radioatlantis said:
Look, by contrast to TV, where advertisers target 55+ in very clever ways. They KNOW that people who are about to retire have boo-coo disposable income. They sell investments with Dennis Hopper talking Flower Power...who does that relate to? Sally Field is taking osteoporosis pills and Cadillac's are sold with Zeppelin. Also 4 out of ten TV spots use hits from the 60s, 70s and 80 to sell products.
Many of the products advertised on TV to seniors require visuals or need to scroll disclaimers (that is why Vagra is on TV but not radio) or use apetite appeal to sell.
The fact is that retired folks have very little money if you look at the median savings, which are gnerally mostly made up of appreciation of a residence. Thre are nearly 1 million Americans now retired in Mexico, as they can actually live there on Social Security alone. One high net worth person can drag dozens if not hundreds or thousands of subsistence level retirees into apparent "average" affluence.
No - RADIO fails to deliver a compelling product and they have failed to repackage the format in a way that creates discovery for younger audiences and more than 300 tested songs for those who remember and want to hear them all.
Testing aside (I run a classic hits format in 12 major markets and we play 1200 songs), the fact that there is no usage of radio by agency accounts for 55+ and has been none for decades would discourage any onwer from trying to program to a group that no significant agency account is interested in. The same goes for teens. There are nearly no teen buys, and appealing to teens cuts you out of lucrative adult buys like beers and spirits (if a station has too many undre-21s, the spirits advertisers will not buy you) so radio does not program to teens, either.
How do you TEST a song that is already bona fide having sold millions of songs and charted top ten.
You play the song snippet and ask if your participants want to hear the song today, on the radio, and how much. If a song does not get a positive score of a certain proportion, it is not, today, a hit and is not playable if you want to keep your audience. Why would you play a song that was a hit 40 years ago that nearly nobody wants to hear today? That is the case with most oldies (60's) and classic hits (70's gold). So you play however many songs people actually want to hear.
Having "sold" (you really believe the charts, don't you. I'd like you to meet Joe Isgor, but Ihing he is in the slammer still. he can tell you how "hits" are made and how few "hits" were really hits and how many were paid sales reports, payola, free product induced, etc.) Most 60's and 70's charts are to be taken with more than a couple of grans of salt.
All I care about is whether my audience wants to hear the song now and each time I play it in the future. I could give a s___t whether it was a hit in 1967 or 1972 or 1981.
Yet, the experts completely eliminate artists because of a "sound" they want to convey. It's their way of changing history....abbreviating the way it was. Classic Hits don't need to be tested and rotated in such tight rotation that you want a lobotomy.
Nobody wants to create a sound. They want to attract listeners. Playing stiffs does not do that.
And guess what... Classic Hits WCBS in NY is in the top 3 staitons in the market, and cumes 4 million people weekly. They seem to like the songs that were tested and programmed for appeal today.
Too much garbage science by a lot of DISCONNECTED people. Just play the damn things and hire people who know the music and can deliver something about it.
I wish I could tell you how many stations I have knocked off that programmed by "golden ears" and gut feel... and how many more I have seen decimated by other PDs who look to the listeners for guidance, not to their own egos.
Research is going to all the places where your demo congregates and listening as much as you talk. FIELD RESEARCH ... not a room with twelve people who KNOW they are in an atmosphere to vent. The rate for error in accuracy is very high. Just like testing what you WANT play is more the norm than not.
Music is not tested in a focus group. In fact, many radio companies do not do focus groiups... they do one on one interviews of up to an hour, with dozens of participants representing all the demographic subsets of listeners. The proof of music tests, one on ones and call out is that repeating the same project against the same sample size yields statistically identical results, time after time. Replication studies are the benchmark for research and sample size.
What is truly dangerous is taking to the streets and getting a totally unbalanced and unproportional sample, and making decisions that do not reflect the opinions of each subset of your listeners in proper perspective.
How many PDs to do you see doing their own street-level research?
Unfortunately, quite a few. However, it is hard to keep track of them, as they move from staiton to station since that kind of "feel" usually results in a quick ratings tanking.
And yes, Wheeler's 60s format is on XM but EXCEPTIONAL RADIO has nothing to do with the way someone runs a company. It is still exceptional radio and those who listen (however many) listen to it because it is. Point - a handful of companies own everything and nobody even makes an attempt to to do anything that smacks of a make-over.
Since 60's oldies attracts over-55, you are not going to get any terrestrial stations trying this today... most oldies outlets are moving to late 60's and 70's and early 80's because of the demos and sales.
Hey...lets just hope that the same people who run the show on AM and FM don't end up controlling the net because THAT is the future of radio.
If whatever the project is it is advertiser driven, you will see the exact same mentality.
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