A Change Coming to KGO

[michael hagerty]

I think that a candidate's opinion on this would depend on whether they were a longshot challenger (say, Larry Elder in the special gubernatorial election last year) or an incumbent who is expected, by their party apparatus, to do fundraising on a near-daily basis.


My ideal is a much lower-cost system of elections. This means an election season that is both much shorter and less dependent on paid media.

For example, there is no reason that we could not have a candidate registration deadline in August, primaries in mid-September, and an election in November. States conducting primaries 4-8 months before the actual election serves only to enrich the political consultant class for services they render over the summer.

While I've never lived in California, I like their idea of the elections office mailing a booklet of candidate information, at taxpayer expense, to all registered voters. Basically if you are a qualified candidate on the ballot, you get a few column-inches to explain your campaign, in the hopes that it would be more substantive than the 30 second ads we get on radio & TV -- and easier for voters than individually looking up each candidate and ballot measure.

We're closer to agreement on this than I expected.

A couple of questions pop up:

Doesn't reducing the campaign windows give an immediate advantage to the more established politicians and reduce lesser-known but serious and well-qualified candidates' opportunities to close the name recognition gap?

Also, especially in larger states, ballot and voter information printing is a real process, sometimes involving challenges to wording. It helps to have the candidates registered a bit further ahead of the primary than the month before. Perhaps a restriction on the starting date of any paid campaigning, but not on unpaid speeches to community groups?

As a Californian, I have to say the voter guide is something I really appreciate. Unfortunately, some candidates don't take full advantage of the opportunity to spell out their positions clearly.

 

[Rusty Muck]

You may be overestimating what infomercials and PPI (pay per inquiry) advertising pays.

I have a bit of experience with that from programming an independent TV station about 15 years ago. The way the game works is they come in at a rate that looks pretty good from the station side. In a few weeks, very close to airtime, they say they really can't continue paying that rate and you really can't justify it and they negotiate a lower rate. You, not wanting 30 minutes of dead air, and wanting to create goodwill, agree.

And from then on, well, it's like dealing with blackmailers. They'll grind and grind until you're pretty much accepting rock bottom. KABC could be in the four figures for an entire weekend of paid programming. It could be better than that, but not by much. Again, the real value is in the clearances. God only knows the difference between being able to show L.A. on the clearance list and not, but it's worth it to Cumulus.

I really do appreciate finding out more about this. I remember The Plain Dealer doing a few write-ups about WERE after that station took up an all-brokered format, which did an interesting job explaining the dynamics between the station and the purchasers of airtime. I’ll have to look it up.

I noticed in one story when WERE most recently re-adopted the brokered format in 2008, a station executive literally mentioned the going rate per hour, which I found odd. (WERE is now on a graveyard class C at 1490 on Cleveland’s East Side).

 

[michael hagerty]

I really do appreciate finding out more about this. I remember The Plain Dealer doing a few write-ups about WERE after that station took up an all-brokered format, which did an interesting job explaining the dynamics between the station and the purchasers of airtime. I’ll have to look it up.

I noticed in one story when WERE most recently re-adopted the brokered format in 2008, a station executive literally mentioned the going rate per hour, which I found odd. (WERE is now on a graveyard class C at 1490 on Cleveland’s East Side).

Advertising rates are sometimes shockingly low. When I was programming that independent TV station, I had money for ad buys on radio. This was in Phoenix, AZ, which was and is a top 15 market.

I called the popular CHR in the market and inquired about rates. The sales exec:

"$500 in morning drive, $300 in middays, $400 in afternoon drive and $25 7 to midnight."

"I'm sorry. You broke up. What-25?"

"No, Mike. Just $25. Twenty-five dollars."

"On a CHR in a top 15 market in evenings?"

Their ratings in that timeslot would have seemed to support $225, given the performance of the other dayparts, but they couldn't get agencies to agree---so they went to the basement, and even though I was a rare local direct buyer, they gave me the spots for what the agencies were willing to pay.

 

[landtuna]

My ideal is a much lower-cost system of elections. This means an election season that is both much shorter and less dependent on paid media.

YES!

While I've never lived in California, I like their idea of the elections office mailing a booklet of candidate information, at taxpayer expense, to all registered voters. Basically if you are a qualified candidate on the ballot, you get a few column-inches to explain your campaign, in the hopes that it would be more substantive than the 30 second ads we get on radio & TV -- and easier for voters than individually looking up each candidate and ballot measure.

We have such a booklet in AZ. Problem is....the candidate's bio is basically a candidate-written fluff piece. The most recent version of this booklet I received had nothing of real value upon which to make a voting decision.

It was handy for describing the various ballot measures though.

 

[TheBigA]

"$500 in morning drive, $300 in middays, $400 in afternoon drive and $25 7 to midnight."

People should notice there was no price given for midnight to 6AM. That's because there are no buyers at that time.

I read a lot of posters here saying radio should invest more between 7PM and 6AM. They don't because there's no return.

 

[michael hagerty]

I read a lot of posters here saying radio should invest more between 7PM and 6AM. They don't because there's no return.

Ignore my earlier post. I only did the math for one hour of the daypart. If you sell out weekday evenings at 12 minutes an hour at $25 a spot, it’s $390,000 a year. Still not massive money.

 

[davideduardo]

But in terms of actual listeners, enough of those stations must reach thousands of ears in order to be worth what the advertisers are paying to get their ads on them, right? But no one will ever know for sure what that 0.1 really represents in that regard. The advertisers assume that their message is being heard by more than the one person in the Nielsen panel who tuned in for a quarter hour, right?

A any share represents a station's percentage of those listening to the radio. So if you are a subscriber, you look at "average persons" to see how many that number represents.

Share/rating/AQH Persons are all the same "number" expressed in different ways.

In the case of "courtesy" 0.1 shares, we have to understand that a station with a 0.1 is not going to get buys based on ratings.

First, most agencies buy based on "rating" and not "share" as rating shows the percentage of the market a station reaches with each ad. To get a 0.1 rating today, a station has to have a share of about 1.2 to 1.3 in most markets. Agencies are not going to touch stations with a 0.0 rating, which means that below that 1.2 to 1.3 share they won't even be considered.

And generally agencies use averages of 3 to 6 or more PPM books to make a buy, so those little bounces and drops are insignificant.

Because new media is sold on "impressions" some agencies are now looking at neither share nor rating, but AQH Persons instead. And in all cases, they pay rates based on rating or persons, not on who the morning show is hosted by or whether they added the new song by a particular artist.

 

[davideduardo]

I read a lot of posters here saying radio should invest more between 7PM and 6AM. They don't because there's no return.

In fact, the bulk of buys are 6 AM to 7 PM, M-F. Weekends follow, with 6 AM to 7 PM Saturday ahead of 10 AM to 7 PM Sunday. Then comes 7 PM-Midnight M-F. And don't even think about 7 PM-Mid on weekends as there is almost never a ratings based buy for that.

 

[davideduardo]

Plus the bills are minimal, since they share studio space with co-owned Westwood One in Culver City.

They do have considerable rent for the transmitter site it leases from KWKW.

 

[davideduardo]

USC signed a five-year deal with KABC in May of 2019. They had been on KSPN from 2006 until 2018. No idea what was behind the move.

The move of the KSPN transmitter site was long-planned. That meant a huge deterioration of the signal. If USC did due diligence or if the contract had certain power and schedule specifications, they may have realized that the signal would be reduced by more than half in the daytime and by about 70% at night.

 

[Larry]

lot can happen between now and 2037. With how Audacy blew up the brands of WOGL and KOOL so those stations could more appropriately be marketed to fit classic hits’ target demos, I wouldn’t consider “CBS-FM” an untouchable brand by any means.

I’m sure they always have the option of approaching CBS/Paramount (or whoever the corporate entity is in 2037) and offering to pay for the rights to continue using the call letters beyond 2037. I would think by 2037 WINS-AM and WCBS-AM will probably be consolidated if they still exist on the AM or FM band.

 

[Larry]

fact, the bulk of buys are 6 AM to 7 PM, M-F. Weekends follow, with 6 AM to 7 PM Saturday ahead of 10 AM to 7 PM Sunday. Then comes 7 PM-Midnight M-F. And don't even think about 7 PM-Mid on weekends as there is almost never a ratings based buy for that.

Are most or all spots I hear overnight on non-syndicated programming a “bonus” from a larger buy (I.e. you buy 20 daytime spots in a week, we will throw in 5 free overnight spots)?

 

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

And as for KFI today? What's the difference that keeps them successful in the same format. Actually, wasn't the Bay Area considered to be more favorable to an intelligent news-talk format?

In the case of the Bay Area it's NPR Affiliate KQED-FM that took the reigns as the most listened to News/Talk station in the area with a 100 kw signal intelligent news/talk never went away it just on a different frequency.

I understand Ihearts KFBK Sacramento is more akin to the former news/talk station KGO-AM. In KFBK's case they got an FM frequency at 93.1 FM along with it's AM signal at 1530AM in the past decade. Yes it's history is a news outlet at drive time and was the flagship station of the late Rush Limbaugh was a factor here. But then again in KFBK's case they have been reforming since Rush Limbaughs death and has to respond to the number 2 News/talk station in the market KXJZ-FM the NPR affiliate in the Valley. I cannot answer directly for KFI-AM Los Angeles and it's supposed to be the flagship iHeartRadio talk station on the west coast.

 

[davideduardo]

Are most or all spots I hear overnight on non-syndicated programming a “bonus” from a larger buy (I.e. you buy 20 daytime spots in a week, we will throw in 5 free overnight spots)?

Yes!

 

[davideduardo]

A any share represents a station's percentage of those listening to the radio. So if you are a subscriber, you look at "average persons" to see how many that number represents.

Here is some further depth from a NuVoodoo report from a few weeks ago:

Expanded Listening Possibilities with New Meters by Carolyn Gilbert & Leigh Jacobs

Nielsen released an update on the rollout of the new PPM Wearables last week. As of the end of last month nearly 20% of the total panel across all markets have the new wearable meters. They remain confident they'll have converted 50-75% of the panel by year's end 2022, with the balance...

www.allaccess.com

 

[gr8oldies]

YES!

We have such a booklet in AZ. Problem is....the candidate's bio is basically a candidate-written fluff piece. The most recent version of this booklet I received had nothing of real value upon which to make a voting decision.

It was handy for describing the various ballot measures though.

Well, unfortunately, this court decision known as Citizens United remains in effect and likely isn't going to be overturned nor replaced with a Constitutional amendment, so the expensive elections, PACs, endless TV commercials and bashing will continue. Some of my candidates won't participate in debates, appear on TV or even fill out a form for a candidate's guide because "I have the right letter beside my name, therefore I'm a shoo-in".

 

[JaredCharles]

I wonder why Cumulus continued to spend the money to keep it live & local. I could ask the same question about KABC.

This station has been losing money for a very long time. I'm sure the creditors who own Cumulus finally said "enough."

Actually, nobody is spending much on keeping KABC live and local, except for the salary of John Phillips, their only local weekday host. I am really sad about KGO. It's on the short list of my all-time favorite radio stations. (Along with fellow ghosts such as 94.7 KMET, 710 KMPC, etc....)

 

[Miss Tuned]

Who's paying all her subscription bills? I think I know. Not her. What we find is there are a lot of people her age who aren't in college, who are responsible for their own expenses, and those are the people who use more traditional media.

I work for a university - there are really heavy discounts on the music/video streaming services (and Amazon Prime) for students, which I'm also sometimes able to take advantage of because my work email address has the educational suffix, and they just check "is this email address .edu, .ac.uk etc?". You could validly argue that the people who need the discounts are those who haven't gone to college and are paying their own way, but the companies see college students as people who are going to keep paying full price once they've graduated and gotten a Good Job, etc.

 

[Miss Tuned]

You actually outperformed most people in terms of staying with contemporary music. As a generality, women hang in longer than men, who tend to calcify in their tastes pretty early. But there's a reason CHR is considered an 18-34 format and why "35-plus" is very much an adult demo.

Stereogum has a regular feature called The Number Ones, in which a very talented 40-something writer named Tom Briehan does an essay/review/rating of every single to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 since the chart debuted in 1958. I think he does three a week, and it's still going on now.

In reading that, I found that I knew the music until I was about 43. I've always been really eclectic in my tastes, so I wasn't wanting for alternatives (and this was 23 years ago, when more of those alternatives could be found on the radio), but I had forgotten and was kind of surprised to see that I was still saving a pushbutton for CHR into my forties.

Quite interestingly, one of the things that has finally driven me away from Top 40 radio, at least in my location, is that the songs are coming back round again. On hot rotation locally are remixes of of Bills Bills Bills by Destiny's Child and I Love Your Smile by Shanice and a reworked version of Blue by Eiffel 65, songs that were okay when they were out originally but I just don't want to hear them so regularly because they aren't new to me, I remember them from the first time round. A big chunk of the playlist on CHR and Rhythmic Contemporary stations over the past year or two has been made up of EDM remixes of old songs from the 90s and 2000s - I was around for their first incarnations. It feels like they're sweating the assets.

For me personally, it hasn't been a slow drift away from CHR, it's been a fairly sudden shift in my listening habits over the past month or two as I reach my 37th birthday. I get in the car, or log in to work from home and put the radio on, and I hit my CHR preset button out of habit and almost immediately go "why am I listening to this shit?" and switch off or away. I just don't want to hear old songs that some "superstar DJ/producer" has put a donk on, or someone rapping away about how much money they've got or how many girls they've bedded, or what fashion brands they're wearing - I swear some of the recent CHR hits have just been someone rapping a list of luxury brands, Victoria's Secret, Gucci, Ferrari.

I guess I just turned into an old lady all of a sudden, in tandem with other areas of my life where I've settled down and don't really have the desire to make any changes, and large parts of the modern world look increasingly stupid. I never did get TikTok. It comes to us all.

 

[ContinuousWave]

My source at Cumulus told me that KGO was the largest money loser in the entire company. As he pointed out conservative talk radio in San Francisco? Yeah that's going to make a lot of money lol.