CHANGING FORMATS

[MARIPILY85]

As a radio station manager, how do you notify your advertisers of an upcoming format change? And what if the new format is a complete 180 degree change from the current one?

Does a simple letter informing them of the change and offering to keep them on at the new format work?

What about the accounts that are paid ahead of time? Do they usually ask for a refund for unaired spots?

 

[4dude]

Some dont notify anyone until the change happens.. (Avoids confrontations,etc)

I dont know why stations do this,if they have something that works,why change it??

 

[redneckriviera]

Maripliy85, a lot depends on the exact circumstance of the station and the market.

If you're in a very competitive market, and you're changing the format to gain a strategic advantage over a competitor--and have the opportunity to make a big splash--then you may choose to spring it on everyone with no notice... and have your sales staff prepared to immediately contact their biggest advertisers after you pull the trigger.

If you're in a less competitive market, you may be able to preview the change for clients & explain the reasons why it will be advantageous for them, without the fear of having a competitor beat you to the punch.

Ordinarily, format changes happen with stations that are not experiencing financial success--so the risk isn't that great. If, however, the change is happening with a station that is doing well--but recognizes the need to change for long term reasons, you may be able to advise key accounts that you'll be making "adjustments in order to enhance the effectiveness of their investment," so that they're not surprised by those "adjustments"--without having to tip your hand. Dude, does that answer your question? There is a difference between "something that works," and something that works even better. Occasionally broadcasters will recognize that the opportunity to do "something that works even better" is staring them in the face, and they decide to go for it.

 

[SirRoxalot]

If you notify advertisers of an upcoming format change, be assured that your competition will know about it very quickly.

If you're changing formats because you haven't been very successful, you can treat the change as an opportunity to "get in on the ground floor" of your "exciting new station". Any format change needs considerable outside advertising to be effective, so you might want to see if there's an opportunity to partner with them on some of that outside advertising.

 

[Leebo65]

If you're in a very competitive market, and you're changing the format to gain a strategic advantage over a competitor--and have the opportunity to make a big splash--then you may choose to spring it on everyone with no notice... and have your sales staff prepared to immediately contact their biggest advertisers after you pull the trigger.

I hate that. As a listener I find that rude, inconsiderate, etc. I literally want to punch a station owner/manager in the face when they do that. They are in essence soiling a public resource. I wish the FCC would fine heavily those that don't notify in a timely fashion such changes.

 

[SirRoxalot]

I hate that. As a listener I find that rude, inconsiderate, etc. I literally want to punch a station owner/manager in the face when they do that. They are in essence soiling a public resource. I wish the FCC would fine heavily those that don't notify in a timely fashion such changes.

Whew! Somebody needs to change to decaf. It's only radio. Nobody's legally committed to a particular format.

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

If you're in a very competitive market, and you're changing the format to gain a strategic advantage over a competitor--and have the opportunity to make a big splash--then you may choose to spring it on everyone with no notice... and have your sales staff prepared to immediately contact their biggest advertisers after you pull the trigger.

I hate that. As a listener I find that rude, inconsiderate, etc. I literally want to punch a station owner/manager in the face when they do that. They are in essence soiling a public resource. I wish the FCC would fine heavily those that don't notify in a timely fashion such changes.

I hate that. As a listener I find that rude, inconsiderate, etc. I literally want to punch a station owner/manager in the face when they do that. They are in essence soiling a public resource. I wish the FCC would fine heavily those that don't notify in a timely fashion such changes.

Whew! Somebody needs to change to decaf. It's only radio. Nobody's legally committed to a particular format.

Rox, we can be cynical about it because we've seen and read about it in the industry a million times. When a 34-year heritage station like KLOL Houston, for instance, flipped to Mega 101, that format change represented a huge, one-time occurrance in those listeners' lives. 34 years is a long time---long enough to fairly say that a good majority of its listeners in the 25-54 grew up hearing it more years in their lives than not. People told me over and over again about how shocked and hurt they were when they turned the station on and it was suddenly Hispanic. Every single one of those listeners in the market had a line in their story that went like this: "I thought there was something wrong with my radio, at first, I thought it was broken."

They didn't have long to wonder, however, because in our particular city, the market managers decided to take to the Internet with a vengance. Their brand of viral marketing and message-board interaction with the listeners was to gloat in their faces, disparage everything about the old KLOL, and call the listeners "losers" for being disgruntled at being uninformed about the switch and for grieving the loss of the format and jocks. Many local advertisers followed the KLOL crew to Cumulus' KIOL when it responded to the switch by going rock and rebranding with the old KLOL jocks, and most of the listeners tried to follow, only to run into a rimshot signal, a frequency swap, and the eventual Cumulus return to the tightening of the format to classic rock and the inevitable Cumulus format flip to talk---re-firing those jocks yet again.

Even if the switch has to be ripping-off-a-bandaid-fast, there's a way to handle it that can be much less hurtful to the listeners, especially in a heritage situation. Giving the jocks and show-hosts a chance to prerecord a goodbye and give out their website info, for instance, and running each recording a couple of times during their former dayparts. Who would it kill, in a format switch where it was just time for a change, as you say? Unheard of, I know.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

A couple of days of Christmas music in July wouldn't have been very ameliorating, aunti?

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

Although everybody recognizes stunting when it starts, I don't think it would have helped much in that case. The KLOL switch happened in November, which solidified the company as The Grinch in the minds of those lifelong listeners, even before they found themselves being so disgracefully abused by a few online trolls in the building whose stations benefitted from axing the active rocker. Left a lot of local advertisers feeling some holiday anxiety, too. It was an ugly scene, all around.

If you ever want a step-by-step tutorial on how to permanantly disenfranchise lifelong listeners and make them hate your company's name so much that they march out en masse to Best Buy to stock up on mp3 players, PC speakers, and satellite receivers, the KLOL flip would be a good place to start studying. Like I said, 34 years is a long time. Those listeners felt cheated, and then abused. And then angry, and then resolute, and now, to the loss of the entire industry, apathetic. They were told rather harshly to move on, and they did...completely off the dial.

 

[davideduardo]

If you ever want a step-by-step tutorial on how to permanantly disenfranchise lifelong listeners and make them hate your company's name so much that they march out en masse to Best Buy to stock up on mp3 players, PC speakers, and satellite receivers, the KLOL flip would be a good place to start studying. Like I said, 34 years is a long time. Those listeners felt cheated, and then abused. And then angry, and then resolute, and now, to the loss of the entire industry, apathetic. They were told rather harshly to move on, and they did...completely off the dial.

The problem is that there were very few KLOL listeners left for the old rock format.

 

[Leebo65]

One thing I am learning from these message boards. Radio is an ugly business with not so nice people calling the shots. Neil Rogers is "Absolutely Correct Sir"...

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

No, Dave. The problem is that the arrogance of Fo-fo-fo-hye! and The Clear Answer, along with their abject abuse of those "few" listeners (the ones who hadn't been driven completely off by terrible programming decisions) caused a rift in the market and created a hatred for CC that was unparallelled. When you've got listeners who never even knew your company name, suddenly organizing websites against you, that's a big problem. Would you care for me to pull up some of those posts which are still archived on this board which show the horrific abuse to which the rock audience was subjected in the days following the flip? Believe me, there are listeners who will never return to radio as a result of the indignities spewed in their direction when they took to the 'Net to protest the demise of their city's heritage rock station.

I'm not interested in arguing with you, Dave, although I know you'll comb every post for some small crumb or morsel upon which to grandstand. The topic is not "Dave Eduardo's theories on why Houston needed a big Hispanic FM" or "Why Dave Eduardo thinks KLOL failed." The topic is how stations, on the verge of a flip, can show respect to their advertisers and their listeners in the market where they're changing formats. Something that was badly bungled in Houston, thanks to your buddies Fo-fo (Jantzen) and The Clear Answer (Charles). If you can stay on topic, just this once, I'm sure your input would be welcomed.

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

P.S. I apologize for my earlier tone, if not for the content of my post. I'm sure a cup of coffee would have helped me temper my response a little more diplomatically. I've gotta stop logging in while I wait for the pot to brew. Mea culpa.

 

[davideduardo]

No, Dave. The problem is that the arrogance of Fo-fo-fo-hye! and The Clear Answer, along with their abject abuse of those "few" listeners (the ones who hadn't been driven completely off by terrible programming decisions) caused a rift in the market and created a hatred for CC that was unparallelled.

There are two issues here. One is how formats are changed, and the other is in the quantification of the protests or objections to the change by old listeners.

Since the 50's when radio started having namable music formats (MOR, Top 40, etc.) format changes have been done secretly in one of two ways... the old format was stopped, and stunting begun, or the old format was stopped and the new format began. In either case, the folks associated with the old format generally were not given a chance to "say goodbye" and were simply shown to the door and given a check.

The objective was nearly always to catch the competion by surprise and, thus, not to give them a chance to react or block with counter programming. This method of changing makes perfect sense; allowing the staff to say goodbye or giving prior knowledge of the change creates the opportunity for swansongs on the air (like Carolla's ugly rant against Mexicans on KLSX last week) and even severe legal liability issues.

An unannounced format change is not something Clear Channel came up with. It's an industry "tradition."

So somebody registered a domain, wrote some HTML, and did a nasty little website. Or two. That means one or two people were annoyed, and maybe they got a few hundred other people to join in for a while. Every format change brings a few dissidents who were in the audience of the changed station... and who don't understand that a declining or ageing audience can't economically sustain a station or a format.

I've done enough "surprise" format changes to know that you get some very ugly calls and correspondence, full of vitirol and invective. The best solution is to staff the phones and try to honestly answer each call and explain the reasons for the change... although many callers will not be reasoned with and will be offensive and rude. The other way is to ignore the calls, which, considering the language listeners who feel entitled to "their" format use, is probably getting to be a better option today. There's no perfect way to explain the change, and those listeners left behind will not be happy.

But the real truth is that very few listeners will protest, and most will move on to one of the 5 or 6 other stations they also listened to and forget about the whole thing.

I'm sure that when ABC finally took Don McNiel's "Breakfast Club" of WABC so the station could be 100% Top 40 there were protests, too. We all remember the flip, but we don't remember the protests because they were not significant.

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

Thank you, David. Your word count just won me a lunch bet.

 

[radioboy]

To the original poster,

How the advertisers will react can, and will, vary.

If you are switching from, say, a Christian format, to secular talk, the majority of them will cancel.
A former employer of mine learned this first-hand and ended up in a worse situation after the change -
and one from which that station never recovered. None of his former advertisers ever came back.
Trouble was, no new ones signed!

A switch from Top 40 to country, or vice versa, or something along these lines, is less likely to
cause such a reaction, if the potential change will reach a bigger auduience.

Knowing your market and having good relationshiops with your advertisers is important.

 

[amfmxm]

What's most interesting to me about this particular thread is the "average listener" perspective, presumably represented by Leebo65--who perceive format changes as a personal affront... downright infuriating. For those of us who have been working in the biz for way too long it's a great reminder of radio's intimacy--that is, that listeners can-and-do form "relationships" with our radio stations, even the ones that don't perform very well in the marketplace.

And maybe that is what we need to explain.

As radio execs (owners, managers, programmers) we are rarely happy about having to make a format change. Most often it is an acknowledgement that we've failed, and need to try something different. But it is a decision that we can't avoid because making radio stations successful is the way we feed our kids and pay our mortgages. And because of that, we have to look at radio stations much more objectively than the "average listener." We can't afford to let our personal preferences persuade us to allow our radio stations to be unsuccessful.

Hey, FWIW--as a second generation Irish-American--I don't find DE's joke distasteful, at all. Then again, I've always thought that the world's languages are fascinating and have never felt uncomfortable around people speaking Spanish or Korean or Arabic or Hindi or whatever. And, yeah, I do think that the "English-Only" crowd is hilarious, essentially trying to hide their bias & fear behind language restrictions.

Which takes us back to format changes. In the Baltimore-Washington area there are still thousands (tens or hundreds of thousands?) of ex-WHFS listeners holding onto a grudge against 99.1 for axing the station's long held rock format in favor of Hispanic contemporary. But "El Zol" is a huge hit. Sometimes ya gotta do what you gotta do...

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

P.S. David, if you're done hijacking this thread, perhaps you could share with us which parts of Adam Corolla's rant you found to be "racist."

And, to bring it back around to the topic of format flipping and the improper treatment of listeners and advertisers, can you think of anything you might have typed which led to many former KLOL listeners feeling angry and betrayed enough to swear off radio altogether and seek out alternative medias? Because I can think of quite a few.

 

[aunti-terrestrial]

It's not.

 

[kd8hho]

What's most interesting to me about this particular thread is the "average listener" perspective,

oh man, i remember living in chicago in the late 1990's and boy was i P.O'ed when WRCX Rock 103.5 flipped formats i didn't like the other so called "rockers" in chicago so after the rock died, i turned off the FM/AM until i moved back to the Indianapolis area.

But yea, a format flip shure can p off some listeners