Younger demos that listen to Country music are all Salt of the Earth types right? They get up at 4am to work the farm. They are perfect little consumers. People who listen to Country are never unemployed or in jail. Alternative or AAA listeners are just lazy intellectuals who mock advertisers from their parents basement. Over 55 listeners no longer spend money on anything. They are waiting to die.
First, there are two types of clients.
The classic local direct is not the stereotypical "Ma & Pa" ship. It can be a car dealer with sales of millions a month, or a local personal injury attorney who spends tens of thousands on media every month. In these cases, the merchant or service provider asks new clients where they heard about them and they tabulate this against the expenditures. Further, those accounts may favor media that gives the best personal service and can also be influenced by stations they listen to themselves..
Agencies use a lot of either syndicated or proprietary research. One of the first things they know and apply is that the older a consumer, the more it takes... as in "more money"... to get a sale. At some point, any potential profit is erased. They also know that different kinds of TV shows, different sections in print and different formats on radio get different results.
Some formats generally are a harder sell, even if they are getting good 18-54 listening. Alternative rock is one of the hard sells, except in a couple of markets where there is a station that has been in format and getting results for decades. Portland, Seattle, Denver and a couple of others meet this criteria, On the other had, we have the famous case of country in New York, where media buyer prejudices and stereotypes have, for decades, made any country effort under perform (yet just outside the metro, in Jersey, "upstate" or even Connecticut, local small market stations in the format do well because local businesses find that those stations produce results.
Radio has a broken business model. If you put a product on the air that people care about, you should be able to monetize it with appropriate clients.
That is not true at all. Looking at country in New York or alternative in Philly, we find significant buyer prejudice against the format. In NYC, nearly everything is agency... big shops or local ones... and there is just not a "feel" that country gets the consumers that clients need and want. In Philly, buyers, both local direct and local agency, believe alternative listeners are not a productive target and they don't buy the local alternative station at all in proportion to its audience... to the extent that it has a 0.4 power ratio while the major local AC station has well over a 1.0 ratio.
I have seen stations where the sales department was the problem not the programming. It's always easier to just keep flipping formats than deal with the real issue...
I switched formats years ago from Beautiful Music to what would be the equivalent of country. A few days before, I presented the format to the sellers. Two of them, in various ways, said that the new format was "low class" and that they did not think it was a good idea because they knew they could not sell it. Of course, they were right... they could not sell it because I let them go on the spot.
Radio has issues today in attracting sellers because the industry is perceived by outsiders as "outdated" and ineffective. The biggest issue is finding people who can see that radio's huge reach and reasonable cost are very positive. But today's well run stations don't have bad sales staffs and the sellers they have are trained and equipped to make radio work for clients.
Your problem is that you think all of us in radio management or in advisory positions are antiquated, incompetent or just plain stupid. Sure, some groups and some stations make mistakes... so did Bud Lite... but the majority of stations are well run and doing a pretty good job of adapting to slow growth and the new competition from things like local retail budgets being sucked up by internet search based and ad based options. We had to deal with newspapers in the 30's and TV in the 50's and shoppers in the 60's and radio is discovering now how to deal with new media.
