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What WMMO should do to improve

I love the Sunny liners. Sorry, but WMMO just sounds tired and boring. Bring back Cary Pall.
 
So true Vadar. Love those Sunny liners. Oh and unlike other stations they are updated consistently. I am also beginning to really like Sunny's Music. As well as Domino in PM Drive.
 
Been listening to Sunny past few days and they are really going at MMO. Cox better do something soon. With Rick Stacey as PD and Morning Personality. Domino, and Paco The station is doing really well. Loving the music as well.

I understand that personality-wise WMMO has been really low-key. However getting rid of the stale liners would be nice. The personalities are good. Just let them do their thing and not require them to reiterate those tired out liners.

Hopefully competition from Sunny 105.9 would be enough for WMMO to retool some things.
 
It seems in the last few posts what ppl are suggesting is just Re-Brand,Re-Image WMMO,maybe it is also time to Change the calls & the entire 9 yards,perhaps WMMO has hit the end of its lifespan just like WHTQ. If they want to go after SUNNY...ReBrand,Image and go All Oldies from around 1960-Mid 70's and go after SUNNY's Upper-Demo,cut them off at the knees.
 
Rick Stacy once worked for Cary Pall, in Toledo, I believe. As for WMMO reaching the end of its life cycle, I think the basics that WMMO started with would kick a little butt today. The current execution of the format hasn't changed in at least six years. I was in Orlando in 2005 and again in 2009, and I checked them out every so often on the web. The liners, the ID, the placement of spots, everything was identical, every time I listened. No wonder you guys are bored stiff. In the Pall days, the liners were freshened at least once a quarter, and sometimes he even tossed them out the window and told the jocks to relate the ideas IN THEIR OWN WORDS. Now that is the way to nurture creativity. Can you imagine the lockstep programmers at Cox doing that?
 
Just Me said:
...just Re-Brand,Re-Image WMMO,maybe it is also time to Change the calls & the entire 9 yards,perhaps WMMO has hit the end of its lifespan just like WHTQ. If they want to go after SUNNY...ReBrand,Image and go All Oldies...

Just Me, with all due respect, there's too much baby being thrown out with the bathwater in the industry today as it is, and that includes people, formats and call letters. Despite being run by folks who don't appear to understand or appreciate the original brand they're still milking, WMMO has proven pretty durable. To toss that heritage and the calls to become another oldies station? What a waste!

As has been discussed, the original WMMO borrowed elements of philosophy from the counter-culture FMs of the late 60s and early 70s, and wasn't afraid to poke tongue-in-cheek fun at radio-as-usual, while slyly using all the same tools, such as music research and external promotion, to succeed. It's the only place I ever worked in my career where subtlety played well with listeners. Given how stale and formulaic radio has become, I think the potential of that approach may be bigger now than it was in 1990. It doesn't just need different liners, it needs to find a way to flip the formatic bird to Liner Radio in general, in a way that's meaningful to listeners who remember how radio served their needs pre-dereg.

And it's hard to imagine any of that happening within Cox.
 
here's the ticket.....bring back cary pall and live jocks who relate to the music........when this station first appeared on the dial, i listened anytime i could. Loved the lost 70s with john summers and then jerry steffen. Great, great stuff in my opinion. This automated crap sucks. what made WMMO great was the 'musicologists' and the way it was programmed.

I believe the late Annie Sommers was the music director in those early days, loved her sunday acoustic brunches.....RIP annie
 
Annie Sommers was brought in after Cox took over. She was at WHTQ back then (in the Q96 "We Hire Talent Quarterly" era).

As for Cox bringing back Cary Pall, in the past they have been stone cold to that idea. Now that Bob Neil is retired, who knows what the new regime will do...
 
I hadn't looked in a while. Looks like WMMO is down two full points 12+ in six months and still sliding...are the demos bad, too?

Sad to say, but blowing up WMMO would probably be seen as a more logical move than trying to put any semblance of the original back together, and would also be cheaper in the short run. "Soft rock & roll has run its course" is better news to tell shareholders than "aw crap, we broke it."
 
The question still remains: What to do with it if they blow it up? Paul, you are correct...again. If they would go back and do it right, it just might work again. The station's success was a synergy of great ideas, un-marketing and the unwaivering, on-air execution. Nobody wants to pay a live air staff anymore, so....forget about it.
BTW, I was WMMO's first music director. But, it was mostly titular. Cary actually did the daily logs, but we DID have actual weekly music meetings, usually over lunch. :)
 
You guys used to eat at that Greek place across from Barnett Bank, right? I think I saw you guys there more than once.

A peek into what might have been an alternate future for WMMO...WBOS Boston, MMO's sister back then, nearly doubled its numbers in six months after Pall went up there and reformed it. In fact, they put the best numbers on that signal ever (3.7 12+), except for its country days (when BOS had a 4 share). Then the locals pushed it into a full-blown AAA and cut its numbers in half (much like what happened at WMMO after Pall left). When Greater Media bought BOS, they blew it up and went to a young-end alt format which also hasn't moved the needle much above a two share.

MMO's numbers rise and fall depending on how much marketing WMGF does vs. what Cox does, as they pretty much compete for the same folks today.
 
I still think if Cox does anything it will be a clone of Eagle in Tampa and Jax, a format that essentially splits the difference between today's MMO and WHTQ.
 
John, this may sound blasphemous, but of all the formats, WMMO might have tolerated voicetracking better than most. Given the fact that we didn't talk over intros, it would have been easy from a technical standpoint, too. I don't think it's VT that's responsible for what's been lost, more a matter of mindset. We interacted with listeners as much through the mail as on the phone. Could that attitude and listener focus have survived into the VT era had WMMO not become K-92's afterthought? Hard to know.

Troublemaan said:
...WBOS Boston, MMO's sister back then, nearly doubled its numbers in six months after Pall went up there and reformed it. In fact, they put the best numbers on that signal ever...Then the locals pushed it into a full-blown AAA and cut its numbers in half (much like what happened at WMMO after Pall left)...

I never understood the mindset of the AAA insiders. WMMO was welcomed into that segment, got invited to the "AAA Summits" where stations in the format gathered nationally, but we didn't have much in common. Some of the A3 folks were just too hip for the room, including managers of a couple of non-commercial stations. "Oh, it's crossed over and pop stations are playing it - we better drop it." Huh?

WMMO certainly got more predictable musically when Cary left, in part because we didn't have his record collection, and nobody had his incredible depth of knowledge of the music. But in point of fact, when his last book came out, 'MMO was something like #9 25-54, and it did bounce back pretty quickly to #1 in the demo. So it's not like the wheels came off.
 
Paul, you're probably right about voice tracking 'MMO, but I still think that a station that cares that much about the music as we did in the early days, deserves 'live and local' to compliment that approach. Then again, the same could be said about almost many other stations, right?

BTW, Cary and I DID eat at that Greek place across from Barnett Bank Plaza. Wow, what a memory!! (lol)
 
johnsummers said:
...I still think that a station that cares that much about the music as we did in the early days, deserves 'live and local' to compliment that approach. Then again, the same could be said about almost many other stations, right?

I'm careful with the word "deserve" anymore. If you can substitute the word "earn" and the sentence still works, OK, but in this case, I don't think it works. If listeners think they deserve "live & local," they sure missed the chance to speak up during dereg.

I remember when Herb McCord came and told us WMMO and WHTQ were being sold, because Granum was being offered crazy amounts of money he could never produce by operating the stations. It was blunt, but I appreciated the honesty. It's hard to believe its 15 years later, and the bubble hasn't completely burst yet, despite a severe recession. If station values again became associated with what they could actually earn, and bankruptcies cleared the debt, stations staffed in real-time by humans might once again be possible.

And our kids might finally understand what we're talking about!

Hey John...four more years will be the 25th. Wouldn't it be fun to find some station in Orlando that was in the mood for stunting at that time, and put an on-air reunion together?
 
Forget the WMMO reunion, how about the BJ 105 reunion............WMMO needs to flip to Jazz, that's the whole and you instantly get all the WLOQ fans.
 
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