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The Basic Principles of Radio Programming
The Station versus the Programs
From the twenties to the mid-fifties, radio was a program-oriented medium. Listeners tuned in programs, and which station (or even which network) broadcast them was relatively unimportant. Television snatched away this function in the fifties, and at first, amid steep audience declines, it appeared that radio—the broadcast medium that didn’t have pictures—had been made irrelevant by video. The funeral was premature.
The first step toward modern format-oriented radio occurred in Omaha, Nebraska. According to legend, Todd Storz was hunting for something profitable to do with his daytime radio station, KOWH. He was talking it over with colleague Bill Stewart in a bar when they noticed that customers played the same songs over and over again on the bar’s jukebox. Storz and Stewart reasoned that if they limited the station’s music playlist to the songs that drew the most plays in jukeboxes and played them repeatedly, KOWH would draw an audience. It did. The daytime-only station rapidly drew audience shares of well over 50 percent.
Cut to Dallas, Texas. Gordon McLendon had already had some real success in radio. He had formed the national Liberty Network to broadcast baseball “games of the week,” but the major-league baseball teams refused to grant him the rights to broadcast their games. He solved this problem by arranging to get pitch-by-pitch, play-by-play telegraph reports on selected games from an observer posted in the stands. From these reports, he re-created the games in his Texas studio, using sound effects and his own sense of drama. Most listeners never realized that “the old Scotchman” who brought them the games was neither old nor present at any of the games.
The Liberty Network was history by the mid-fifties, and McLendon by then was in charge of KLIF in Dallas, a minor independent AM radio station owned by his father. He was intrigued by reports of what KOWH was doing in Omaha, and after checking it out, he installed his version at KLIF. Thus Top 40 was born—as was all modern radio formatting. Legendary stations—WABC, WLS, WQAM, WINS, KOMA, KFWB, KRLA, WMGM, CKLW, KYA, KFRC, WCFL, KJR, KHJ, WMCA, and many others—refined it.
What McLendon added to the Storz-Stewart concept was a sense of showmanship and the understanding that to succeed, the new Top 40 format had to define the cutting edge of the youth popular culture. Young people have always defined the forward edge of the pop culture; this was as true back in the big-band era as it is today. Adults eventually adopt what started out as an unsettling youth phenomenon (in music, fashion, consumer culture, everything), whereupon the young people move on, always seeking to define themselves in ways that differentiate them not only from their parents, but also from the generation that immediately preceded them. Top 40 radio thus needed to concentrate on the current hits, played over and over, because the current hits—established by sales and requests—define the group that defines itself by the music, which is the teens, the most active group buying hit records and calling request lines. It is true that only the real “activists” of the teen culture are doing most of the buying and requesting, but the youth culture is created by those activists, so it is quite legitimate to use that data to program a Top 40 station.
Top 40 tends to draw large adult audiences for two reasons. First, many of those adults are parents of the teens (or subteens) who turn the station on. Second, many adults like to feel that they are still in tune with the youth culture. Because many of those buying “spins” on the Omaha jukeboxes were adults, they too valued the ease and comfort of getting what they wanted when they wanted it. So the basic “format radio” principle was applicable, with modifications, to adults too—and McLendon was smart enough to realize that, although it was not until 1959 that competitive circumstances led him to develop format radio in other directions—first at KABL, Oakland-San Francisco, where he developed the successful package with harps and poetry for the Beautiful Music format; and later in Los Angeles via XETRA, Tijuana, Mexico, with the first solidly successful All-News format.
The show business element that McLendon brought to format radio included the development of high-profile personalities to whom the core audience could relate and the use of stylized format elements, such as outrageous stunts and intriguing on-air contests. His imaginative promotions included running commercials for imaginary services, to tweak the listeners! Courtesy of Dave Verdery at KBIG in Los Angeles, who worked for McLendon, here’s a portion of a memo by Gordon about this unusual promotional idea:
Along with station promos, exotics are your major cause of listener talk. These should be scheduled at least once every three hours throughout the day. The best exotics seem to be those which are completely incongruous with the idea, i.e., advertising the Brooklyn Ferry in San Francisco. Good sources for exotics are distant areas, selling products not normally sold in this area, advertising something completely foreign to the general thought, etc. All exotics should be played perfectly straight; they should never be done live. All should be perfectly produced and recorded. They have a tendency to annoy many people and you will receive quite a few complaints. Ignore them. Exotic commercials are almost the backbone of this type of operation. It is believed they are second only to the actual music policy of KABL’s success.
Many of those who listened to KLIF and its many imitators in the late fifties and early sixties remember the stations as rock-and-roll radio. However, the published Top 40 playlists show that many of the records played were not rock and roll at all. Some songs were ballads from artists like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Doris Day, and Rosemary Clooney. Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” was a Top 40 hit in the fall of 1962.
There are always hit records that originate in older pop styles but that nonetheless appeal to the young and are legitimately part of the cutting edge of the pop culture. Hit radio stations in later decades all too often forgot that. They arbitrarily rejected any then-current pop hit records not seen as mainstream youth records, which reduced their station’s appeal to all components of their audience. The only justifica-tion for the wide variety that has characterized successful Top 40 radio is that all these records are united by being current hits. That free- ranging variety has always been the essence of Top 40’s wide demographic appeal.
To Gordon McLendon, then, we must award credit for originating much of what radio became in the latter half of the twentieth century. Stations learned that attracting audiences begins with consistency. These principles have been refined over the years by such outstanding programmers and consultants as Mike Joseph, Bill Gavin, Paul Drew, Kent Burkhart, Lee Abrams, Bill Stewart, George Burns, Rick Sklar, and many others. Once radio had been reinvented as an ongoing, lifestyle-oriented audio accompaniment, it became station-oriented instead of program-oriented. People today choose stations to listen to based on their own perceptions of what kind of service the station will offer, rather than on any specific program.
There is one exception to this, though. Play-by-play sports coverage is perceived as a program. As I have had plenty of opportunity to observe and research in my career, listeners will tune to whatever station they must to hear that “program.” Afterward, they return to the stations to which they usually listen. This creates unforeseen problems for stations that use sports to draw casual listeners whom they hope to convert to regular listeners. This is discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
The Importance of Consistency
Today, successful stations devote themselves consistently to one type of programming. This programming generally consists of a mixture of compatible elements, such as newscasts, commercials, and air personalities. The principle of consistency can be refined as follows: Successful programming consists of fulfilling listener expectations, and listener expectations are based mostly on what the station has done in the past. This refinement makes clear what a programmer must do to maximize the success of a radio station. A station must be consistent with what it has done in the past to reinforce listener expectations.
To succeed as a program director, you must be able to hear your station, and radio in general, from the perspective of the listener. You’ll have to get into the listener’s head—a listener who is much less preoccupied with radio than you are—to understand how the audience actually perceives your station and the competition.
If your station matches listener expectations when they tune in, they feel rewarded, and the behavior of tuning in your station more often and listening longer is reinforced. If your station fails to match listener expectations, the audience’s perception of your station is weakened, and they will tune in less often and listen for shorter intervals each time.
What about ratings, which are discussed in much greater depth in Chapter 8? When a station does not meet listener expectations, the weekly cumulative audience will hold up quite well for a considerable period of time, as listeners tune in from time to time, hoping that the station will again be as they expect it to be. However, the average quarter hour share, which is based on the average listening span, will show a downward trend. In this case, all that’s necessary is to realign the station to listener expectations. In many cases, though, station management reacts by changing the format in the hope of building a bigger but different audience for a new service—thus destroying the expectations of the existing audience altogether. Building a new audience is almost always harder than “fixing” an existing station that already has an established audience.
In the context of listener expectations, exactly what a station is doing at any given instant is almost irrelevant to the established image of the station. This point hit me one day when one of my on-air personalities at KEX in Portland, Oregon, where I was the program director at the time, stopped by my office with an observation that puzzled him. He had been at a laundromat and noticed that the radio on the shelf there was not tuned to Adult Contemporary KEX as it usually was, but instead had been turned to Top 40 KGW. As he proceeded with his laundry, the manager of the laundry popped out of her office, looked around suspiciously, asked who had changed the radio, and retuned the receiver to KEX. Then she visibly relaxed and went back into her office. What puzzled the deejay was that, at that moment, both stations were playing the same song. The manager’s relief at retuning her favorite station could not have been based on the music that the two stations were actually broadcasting when she changed the station. Actually, the manager’s rejection of KGW and her preference for KEX were based on her perception of what each station represented—and what sort of music she expected to hear next on each. What a station is playing right now can be almost irrelevant to the listener’s image, and thus expectations, of the station.
There is another dimension to listener expectations—one that probably played a major part in the laundry manager’s reaction. As noted earlier, with modern formatting, radio became a lifestyle medium. As a result, listeners choose their favorite station at least partly because it seems to reflect them—their tastes, their values, their very selves. It’s a “cultural mirror” for them, in that respect—a touchstone by which they define themselves and with which they keep in touch with the elements of their culture.
This special role of radio is most obvious in ethnic broadcasting, but it’s important for all listener segments, which is why demographics—the age groups into which ratings are customarily divided—are quite inadequate to define radio audiences. Adult contemporary pop music stations, oldies stations, country music stations, classic rock stations, and jazz stations generally compete for the same demographics, but they reach very different audiences in terms of lifestyle.
The role of radio as a cultural mirror motivates listeners to use a station as a “soundtrack” for their lives, and it explains why people get so enraged when “their station” changes format. After all, it’s a bit like looking into the mirror and seeing a stranger looking back at you. A format change seems to be a rejection of the listener’s values—and even his or her identity. Radio people sometimes underestimate the important role our stations play in people’s lives. Just answer the phones after a format change!
Radio formatting once was a much simpler job than it is now; even big markets had relatively few radio stations with significant audiences, and all were on the AM band. (FM stations were not even included in most ratings until the mid-sixties; measurable FM audiences were usually lumped into the “miscellaneous” category until then, except by the Hooper Rating service.) By the eighties, when FM stations commonly drew audiences larger than the AM stations did, there was such a large choice of stations in most areas that niche programming became the rule, and most AM and FM stations began catering to small segments of the available audience.
Up until the seventies, even second-rate stations could expect to get a 5 percent or larger share of the audience in a crowded market. By the eighties, even leading stations in competitive markets were fighting it out for shares of less than 3 percent of the audience. This does not mean that it’s pointless to try to serve a broad “mass” audience—even moderate success in doing so could easily result in a profitable audience share—but it does require that a programmer have an ever clearer idea of how listeners perceive his or her radio station.
At this point let me recommend a book to you—a book that every program director, every general manager, and every sales manager should read and keep handy: Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Reis and Jack Trout (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). Although it was published in 1981 and some of its examples are out-of-date, it’s still in print and it remains the definitive work on modern communication. The central premise of the book is that people perceive new things by relating them to the things they already know. For example, consider these terms: horseless carriage, tubeless tire, offtrack betting, unleaded gasoline. In addition, top-of-mind awareness, arising from how people mentally rank the alternatives in each product category, determines expectations and consumption patterns.
The authors cite the brilliant positioning of 7-Up against the dominant soft drink as “the un-cola,” moving 7-Up from its own product category to the number three position in the “cola” category behind Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Though most examples in the book are drawn from advertising, the underlying theme is communicating in an overcommunicated world, and radio is very definitely in the communication business. Read the book and understand its lessons if you hope to win the radio wars.
FM versus AM
Statistically, there is an approximately equal chance that you, as a radio programmer, will be assigned the programming of an AM or FM station; there’s roughly five thousand of each licensed for commercial broadcasting in the United States. The evolution of AM and FM broadcasting services in the United States has led to two different sets of listener expectations for the two bands, and amazingly few radio people realize that this must be clearly understood and taken into consideration to maximize success on each band.
The distinction between listener expectations of AM and FM stations has proved quite durable over the last twenty-five years. Yet broadcasters today often try to program mainstream formats on AM as they do on FM, and when it doesn’t work well, AM radio is pronounced dead—or fit for talk only.
AM radio arose from a tradition of program orientation and a variety of services. After decades of obscurity, FM radio finally caught fire in the late sixties and seventies, accompanying the growth of the home-entertainment system from a hobbyist’s toy to a universal home appliance. FM arrived as part of the home stereo system and so was perceived as an adjunct to it—an alternative to listening to tapes or records and used in the same way: to provide a “texture” or background accompaniment to mentally demanding tasks—from the conversation at the family dinner table to an office workday environment. This is as true for rock formats as for soft music formats, and as a consequence, FM programming since the seventies has proved most effective for adults when it’s appropriate to these listener expectations and uses.
For FM, then, few interruptions, minimal use of production aids, minimal use of deejays (often limited to liner cards), little or no news coverage outside of morning drive time, minimal contrast from recording to recording, and so forth, typified the approach of most successful stations. I recall when a top-rated FM album rock station tried to update itself in the eighties with some of the then-evolving “modern rock” and met with a wall of listener opposition. The new genre introduced too much contrast and variety into the station’s texture and proved a disruptive influence on listeners’ use of the station. The modern rock was removed.
Unfortunately, what worked well with FM was usually then tried on AM radio, where it really didn’t work well at all. That’s because adult listener expectations, as I mentioned, remained and still remain different for AM stations. Listeners switch to AM when involved in such boring tasks as mowing the lawn, washing the dishes, driving to work, and performing repetitive and unsatisfying work. They tune in AM because they are bored and want involving content, interaction, excitement, relevant information, and musical contrast and variety. Even the twenty-five to thirty-four age group has this expectation.
Successful FM techniques work no better on AM than the AM techniques work on FM. However, most radio executives totally misunderstand, assuming wrongly that these failures mean that music programming will no longer work on AM radio, and they retreat to the miscellaneous talk formats and extremely specialized niches that have become the bane of AM.
As it happens, talk formats do contain the elements I’ve outlined that listeners expect of AM, and so they do work on AM. However, as several spectacular failures have shown, they don’t work well on commercial FM stations due to the expectations listeners have of FM stations and the way they use them.
If you are to program an AM station, understand that music programming, even mass-appeal formats such as Adult Contemporary and Country, can still work well on AM—if they are designed to meet listeners’ expectations of AM radio. When music formats are done properly on AM, FM may actually find itself at a competitive disadvantage because “being interesting”—an AM programming plus—can actually lose audience on FM.
No more than 20 percent of the audience in any market is interested in talk radio (usually even less). For this reason, only two or three talk stations can survive, let alone prosper, on the AM band in any given locality. However, roughly one-third of all radio listening involves AM radio even today. Thus there is still plenty of opportunity for making a success of a shrewdly programmed music station on AM, despite conventional thinking. (This approach to programming AM has met with success in a number of markets, but many broadcasters have dismissed each success as a fluke. If AM is dying, it’s radio people who are killing it.)
For both owners and programmers, the greatest opportunities in radio for the twenty-first century may well be found in today’s AM for several reasons:
1. Eighty percent of radio listening is to music. If programmed as explained above with a strong market-saturating AM signal, there is a significant share of audience to be had for music formats on AM.
2. Buying FM stations today tends to be extremely expensive, leading to indebtedness that even profitable operations may not overcome. AM stations, on the other hand, are usually sold for less than their money-making potential, thus improving the chance of making a profitable business of an AM station.
3. AM stations are unlikely to be left behind in the transition to digital broadcasting, which should disproportionately enhance the eventual value of AM stations in comparison to FM stations. As early as 1993, the USA Digital Consortium successfully demonstrated a very impressive, practical, “inband, on-channel” system for AM radio over an AM transmitter that simultaneously broadcast conventional AM.
I’ve tried to make two points in this discussion of FM versus AM programming opportunities. First, as an AM programmer you have a great many more options and opportunity than you may have believed in what’s thought of today as an “FM world.” Second, if you can truly get inside the heads of your listeners and perceive radio as they do, it’s not that difficult to create a successful radio service.
The Importance of Unconventional Strategy
There’s a third point involved here, and it’s the final programming principle I offer you in this chapter: The greatest opportunity always lies where your peers are not looking for it. In the world of investing, they call this concept “contrarianism.” It is based on the proven principle that when the crowd discovers a hot investment, the opportunity in it is just about over.
To put it another way, to succeed, you have to go where the crowd is not because you can’t be a leader by being a follower. It may require research and much thought to find a successful idea, and it certainly is not as easy as following the crowd and copying what seems to be working elsewhere. However, by the very fact of your station’s being different, it is much easier for you to clearly position it for your listeners with something unconventional—and this always offers more opportunity for success.
Furthermore, by using unconventional strategies to win—methods not fashionable in the radio industry—your success will invariably demoralize your competition (“Hey, that’s not supposed to work. Nobody’s doing that. Why is it working?”). More often than not, your competitors will react to your success by discarding the very elements of their own programming that made them successful, leaving them unable to compete effectively with you. (Half of winning in radio programming, as in war, is making your opponent lose.) After all, the listener has no idea what is unfashionable in the radio business, and intelligently using ideas not in fashion with other broadcasters will simply strike the listener as fresh and distinctive on both AM and FM bands.
Conspicuous success is what builds a programmer’s reputation. What it takes to get there is an understanding of how the listener perceives radio—and especially your station: consistency in execution, and a healthy dose of contrarianism. In the following chapters, we'll explore ways of achieving your programming goals using these principles and the techniques that arise from them. You’ll also learn how to bring out the best in your staff, how to be an effective leader, how to “grade” your work with ratings, how to get the rest of the station— including the sales department—on your team, and much more.