If you’ve ever encountered a farmer watching his crops dying in the field due to a lack of nourishing rain, you know how radio station owners feel. The difference is, radio’s owners have done this to themselves.
Back when I started in radio, my inability to see the “big picture” of the business was a good thing. My job was to come in and do my air shift along with cutting spots and working on news.
It sounds simple enough, but being sheltered from the other stuff was good in that it allowed me, a complete neophyte who was still in college, to concentrate completely on my job. I taught myself how to prep for the show and perform whatever had to be done technically with the old equipment.
With each step up the professional ladder, I learned a little more about the business, and like most of my peers, I thought I knew a lot more than I actually did. My managers were all “people-oriented,” and they guided me through the rough spots and handled my know-it-all attitude by gently letting me know when I veered too far away from reality and practicality.
I never really thought of commercials as a negative thing. They were part of the job. Even when I was working at a medium market Top 40, we jocks all accepted spot breaks as an integral part of the program. One of the jocks there, the afternoon drive guy whose name has been submerged too deeply in my gray matter, showed me his grasp of the concept when he said, “Our job is to build up to the spot break, run the spots and then build up to the next one.”
That didn’t seem terribly blasphemous. It made sense. People may be tuning in to hear the personalities or the music, but our job was to keep those listeners through the spots so the commercials would be heard.
It was only when I got to a large market that I encountered programmers’ animosity toward commercials. By then I’d also sold ads, so the “big picture” of the business was a lot more clear to me, but station management began to cave to the pleas of consultants and programmers.
Not everyone did this. At KMOX, GM Robert Hyland had a rule etched in stone: Spot breaks would run no longer than two minutes.
This was challenging, because the station ran a lot of spots. The folks in the traffic department had a rubber stamp they used very frequently on the logs that read, “This hour sold out.” That meant we had 18 minutes to run (22 minutes during elections and Christmas holidays). But all the announcers had to break after two minutes of spots to say something to the audience before more spots ran. Apparently KMOX was doing something right back then.
Today, thanks to the weak management, listeners are subjected to clusters of commercials that run far too long. Programmers were able to convince owners that listeners ran away in droves as soon as they heard the beginning of a commercial. The reasoning was then extrapolated to mean it would be fine to run 7 minutes’ worth of spots in a row since listeners were already gone.
That’s fine unless you’re an advertiser paying for commercials. That’s the “big picture” the radio owners ignored, and that’s why they’re wringing their hands and sobbing loudly about the terrible straits radio is in today.
Advertisers want their spots heard. They don’t want to be the last spot in a long cluster. It is reasonable to expect radio management to do their best to make sure the spots are heard by listeners.
That farmer, if he can make it through the winter, will try again next year to cultivate the crops and harvest them. Radio won’t, because now owners are listening to another ill-informed group: bean counters.
“Slash!” say the bean counters, so that’s what owners do. Instead of fertilizing the seeds known as “talent,” owners fired them. And promotion? That’s an unnecessary expense. (Try telling that to the folks to whom you’re pitching advertising.)
Soon there will be no crop of listeners to harvest, and radio owners will wring their hands and wonder why.
Discuss on the STL Media Message Board. (Registration required)
