2
Structuring Your Station and Creating Identity
The Role of Structure
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the essence of programming is establishing—and then fulfilling—listener expectations. That’s what makes audiences tune your station in, listen long, and listen often. The stronger the expectations you arouse—and then meet—the better the result. How can you build clear, concrete expectations of what the station represents in the mind of the listener?
Radio communicates simultaneously at both the rational/conscious and the emotional/subconscious levels—in fact, the same way poetry does. Rational expectations can be built through the use of tools such as descriptive “liners”—simple, repeated statements of what the station offers: “Never more than two commercial breaks per hour.” “Where local news comes first.” “The one station everyone at the office can agree on.” To some extent, your station is what you say it is. However, the far more powerful expectations are the emotional ones. It’s futile to try to argue audiences into listening again; they must feel good about listening. It’s important for the rational and the emotional elements of a station to be in harmony with and reinforce one another.
For example the most influential programmer of the sixties, Bill Drake, promised “much more music” (rationalized description) and massacred the competition in that decade as his streamlined, music-intensive Top 40 approach (the emotional fulfillment) spread from station to station across the country. The listeners had never been approached that way before by a Top 40 station. Until then, they had usually associated successful Top 40 radio with lots of commercials, so they were easily persuaded that their reason for listening was the music and that “much more music” was what they wanted.
However, just as kids will tell you that what they want for dinner is much more dessert, when listeners do get “much more music,” they eventually get bored with it. They want variety, just as kids eventually want something other than dessert all the time.
Thus, although the Drake format swept the country, demolishing the old-line “personality” Top 40s, a lot of damage was left in its wake. When the Drake operations began their ascendancy in the first half of the sixties, the stations they beat had had audience shares in the 20s and 30s. After they surpassed their competitors in the ratings, the victory was generally with smaller audience shares—10s and 15s—and the stations they beat had by then even less audience. In other words, when logically persuaded that what they wanted was “much more music,” listeners shifted allegiance. In the end, however, they found the reduction in “personality” and companionship that usually resulted to be boring at the emotional level, and they drifted off to other more specialized formats in hopes of finding “more music” which was more precisely targeted to their own preferences.
What you seek to influence with radio programming is audience behavior, and for that you must provide an emotionally satisfying companionship service—a soundtrack for the listener’s life—that logical liners can then reinforce. To begin with, you must consider the structure of the radio station’s hour. The structure is the “package” into which the “product”—the radio station—is put, and it is the package that defines any product.
To draw a parallel from retailing, if you put the exact same soup in a Campbell’s can and in a can labeled “Apex Soup,” chances are that consumers will always prefer the soup from the Campbell’s can—even if they taste both of them. That’s not only because, as Al Reis and Jack Trout point out in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, “you taste what you expect to taste,” but also because the packaging (which includes the brand name and its logo style) arouses very clear expectations of the product based on past experience, which the product in the can will satisfy and reinforce when it is tasted.
The unknown brand name on the other package arouses no positive expectations, other than that it is trying to copy the leader. Tasting that soup will only reinforce that expectation (because it tastes like Campbell’s) and will probably lead to the perception that it isn’t quite as good because it’s a copy. The resulting expectation is that, in the future, the off-brand soup can't possibly taste any better than Campbell’s—and probably won’t taste as good. Thus the customer will continue to pay more to buy Campbell’s.
To make any competitive headway, the Apex Company would have to come up with a tasty soup that is quite different from Campbell’s, design a package to epitomize the difference, and then make sure that the positive expectations for their soup are met and satisfied with each experience. Some soup makers have competed successfully against Campbell’s, which owns most of the market, by doing this. Pet Milk’s Progresso Soups are one example; the Lipton dry (“created fresh”) soups are another.
Why should you start designing the station’s programming by working on the structure of the hour? In radio, your package is the structure of the station on the air. Station jingles, when used in a particular and consistent way, are very good at creating structure. Bill Drake “jingled into” every record on the successful Top 40 stations discussed earlier—even if his stations were playing several records in a row—thus breaking the hour down into the smallest possible structural pieces. This was a very shrewd strategy, and Drake wasn’t the first to do this. Mike Joseph had introduced a similar strategy years earlier at WABC in New York, “jingling out” of every record, and Ron Jacobs had been doing the same thing at the Colgreene stations in the western United States.
Structure is in the details. Where are the spot breaks? How are they handled? What is the station called on the air? (Be consistent.) What wording is used to introduce the newscast, and is there a “sounder,” or musical introduction, associated with it? Program directors are notoriously intolerant of air talent taking liberties with planned structural elements like these—and rightly so because these are the key elements that define the station in the mind of the listener. Any distinctive stylistic element that the station uses on the air in a consistent way can help define the station.
For the structural elements that you decide to use, look for things that other stations don’t do. Often, the place to look is in the past. Most radio people want to seem up-to-date and “cutting edge” to their peers in the business, but radio listeners don’t know what’s fashionable in the business and what isn’t. When you do something on the air that makes sense to the listener and causes the station to sound distinctive and different, it’s to your definite advantage if your competitors perceive it as old-fashioned. This will cause them to underestimate you, and they won’t counter your moves, which makes it a lot easier for you to sneak up on them and pass them in the ratings.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. In the fifties and sixties, one radio fashion for a while was the use of “time signatures” when giving the time—such as, “It’s 10:24, WXXX More Music Time.” The tag after the time in that phrase is called the “signature,” and it actually originated back in the pre-TV days of radio when time checks were sold to advertisers (“10:24, Bulova Watch Time”).
In one successful programming venture not long ago, I adapted this old, unfashionable idea for a new station, using it to build structure and enhance community awareness. The way I implemented it, there was always an index card with a time-signature line posted near the digital clock in the control room. The time was always tagged with whatever line was currently posted, such as, “9:31, WXXX Summer Time.” The four generic time signatures I used were based on the seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—but these were used only when no other, more specific line was posted.
Using resources from the state department of tourism, I developed a list of every civic celebration and planned event in the station’s coverage area for the whole year, and I posted a special time signature when each event was in progress (“WXXX County Fair Time”). With many time checks every hour, the station associated its call letters strongly with localities and civic events. If more than one event was going on at the same time, I’d devote one day’s time signatures to one event, the next day’s to another, and so forth.
Not only did this make the station sound amazingly involved in all civic activities throughout the entire region, but the time signature “salute” became greatly sought after by chambers of commerce and civic groups. It sometimes even got the station an ad schedule or an extra budget for an event that it wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. I was the only one who selected the events highlighted, and the time signatures themselves were never sold. That would have cost the station goodwill by diminishing the perceived community commitment.
Time signatures are just one example of how you can use unfash-ionable programming ideas to succeed. There are other ways. I recall program director Johnny Hyde making use of a “time tone” (a tone or effect which always accompanies the giving of time) at KROY in Sacramento in the early seventies—a concept considered to be hopelessly out-of-date even then. Even odder, the tone was a quick, rising, ripping sound, like somebody knocking a needle off a record. It certainly made the station sound distinctive! Using such offbeat, unfashionable ideas, KROY went on to beat a tough, conventional-sounding competitor that had more power and better coverage.
Back-to-back music segues alone cannot create a structure for a radio station. If your station is the only one in its format in the market, it will perform satisfactorily without much structure—but only until a format competitor enters the market. Unless your station has real audience loyalty, derived from listener expectations that are built and satisfied through structural elements, the tie will always go to the newcomer. If the new station simply does what your station does, with no clearer structure than your station has, listener expectations will simply drop to the level of anticipating what sort of song each station will play next. So subtle changes in the music by the competitor can create stronger music expectations for their station over yours and lure listeners away.
Listeners just don’t stay loyal to a music mix. To survive and prosper, your station must have more listener loyalty than is possible by simply how records are mixed together. Your station must project its own personality and establish a clear set of expectations in the mind of the listener, just as Campbell’s Soup does in the mind of its con-sumer. That adds up to hourly structure, or packaging, and consistency in the way that structure is executed.
If structure—the way the station defines its own elements stylistically—still doesn’t seem of vital importance to you, think about this: How do you define a glass of water? The product is the water, but, by the phrase itself, you're defining it by the package—the glass. The music, or whatever else forms the core of your station’s format, is the product; the distinctive, repeating, anticipatable structural elements of the hour within which it is presented is the package.
The Role of Formatting
The first and most elementary way one radio station is distinguished from another is by its format. What, in very basic terms, does it do? (In listener terms, now; not radio trade terms.)
As noted earlier, modern radio began in the fifties with consistent formats, which easily beat all the well-known block-programmed “variety” stations. Listeners had clearer expectations of what they’d hear when they listened to the format station, and they got what they expected every time they did. All of the structural elements previously discussed in this chapter have to work together harmoniously—artistically—to create in listeners the desired concept of what the station represents, particularly when there’s competition in the format.
General managers sometimes suspect that program directors are more concerned with art than commerce, but though the commerce part does pay the bills, the creative elements are what attract and hold an audience. Sticking a sponsored golf report in the middle of a coun-terculture rock format (I’ve heard this done!) can destroy the station by contradicting the listeners' established “emotional expectations.” There is some art in this. If you lose your listeners while making a quick buck, soon you won’t have either listeners or bucks. (There is a connection between the two.)
The Role of Diversity in a Consistent Format
When planning the format structure of your station, please do not read what I have said up to now as indicating that there should be no diversity in what your station offers. In fact, there is some crossover between formats. For example, there are talk elements—such as news—that work in a music format. You should include as many diverse elements as you can, as long as they are consistent with station goals and the lifestyle of your audience.
Make news work for you in a music format. Music listeners like to know what is going on, and they expect radio to be the first medium to tell them about it. Local news is the part that usually interests listeners the most, and the aggressive presentation of local news makes the station seem more involved in the community. That, in turn, helps build listener loyalty and repeat listening in order to keep up with “what’s going on.” The key is to present the news in a manner that meets the expectations of your listeners. The news thus becomes another structural element through its consistent placement in the hour, consistent style of presentation, and consistently distinctive and reliable content. With news, as well as other content elements, find out what’s important to your target listeners, and then include what they want to hear in your format package in an intuitively, emotionally harmonious way.
The Problem with Sports
That brings me to sports play-by-play programming, long a radio staple. I spent seven years working for an organization that believed intensely that sports broadcasts were key to the success of its major-market stations because they served to draw in new audiences. The company paid a lot of money to fund research to prove it—and then buried the report when the results proved the opposite.
As I observed in Chapter 1, play-by-play sports is the one great exception to the way listeners use radio: as a companionable, lifestyle soundtrack to whatever they are doing. Even all-talk stations serve such a role. However, radio listeners still think of sports broadcasts as a program, like a TV program. They will listen to whatever station they must to hear the “program” they want. After it’s over, they’ll tune back to where they usually listen. Sports events can bring in a large temporary cumulative audience—but at a great cost. Here are some of the problems sports play-by-play can cause.
First, the audience tuning in for play-by-play sees no more relevance to being loyal to the radio station that broadcasts their favorite team than they would to a particular TV channel because it carries the World Series. In both cases, the station is simply a conduit, rather than a companion. A common strategy is to hold elaborate contests based on the game on the morning after the broadcast. However, these contests generally attract just the members of the station’s usual audience who stayed tuned to the sports broadcast, rather than bring back to the station the temporary game listeners.
Second, play-by-play broadcasts chase off a number of the station’s regular listeners, and they are slow to come back when the game is over. Because they aren’t listening, they don’t know when the game has ended. The temporary listeners will vanish as soon as the game’s done, leaving the station with few if any listeners until the regular audience seeps back over many hours. In most cases, the postgame listener void cancels out the potential ratings boost of all of those temporary game listeners.
These problems create a third. Carrying play-by-play means that you interrupt regular programming—and it’s the regular programming that constitutes the station’s format! This results in less certainty in audience expectations, which translates to long-term audience erosion if the station has effective competition, and risks a general perception that the “main thing the station does” (and that’s what format is) is sports!
Play-by-play seems to perform less harmfully within a talk format because the game itself is a form of talk. In general, however, outside of the smallest towns, where carrying the local high school team may be a form of genuine community involvement, the only good reason for carrying play-by-play is revenue. Yet, believe it or not, many major stations today are paying more for the rights to carry a sports event than they can earn from the advertising revenue that the event generates. They incur this loss simply to obtain the presumed listener-growth benefit that the games supposedly offer. This is like paying the salary of your executioner.
If you must do it, probably the least hurtful time to run a sports broadcast is once a week on the weekend because weekend listening patterns tend to differ from those of the weekdays. However, it still makes little sense in the long run to compromise your listeners’ expec-tations even on weekends. Regardless of whether such sports events deliver station profit, the damage to the station’s format identity in the mind of the listener—leading eventually to audience erosion—is seldom worth it in the long run.
Perhaps you can now see why all-sports formats seldom perform well—at least outside of New York City, where such things as all-dance-music and continuous sports conversation seem to define par-ticular lifestyles not found elsewhere. Even ESPN, the all-sports TV network, obtains most of its weekly ratings during its weekend game broadcasts.
The problems for the all-sports radio format are twofold: There is a sizable audience for sports play-by-play and special sports events, but as we’ve discussed, the audience listens to the program and leaves, which results in more sporadic listening patterns than in other for mats. In addition, the underlying audience that wants to be accompanied by sports conversation throughout the day tends to be very small in most markets. Of course, a 1 share can make you money in a large market and may justify the use of such a low-performance format. In medium and smaller markets, however, a 1 or 2 share simply represents too small an audience to pay the bills.
Quarterbacking Your Team
So far in this chapter, we’ve discussed the rationale for distinctive and consistent structuring, or packaging, of a station, including phrases and elements of the construction of the broadcast hour. We've also discussed the need for consistency in the way in which the station does what it has chosen to do. Now, it’s time to execute the concept you've chosen in a consistent and well-defined manner. Usually, this calls for what I call a “format book,” or programming handbook. This is a manual that not only tells the staff how the structural elements are to be presented, but explains the rationale behind them.
I find that many program directors are afraid to put an explanation for these elements in writing for several different reasons: (1) “If I explain it, the competition may get their hands on it, and they’ll counterattack with this information”; (2) “If I try to explain it, the staff may think I don’t really know what I'm doing”; (3) “How can I explain it when I’ve just copied it from some other station somewhere else and don’t know why it works?”
If you’re afraid of what might happen if the competition should see your handbook, all I can tell you is this: In three decades of programming, during which the manuals I wrote for my various stations must undoubtedly have fallen into enemy hands, never has a competitor ever made competitive use of a format book against me. This is probably because of the “unfashionable” structural elements I invariably used to set my station apart, which led competitors not to take my efforts (or my handbook) seriously until it was too late. My advice is that if you think and program in an original way, it’s very unlikely that your competitor will have the wisdom and wit to take competitive advantage of any bootlegged programming information. Any risk of this is far outweighed by the advantages of having your staff understand why they do what you require they do at the station. That understanding not only helps them execute the structure correctly, but results in their feeling like a real team, guided by a plan for success.
If your concern is the second one—fear of staff contempt—then you misunderstand the nature of the relationship between the program director and the airstaff. Your staff will grant you leadership right from the start because you are the designated leader. You don’t have to earn leadership; you have it already at the start. What you do have to do is earn respect, and you get that by being open with your airstaff, letting them in on your strategy, and making them feel they are a team following a winning quarterback, even if they feel uneasy about some of your “plays.” All they need is to see that you have a clear plan behind those plays.
If your concern is the third one I listed, you are not yet a true program director. If you hope to be one, start analyzing the elements that you’re copying from others, and identify the ones that advance your own station-imaging objectives. Then reject those that are only working for the other station because of its market situation or tradition, its competition, or other factors not relevant to your own market. Combine the ones you've decided to make use of with distinctive, compatible elements of your own, and create a station that others will copy someday—even though they don’t understand why it works!
To create your format book, divide it into sections reflecting the major elements of the station’s service for which your airstaff has responsibility. Start with a broad statement of the overall format and the station’s goals. Then define clearly all of the important format elements, including scripts for the opening and closing of the newscasts and scripts for any other distinctively presented station elements. Weather forecasts can usually be stylized and made more useful to the listener with a customized script. This can better communicate the information provided in those boring communiqu豠from the weather bureau, which other stations usually read verbatim.
Devote a section of the handbook to your expectations for the airstaff, and don’t limit your people to reading liner cards. It may surprise you, but all this careful and exact detail about how key elements of the station’s structure must be done can actually free your on-air people to show some real personality: They cannot explore boundaries until they know clearly where the boundaries are. Your air talent cannot improvise effectively in an uncommon situation (an airplane has just crashed near the city; a weather emergency has occurred) until they know what should be kept in and what can temporarily be dispensed with under the circumstances. That comes only with understanding the objectives of the station and its format.
Radio’s intimacy can result in a genuine relationship between listener and station that makes the commercials far more effective than is the case with any other medium. Personality is the key to that. A great many people in the radio business think that personality means being funny or outrageous. Not at all. It means being relatably “human” for the listener: letting down personal defenses and treating the listener, in on-air comments, like a close friend. Find people with some brains who express themselves interestingly, and put them on the air. That’s personality.
When you’ve finished writing your format book, proofread it for clarity and for spelling (you’ll have an easier time commanding respect from your airstaff if it looks as if you know basic English), and then prepare a detailed index to include at the back. Encourage new hires (and existing staff members, as they are introduced to the new procedures) to keep the book with them in the control room for a while so they can consult it when questions arise: “Where do I get the weather forecast? What parts do I use?” “Where do I find the current local news?”
If you want to make sure that your staff executes the station procedures correctly, you must make it as easy as possible for them to do so. In addition, avoid pouncing on them when they fail to follow procedures. When your on-air people make a mistake, try to wait until they're through with their shift to discuss it, and then try to handle the situation in positive terms. Fearful air talent makes for a rotten-sounding radio station—and a lack of teamwork.
If you find someone who doesn’t want to be on your team, you must replace him or her with someone who does. To avoid legal problems later, make sure to document for the station’s files the conversations, meetings, and behavior that led you to that conclusion. When such a change is clearly needed, it must be made not only for the sake of the station’s consistency and atmosphere, but also to maintain the respect of your staff. You must do your best to be human and understanding, but in the end your airstaff must see that you mean what you say and that your rules apply to everyone.