Buffalo Live and Local

[Rusty Bridges]

This board has seen a number of ... eh, spirited discussions ... regarding live and local programming, especially as it relates to Buffalo. A recent blog post by highly respected consultant, Fred Jacobs, provides definition and structure to the discussion. For many years, Jacobs successfully consulted 97 Rock. The blog post is a compelling and encouraging read, especially as it relates to how listeners seek, define and use "local news" and how "local" elements contribute to a station's success and image, both on the air as well as other station related platforms.

How Radio Can Redefine "Local"

 

[SirRoxalot]

Radio has too often given up its two biggest strengths, timeliness and localization. Before syndication and voice-tracking, radio had an advantage over every other media. It could get information out faster than any other media, and they could go live from almost anywhere with very little delay. This was true not only for news, but for events of all sorts. Remote vehicles evolved from radio links in the trunk of a car to major remote setups that were an event unto themselves. Radio stations had visible presence in the community with studios that welcomed the public to "witness the magic." Now, all too often, you have a computer in a closet spewing generic pap and "safe" playlists that don't necessarily reflect local or regional tastes. Imaging is old and tired and not very relatable. Commercial production is at an all-time low in quality and content. Radio is part of the entertainment business. Unfortunately, the focus is on business, not entertainment, and listeners have noticed.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

Radio has too often given up its two biggest strengths, timeliness and localization. Before syndication and voice-tracking, radio had an advantage over every other media. It could get information out faster than any other media, and they could go live from almost anywhere with very little delay. This was true not only for news, but for events of all sorts. Remote vehicles evolved from radio links in the trunk of a car to major remote setups that were an event unto themselves. Radio stations had visible presence in the community with studios that welcomed the public to "witness the magic." Now, all too often, you have a computer in a closet spewing generic pap and "safe" playlists that don't necessarily reflect local or regional tastes. Imaging is old and tired and not very relatable. Commercial production is at an all-time low in quality and content. Radio is part of the entertainment business. Unfortunately, the focus is on business, not entertainment, and listeners have noticed.

This has always been a business, but with more stations and more entertainment options, stations have to work harder for money

Try convincing a business owner who thinks posting on Fb is good enough advertising....... try selling a smal ltown advertiser on digital wensite ads or ads on your station fb page? Nope they dont wanna pay for it.

Vocietracking can be a good tool, if used right and not abused

I do afternoons on a station 2500 miles away and still manage.. shockingly somehow... to talk about locally relevant things and regularly update tracks when we have a wildfire going on, missing kid, severe weather, real bad winter weather stalling out traffic.

 

[TheBigA]

Radio has too often given up its two biggest strengths, timeliness and localization.

Unfortunately, there are now other ways for people to get that information in a more timely and local way. The weather and traffic on one side of Buffalo is unimportant to people on the other side. I can narrow my search to know what's happening where I am in ways that any mass media can't. The news often gets out quicker because frankly the information isn't vetted the way it is in broadcast. But if that doesn't matter (and obviously it doesn't) then there are alternatives that simply didn't exist 20 years ago. What may have been strengths then are no longer unique.

Unfortunately, the focus is on business, not entertainment, and listeners have noticed.

It all costs money, and that means you need business. You can't buy the remote vehicles, you can't hire the staff, and you can't equip that staff without money. As long as radio exists in a world with only one revenue stream, it will operate at a disadvantage. The competition is either done by amateurs who work for free, or by trillion dollar tech companies who have no problem funding money-losing operations.

Radio simply can't compete against unregulated competitors who have more money and more freedom to operate. Having said that, thousands of radio stations are doing the best they can with the staffing & budgets they have, and all we hear are complaints from boomers who hate the commercials and say the DJs are not as good as they used to be. That POV isn't helping the battle.

 

[SirRoxalot]

The biggest challenge at this point is trying to reduce commercial clutter without reducing revenue. If you come up with a solution for that, you'll be a huge winner. Reality is that too many commercials are poorly written and poorly produced at regional hubs by overworked staff, or by agencies who simply aren't creative enough, skilled enough, or don't want to spend the money on talent. AI isn't going to improve that.

Most commercials could be reduced from :60 seconds to :20 seconds without losing much in the way of important content or effect. Considering the reduced attention span of listeners these days, :20s might be more effective. Imagine clustering 3-4 :20s instead of 6-8 :60s, and adding a couple of clusters during the hour because the interruption would be much shorter. Would that work? Some of the streamers seem to be moving in that direction for their "free" services. I'm not sure we can pry the metrics out of them, but it would be interesting to know how effective those changes might be, and whether you could charge enough to make up the difference in revenue. It seems to me that you could sell a lot of advertisers on the idea that they could get twice as many shorter spots for the same money and maybe even get more results from their campaigns.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

The biggest challenge at this point is trying to reduce commercial clutter without reducing revenue. If you come up with a solution for that, you'll be a huge winner. Reality is that too many commercials are poorly written and poorly produced at regional hubs by overworked staff, or by agencies who simply aren't creative enough, skilled enough, or don't want to spend the money on talent. AI isn't going to improve that.

Most commercials could be reduced from :60 seconds to :20 seconds without losing much in the way of important content or effect. Considering the reduced attention span of listeners these days, :20s might be more effective. Imagine clustering 3-4 :20s instead of 6-8 :60s, and adding a couple of clusters during the hour because the interruption would be much shorter. Would that work? Some of the streamers seem to be moving in that direction for their "free" services. I'm not sure we can pry the metrics out of them, but it would be interesting to know how effective those changes might be, and whether you could charge enough to make up the difference in revenue. It seems to me that you could sell a lot of advertisers on the idea that they could get twice as many shorter spots for the same money and maybe even get more results from their campaigns.

\
Good luck doing any of that
Raise rates?
cut back commercial lengths?

We tried all of that at a leading cluster I was at in NW PA

We had one client that is a locally owned farm n home type store.. they had a 60 second ad every time that was crammed full of stuff, youd start with pet food and at the end be talking about amish furniture.

I tried talking to the sales person about lets do 3 30's and not be crammed full and focus on one thing. Well, the sales person said thats what the client wants.

Theyd been advertising for years

What do you do then?

 

[TheBigA]

Most commercials could be reduced from :60 seconds to :20 seconds without losing much in the way of important content or effect.

Some advertisers are doing that now. But they still want the same number of impressions. So you end up hearing that :10 or :20 repeated several times in a cluster rather than one :30. They also argue that if they get less airtime, they should also get a discounted price, so it doesn't lessen the clutter. But another issue is that the products being advertised, such as drugs or other medical products, have a lot of legal disclaimers. Financial services take a lot of time to explain. They're the ones paying the money so they get to dictate the terms. Costs keep going up, so either they pay more, or we cut costs.

Any idea you can think of has been discussed and even tried. The only real solution is another revenue stream. Right now, that appears to be on the digital side. Or some kind of subscription plan where people pay for radio as they do with Sirius or public radio. Until then, you'll see more companies selling their radio stations and diverting resources to digital. No more big investment companies coming in to bail out radio. That's over.

 

[Voicetrack of Reason]

Reading more bloviating and shameless self promotion by Fred Jacobs will only subtract minutes from my life that I can never get back. But thanks anyway.

 

[four4rock]

FWIW... As a listener to (predominantly) music radio stations, I find the current logic(?) of commercial placement pretty bad. It seems that radio folks believe that stringing songs together for, say, 20 minutes and then plopping 8 +/- minutes of who-knows-what commercials together just before the top of the or (or whenever) is attractive.

Here's what I do... in a vehicle... if I turn the radio on and hear commercials, I expect that they will continue for several minutes. At that point, either the radio goes off or the volume is reduced to nearly inaudible (just enough so that when music returns I can sense it). At home... if I turn the radio on and hear commercials, the radio goes off and I go to another source. No matter what, commercial content is not absorbed. The primary cause of my behavior is that I am not there to fawn over commercials... and, yes, some of that is because for the most part commercial creativity is pretty sucky IMO.

Now, having said that, were I to be subjected to, say, brief commercials on a more one-by-one basis in-between every song or two, I most probably wouldn't extinguish them. Whether, or not, I paid attention would be dependent on the product/service and how engaging they were. But, c'mon, the current manner is counter-productive.

If 'radio' in any way views listeners as it's customers (so-to-speak), they'd be well considered to recall the virtually universal knowledge that it is far easier to retain a customer, that it is to regain one. When a listener chooses to walk out of your store into which they walked for some product/service, they are highly likely to go find what they were looking for somewhere else... and that is what they will remember.

 

[topsound]

I run two short breaks per hour on my Live365 station. Granted it's a small sample size, but it looks like practically nobody tunes out.

 

[TheBigA]

Whether, or not, I paid attention would be dependent on the product/service and how engaging they were. But, c'mon, the current manner is counter-productive.

The advertisers know what they're buying. If they wanted there spots between every song, that's what you'd hear. The current system of commercial placement has been in use for over 30 years. During that time, there have been numerous research studies on the effectiveness of the placement, and this is what advertisers prefer. I have offered advertisers the option of sponsoring entire hours, and they've declined.

If 'radio' in any way views listeners as it's customers (so-to-speak),

As I've said many times, the listeners are not the customers. The listeners are the product. Listeners are what we sell to advertisers. They've heard your arguments many time, and they dismiss them.

The subject of this thread is "Live & Local." Posters give all kinds of reasons why they want radio to remain live & local, but they refuse to pay for it.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

commercial placement is the way it is in many markets because of ratings/time spent listening/quarter hour stuff

 

[TheBigA]

commercial placement is the way it is in many markets because of ratings/time spent listening/quarter hour stuff

Correct, and all of that is what advertisers want. Typically a radio station plays 12-13 songs an hour. To get the inventory in, there would have to be a minimum of 1 minute of commercials between every song. It's simple to program the automation to do that. So this isn't a radio company issue. But the inventory has to be run as scheduled in the sales contract.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

Correct, and all of that is what advertisers want. Typically a radio station plays 12-13 songs an hour. To get the inventory in, there would have to be a minimum of 1 minute of commercials between every song. It's simple to program the automation to do that. So this isn't a radio company issue. But the inventory has to be run as scheduled in the sales contract.

One of the best PD's I ever had, Chuck Demko at WDDH, told me that the reason we ran commercials at 50 and 20 after is you get nearly half hour without spots anfd if people listen for the first 15 minutes, we get credit for the whole hour or something like that.

(This was explained to me 12 years ago so i may be fuzzy on details)

 

[TheBigA]

One of the best PD's I ever had, Chuck Demko at WDDH, told me that the reason we ran commercials at 50 and 20 after is you get nearly half hour without spots anfd if people listen for the first 15 minutes, we get credit for the whole hour or something like that.

People in radio understand the complaints from listeners. If it was up to us, there would be no interruptions to our programming. But that's not how things are. We work under lots of rules imposed on us from lots of places. That's why you don't see a lot of new companies coming along to enter the traditional radio business, and why the new buyers of stations are non-commercial companies.

 

[SirRoxalot]

The advertisers know what they're buying. If they wanted there spots between every song, that's what you'd hear. The current system of commercial placement has been in use for over 30 years. During that time, there have been numerous research studies on the effectiveness of the placement, and this is what advertisers prefer. I have offered advertisers the option of sponsoring entire hours, and they've declined.

As I've said many times, the listeners are not the customers. The listeners are the product. Listeners are what we sell to advertisers. They've heard your arguments many time, and they dismiss them.

The subject of this thread is "Live & Local." Posters give all kinds of reasons why they want radio to remain live & local, but they refuse to pay for it.

You might want to read the numerous studies of how attention span has changed in the last 30 years. TSL tells us that the current practices aren't cutting it. The 6-8 minute stopset was created to job ratings diaries. The idea was to get your 1/4 hours when the other stations were going to commercials, grabbing their audience who would push the button in their car after the first or second commercial. When you went into your spot cluster, you expected some of your listeners to punch to their P2 or P3 station, but come back when they went into their next commercial cluster.

These days, attention span has dropped to under 10 seconds (under 5 in some studies) and there are lots of options readily available other than radio. If you lose them, it may be a long time before streaming or satellite drives them away. Spot clusters simply have to get shorter, and content needs to "tighten, lighten, and brighten." Repetitive :60s are a tune out. Worse, are hearing the same spot back-to-back, or twice in a cluster. The only people who will sit through that are people who can't change the station or are being paid to listen to it.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

You might want to read the numerous studies of how attention span has changed in the last 30 years. TSL tells us that the current practices aren't cutting it. The 6-8 minute stopset was created to job ratings diaries. The idea was to get your 1/4 hours when the other stations were going to commercials, grabbing their audience who would push the button in their car after the first or second commercial. When you went into your spot cluster, you expected some of your listeners to punch to their P2 or P3 station, but come back when they went into their next commercial cluster.

These days, attention span has dropped to under 10 seconds (under 5 in some studies) and there are lots of options readily available other than radio. If you lose them, it may be a long time before streaming or satellite drives them away. Spot clusters simply have to get shorter, and content needs to "tighten, lighten, and brighten." Repetitive :60s are a tune out. Worse, are hearing the same spot back-to-back, or twice in a cluster. The only people who will sit through that are people who can't change the station or are being paid to listen to it.

I work at a station that runs 4 shorter breaks.. first VT break of the hour is at 05 after, straight into id, 60 sec abc news, one or two local spots then commercial breaks at 20, 38 and 50

 

[TheBigA]

You might want to read the numerous studies of how attention span has changed in the last 30 years.

I'm not an advertiser, so it's not my business. They often commission their own studies, so they know what attention span is. I can tell you that in my conversations with advertisers, they don't see it as a problem.

If you want to talk about programming or song selection, I read all of those studies. You want to complain about advertising, I'm not your guy. But I'll say this: Someone has to pay in order for commercial radio to continue. Costs are not going down. Otherwise you will simply see more stations like Star being sold to religious broadcasters. All of this complaining about commercials is not helping keep free radio in business. That is biting the hand that feeds you.

 

[tbolt909]

I'm not an advertiser, so it's not my business. They often commission their own studies, so they know what attention span is. I can tell you that in my conversations with advertisers, they don't see it as a problem.

If you want to talk about programming or song selection, I read all of those studies. You want to complain about advertising, I'm not your guy. But I'll say this: Someone has to pay in order for commercial radio to continue. Costs are not going down. Otherwise you will simply see more stations like Star being sold to religious broadcasters. All of this complaining about commercials is not helping keep free radio in business. That is biting the hand that feeds you.

Commercial Radio cannot be viable if they try to operate as if it's still 1992. For years they said "Screw you listener. Here's another 9 minute stop set. You just have to take it".
It's hard to have sympathy for these companies.

People have lots of other options now. If Radio put some money into better content (Instead of gutting the programming side), most reasonable people understand that commercials are necessary. Very few listeners are passionate about Radio because the content is simply not very good...

 

[TheBigA]

For years they said "Screw you listener. Here's another 9 minute stop set. You just have to take it".

Nobody in radio has ever said anything like that. Ever.

If Radio put some money into better content (Instead of gutting the programming side), most reasonable people understand that commercials are necessary.

That's not true. People will complain regardless. It's the entitlement syndrome. They feel like they're entitled to free music and free content. They demand live & local, and then complain about commercials.