haven’t made another radio buy.
I share this because in the experience I just detailed is a business radio has overlooked. Radio could provide the service of collecting the data required to establish a direct link to a business owner’s audience, or potential audience, manage it, provide the creative content, and the analytics that advertisers now demand.
Each business has a target audience but radio is a broad cast medium. For example, in my personal experience, I would pay to reach all listeners when, in fact, my ads were designed to speak to a small part of a station’s audience. Most business types suffer the same wasteful spending experience when buying radio ads.
The problem lies in that stations are not staffed to execute an Internet business model such as I’ve described and have resisted incorporating the internet into their operations and sales programs.
There are many ways stations could expand their business model through use of the Internet but it appears there is little creativity in the minds of the business people in radio today. The result: advertisers have move on. Radio ads are no longer effective. And the medium is dying.
As I’ve stated before, I don’t know a single young person that listens to music radio. This statement is supported by research by Triton presented at the RAIN Summit in 2009 during NAB. The research, 12 years ago, was showing that millennials could not name the call letters of a single radio station. I think that says it all.
As a former radio professional and music programmer, I personally can’t tolerate the listening experience of LA’s music radio stations. Fifty years ago I was saying I want my KHF. Forty years ago I was saying I want my MTV. Now I’m saying I want my Serius/XM. Or Amazon music, or Spotify, or Apple Music, or dozens of other streaming choices, including podcast. Terrestrial radio is not in the mix.
That was supposed to be, “I want my KHJ!” at the end of my last post.
I have always loved OTA radio, but do not like streaming over the web radio much. Why are they not geo targeting things more? If I listen to WSKY mornings on my Elexa , why am I hearing Florida Weather and traffic? We have KYW right here in the Philly area, they already provide traffic and weather for our region. Are you telling me that an automated system can’t pump the latest traffic or weather report that isn’t live and fit it in to the time constraints? Why am I hearing spots and promos for stuff in FL where I”m not at? Every once in a while I’ll hear something local but usually not. and let me not start on the processing of the stream vs the spots… Radio to me is missing a missed opportunity on smart speakers, phones etc. Why are they not monetizing the streaming audience more? I’ve heard Equity Communications do spots over the air on WAYV telling businesses how they can use the power of radio to advertise on Facebook. That’s such a narrow minded way to prevent the power of radio’s reach! I mean think about it. Surely if a station can do promos of international listeners if they don’t geo fence the stream, then why not do the same with add buys too? I think radio is continuing to die by a thousand cuts. iHeartMedia does their iHeart Music Festival right. The only thing they don’t do right in my opinion is list which terrestrial stations the concert will be on. But other than that? Yeah. they make sure its clear it can be heard everywhere and interacted with in multiple ways. But even they don’t do well with their streams other than that. I truly don’t get this and would love an answer as someone that is way more in tune then the average listener. But yeah make the stopset short. Or hell got a long intro in a song? If you’re not using it for a jock talkover intro, you could use it to advertise something too. and don’t program stop sets at the same time radio! cause that just makes the listener go elsewhere…