Most format mechanics, rotations, song placements and the like have to do with ratings, not local interests. Those don't change by market.
And playlists are becoming more universal as time goes by due to the instant and totally non-geographic influence of the web.
The issue, nationally, with promotions reflects the fact that the United States is by far the most litigious society in the world. So stations are very much precluded from doing many "spontaneous" promotions without talking to either the groups in-house attorney or outside counsel. This really slows down the process and makes spur of the moment stuff hard to achieve. While some smaller groups may have faster turn around or greater risk tolerance, we are all conscious of the "Hold your wee for a Wi" type of liability.
Understood. But here's a hypothetical: mechanics, etc. are dictated by corporate. In one market, though, the listening patterns are different, because most of the community's major employers operate factories where shifts begin at 6:30am and 3:30pm - meaning AM and PM drive don't coincide with the group's mandated format clocks. Shouldn't the local management have the ability to rework the clocks, in order to synchronize with the schedules of the vast majority of the audience?
I agree with local input on some measures. For example, a Houston station that is not country might give input to the corporate person about how ample the acceptance of the rodeo there is each year. That type of thing should be part of the localizing of a station where it can be done within the company guidances.
One of my interesting cases had to do with the "Bridal Fair" sales promotion done back in the 60's and 70's. At a station I was associated with, the corporate head wanted to do it at the station I was managing... which was their only Spanish language station. I tried to explain that in our community, "June Brides" and June weddings were not a thing because in much of Latin America, June was about the hottest, wettest and uncomfortable month.
It took some convincing, but we came up with an even better promotion that helped traditionally slow January and February by doing specials for "First Weddings of the Year" and it generated sales from a category we had never had luck with before.
That's the type of thing I'm talking about. These days, I don't know that most groups would work with you that way, even if it made nothing but complete sense. At least, not the group format leaders I've known.
It makes me appreciate the time I spent working for a small group, whose corporate boss was two doors down from mine.
Our cluster owned the rights to most of the major events in the city, and being able to make my case directly to the group head made things much easier.
For example, when I got there our heritage news/talker had an audience only slightly more desirable than that of our MOYL station. (I got there shortly before the MOYL station had its scheduled lifestyle event, and was horrified to discover that the big giveaway was a microwave oven, courtesy of the local cremation service. An eye-opening welcome to the cluster, needless to say.)
The N/T station had no exposure to younger demos whatsoever, even though I'd retargeted the programming to skew younger. A key was that I was able to place some dynamite under the "it's the way we always do it" philosophy after convincing the group head that I wasn't crazy.
- I got approval for the N/T station to "sponsor" some of the summer concert series (the shows with 25-54 targeted artists), for the first time.
- All of the stations did big promo events linked in with the state's major summer holiday, and the N/T station was always cemented in for a concert by the Navy band (you can imagine who showed up for that). I got the N/T station a much larger portion of the budget, hired an Elton John impersonator and (after running the details through legal), leaked the possibility that Elton was going to be there, with vague (and legal promos) to match. The buzz was phenomenal, and the crowd was 100 times larger than usual.
- A local car dealership gave the N/T station one car to give away each year, in conjunction with the college basketball broadcasts - which produced very little benefit to the station. I got the dealership and the group head (he was a tougher sell) to let me use it instead for a month-long, state-wide promotion, supported with billboards, that ended up in a day-long citywide scavenger hunt, loosely modeled after Dave Barry's original scavenger hunt in Miami. Thousands participated, many of them young.
Bottom line, by the following year, we had our best 12+ numbers in years, good 25-54 numbers for the first time in decades, and even were making a dent in 18-34. I honestly think that in today's group-dominated world, it never would have been possible.
I had the good fortune to get the "speed course" in Top 40 from Todd Storz himself just days before his death. What I learned in three or four hours was amazing. In management, he told me that it was easier to sell #1 than #10 so spend my best time on programming.
Today, particularly with the publicly traded companies, the focus is all bottom-line and very short-term. Nobody thinks months and even years ahead. Even in ratings, many look at minutes and seconds and quarter hours, not at hours, days and weeks.
I never worked with Drake, but did work with both Tom Rounds and Ron Jacobs. We have to remember that back in the mid-60's ratings were not split by dozens of demographics and agencies bought total numbers, not targets. It was a different world.
Needless to say, I'm phenomenally jealous (and no question about the difference between the mid-60s and the 80s/90s, let alone now). I often wish I had a time machine; being able to pick the brains of people like Storz, Rounds and Jacobs would be one of the things I would love to do with it.
