KJCB said:
Some shows did, some didn't. It's hard to have a format where only five hours out of the day gets any listenership. In Washington, that's Don and Mike. In California/Arizona it's Tom Leykis. If "t&a talk" had dozens of Tom Leykis clones like political talk had a new Hannity wannabe every month, it would succeed, too.
You know I couldn't just let this go:
There are dozens of "T&A Talk" or as I call them "Stern ripoffs" doing /hot talk/. Guess what? Most of them are duds, without debating the merits of Tom Leykis, who has failed 4 times in Phoenix since departing KFYI (whether by his fault or not), the fact of the matter remains that hot-talk is a smaller, niche audience and subsequently even the best 'clones' have only marginal success. Look at Frosty, Heidi and Frank--no ratings in San Diego, no ratings in Phoenix, MARGINAL ratings in L.A. They attempted Syndication and it flopped miserably. Don & Mike's syndication was very similar to the response of FH&F, wherein they do okay in their home market and fail elsewhere for the most part.
Now on to KTAR / KFYI. Everyone was all over KFYI when they had one bad trend, but again they have continued to demonstrate their dominance in the market, there are two primary reasons why they dominate. 1) Content: They have good shows (even though I don't like Rush he's a big winner in the ratings) that overcome their awful IBOC'd sound that appeal to the general demographics of Phoenix. Jacobs, Young, Limbaugh totally dominate in the key demos 18-34M, 25-54M, 12+, etc. Even JD Hayworth--who everyone on this board said would last three months is doing pretty well . They put on CONSISTENT programming and have little variance of their elements/personalities which helps to establish a very loyal (high AQH) audience.
The other factor that keeps KFYI at the top is that they have competition that doesn't know it's ass from a hole-in-the-ground. Examples of their primary competitor's (KTAR) blunders are as follows:
1) KTAR has not had a consistent lineup since day one - While Ankarlo has been anchored into the 8:30-Noon slot since January, this is about the only thing that's held constant. Glenn Beck replaced Pat McBland, McBland replaced Ded Simons before that, Ded went to the afternoon snooze, Heidi was let go and replaced by Jamie West, the afternoon snewz was replaced by Mac Watson--yet another out-of-town guy who has some personality but does a basic toaster-talk/this is our topic for this hour type of radio; Mac is also very limited by the format of the afternoon clock where he is interrupted at every turn by traffic, weather, endless spots, news and clutter. Gaydos replaced Kidd who replaced Dave Burns. Phil Hendrie replaced Gaydos which replaced Clark Howard. The only consistent element is that the programming is completely inconsistent.
2) Tape delayed shows: Good lord, you have a talent like Phil Hendrie and you can't even figure out how to properly air his show. The show airs live from 11pm-2am MST, KTAR runs it from 10pm-1am MST--meaning the first hour of today's airing is actually the last hour of the previous day's show! A whopping 21 hour tape delay! Then the following two hours are live, any bit that Phil teases in the third hour won't be heard until TOMORROW (or later today in 21 hours). Glenn Beck is delayed 5 hours now (6 during DST). I understand that you can't interrupt that precious morning snewz that's getting trounced in the ratings, but maybe if you're going to go for the jugular on KFYI, you might want to actually put yourself in the best possible position to do so.
3) The great spinning wheel of format/philosophical programming ideas: Initially the focus of KTAR-FM was news with talk as the secondary feature. Obviously, KTAR felt that their news product was stronger than KFYI (or any other news/talk station in Phoenix) and I would say that overall such /was/ the case. Then, they decided to change the focus to a 50/50ish relationship where talk was more prominent, but still news had it's equal time (morning and afternoon blocks). This lasted all of a few months before KTAR went more toward KFYI with a very heavy emphasis on TALK. Too bad their emphasis on talk had many branches; first they touted themselves as not talking politics--but of course that's all Ankarlo did, so they shifted to "we're not republicans, we're not democrats" and they proceed to play clips in these promos wherein they have very conservative individuals speaking... huh? Then they completely did a 180 from the "because there's more to life than politics" platform by having a big batch of election imaging promoting their hosts would be "rocking the vote". Wow, talk about your radical inconsistencies.
4) This really ties in with all the rest, but deserves it's own bullet-point. KTAR can't even keep the same positioner for more than one ratings book. "News without the static", "Arizona's news, traffic and weather station", "FM News/talk 92-3, it just sounds better", and many others. While KFYI has hald the same positioners/sub-positioners the entire time.
I'm sure with all of those millions of dollars you threw into researching the move to FM, you must have run across the portion where listeners overwhelmingly say that they like consistency. The Phoenix market (and all markets for that matter) is much better with a good competition between stations, unfortunately the powers that be at KTAR are trying to re-invent the wheel rather than just stick with an idea for more than a few months and see how it goes. Right now the KFYI / KTAR battle is a hammer and nail relationship, wherein KFYI is the hammer and KTAR is the nail... believe it or not folks, there was a time when this wasn't the case, but that was pre-2002/2001.
