John Carlton, the direct response copywriter who lays claim to being “the most ripped-off and respected copywriter alive,” is such a dear friend and sweet, kind person that I’m afraid he goes a bit overboard in his praise for me…
May, 1995 (continued):
The next day I was taken on a tour of Radio Caracol; at the time they operated nine stations in Bogotá alone — which was extraordinary to me as a pre-radio consolidation American.
Among the people I met was one of their program directors, Tito Lopez. When we were introduced in his office, he turned to a shelf behind him and pulled down…one of my videotapes: Building A Winning Morning Show.
After the tour, Sr. Gallegos and I flew to Cartagena for the sales meeting. In the Bogotá airport I noticed an American institution with a slightly different name: “Whopper King.”
One nice thing I can say about Avianca Airlines: Even on one-hour flights (e.g., the flight to Cartagena), they served they passengers a very nice meal.
To many people, Cartagena is one of South America’s tropical paradises. But the city has a long and tragic history. Starting in the 17th Century, swarms of Europeans ravaged the area in search of “El Dorado,” the fabled city of gold which was thought to exist primarily due to the ubiquitous use of gold for religious and ornamental use.
The Spanish decimated much of the indigenous population and enslaved the rest. Cartagena was used as a storage point for the treasures looted by the Spanish from the New World. As a result, the city became a prime target for pirates (including a number of the British variety who subsequently were elevated to knighthood).
Finally, tired of endless attack from pirates, the city built a wall around the entire city. This is not uncommon in Europe, but it’s unique in South America. (The wall still stands.)
Hotel Caribe
Cartagena is a beach resort where it’s always hot & humid. (For some reason, it’s very popular with Canadians.) I stayed at the Hotel Caribe. Good location, nice rooms…and spectacularly mediocre food. (I had been looking forward to sampling more traditional Colombian cuisine.)
Some of the Caracol attendees warned me the food wasn’t very good there, but I assumed they were being overly critical. They weren’t. You won’t get sick from eating at the Caribe…but it won’t add to your epicurean memories, either.
Upon our arrival at the airport in Cartagena, we were greeted by music of a papallera band. It’s kind of like Bavarian folk music with a Spanish twist. Carlos groaned upon hearing it; he much preferred the Bee Gees, Foreigner, and Elton John.
Frustrating moment upon check-in: I did not have any Colombian currency, and I wanted to exchange a U.S. five-dollar bill for five one-dollar bills, to use as tips.
Yes, the front desk had American currency.
Yes, they had five one-dollar bills.
No, they would not exchange them for my five-dollar bill. For that, I would have walk six feet across the lobby to officially exchange American dollars into Colombian pesos and then back to U.S. dollars (each time paying a commission and a transaction fee, which essentially would have eaten up my five bucks).
“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to exchange currency. I have five U.S. dollars; you have five U.S. dollars. All we need to do is trade, and we’ll still both have five U.S. dollars.”
Sorry, no. Impossible. Hotel policy.
Really dumb. Really frustrating.
But I still say the Colombians I encountered with were quite nice.
Surreal moment in Cartagena: I picked up the phone in my room and, at first, had trouble getting an outside line. So I dialed the hotel operator (“9” in Colombia) to ask for help. She put me on hold, and I got to listen to their prerecorded music.
What music did the Hotel Caribe play while its guests were on hold? “Home on the Range.”
The next morning I drank guayaba juice with my breakfast. Nice, kind of like pineapple, only smoother and not as sweet. At 10:00 am, I was supposed to meet my interpreter, who had been hired by Caracol. After going over a few details with her, I would have several hours free before I was scheduled to speak.
Sr. Gallego had insisted that I take time to visit the “old town” portion of Cartagena. Rather than hole up in my room and work on my computer, I figured I’d use those few free hours to enjoy a rare bit of sightseeing.
I was at the meeting room at 10:00; the interpreter was not.
Nor was she there by 11:00 am.
Nor by noon.
She finally showed up at 1:00 pm.
Did she not know we had been scheduled to meet at 10 am?
Yes, she explained, but she wanted to give me time to sightsee during the morning, so she decided to come three hours later.
Oh.
So much for sightseeing.
Next: The most embarrassing moment of my public speaking career.
A Loyal Reader Asks:
What do you think about talking about television and popular websites on your show? I had been talking about American Idol on my midday show, and my PD hotlined me about it because he says that’s telling them to turn the radio off and watch the TV.
I see where he’s coming from, but it’s pop culture and everybody is talking about it, and I don’t want to sound out of touch. What do you think?
Some PDs Follow This Programming Philosophy
I wouldn’t recommend talking about a TV show that’s on during your air shift…or even during the shift that follows you.
But….
Does your PD let you talk about the local college football game?
Does he let you talk about the new song by one of your core artists?
Are you allowed to refer to the current big movie hit?
If so, doesn’t he realize that every person who attends that game is a person who will not be listening to his radio station?
Doesn’t he understand that every person who listens to that new song on an iPod or a CD is a person who is not at that moment listening to the radio?
Has he somehow missed the fact that every person sitting in a darkened movie theater for two hours is a person who cannot listen to the radio?
A radio station chooses whether to be relevant or irrelevant to its listeners’ lives. It achieves relevancy by talking about things that the listeners care about.
One added irony: Visiting a website (which your PD doesn’t like you to talk about) is an activity that can be done while listening to your station.
(Intense, supressed excitement)
I remember the way my heart sped up and how my vision got all bleary outside the crystal clear center focus. Awareness was way into that obsessive danger level, deep into the meter’s red zone.
(gets personal, advances story)
Orson Welles had just gathered his entourage and seated themselves nearby at the restaurant in which I and a few friends were having lunch. I had recently started working in in Hollywood, and knew I would be bumping into many hi-calibre celebrities, but THIS was something for which I was totally unprepared, unnerved and (rule of threes!) unable to further function.
Usually I can find voltage for my legs somewhere. But not this time. This person was such a monster in my book of inspirations, I was frozen, unable to go over and introduce myself. Finally, // beat // I would settle for leaning in towards his party’s general direction and listening to that magnificent voice order selections from the Lucy’s El Adobe menu.
That’s the way it is with some of us and those we choose for our Shining Example: like a Santa in the store can make a five-year-old cry, chosen champions of our profession can be so huge as to frighten. But it’s OK. Probably will be discovered to be good for us. Already, we know honoring someone we’re aware of as having achieved something worthy can stimulate us to be our best, more consistently.
(2nd transistion)
Recently I met a brand new (to me) batch of Shining Examples. But, instead of intimidating, they were refreshiingly welcoming as well as strikingly talented. Some of us even shared a lunch table with many of Dan’s Blog readers and regulars at his recent International Radio Creative and Production Summit, where we all gathered for the purpose of sharpening our skills. I attended as student, not teacher this time, and came away a fan. (oops, too syrupy)
Broadcasting and acting are the kinds of professions usually chosen because the performer really likes doing it. They take quite a risk pursuing these careers and, further, must adopt strategies for the different psychological hurdles they will face. Knowing just this general backstory alone, I celebrate each job bravely landed.
When daring souls gather to evolve and get better at what they do, like a particle generator gone berserk, anything can happen, much of it all at once. And when it’s an ODay learning space, like a Bob Dylan show, you know it’ll be full of good material, but you never know the song set.
Boy, was it.
Home now, glutted with cool tips, insights and inside advice, I’m assured this next generation of VO performers will be the names which future aspirants will look up to as their Shining Examples, and of whom much will be… (pause) well spoken.
I’m back in the thin, dry air at 8,000 feet, reflecting on a long weekend down at sea level.
Each year, radio guru Dan O’Day brings together radio people from around the globe.
His International Radio Creative & Production Summit (which he has previously vowed to rename if you can come up with a title more pretentious) is two full days in a LAX Hilton conference room, packed to the gills with radio professionals.
Dan always limits the event to 100 attendees.
This year, something interesting happened. (Besides the convention of “leather enthusiasts” arriving next door.)
Nobody was wait-listed.
The room was only about half full.
And something else happened.
It was possibly Dan’s best Summit ever.
ENTHUSIASM IS CONTAGIOUS.
While good as always, I’m not sure the Summit presenter lineup was really that much better than previous years.
But there was an electricity, an energy, that hasn’t been experienced at the Summit for a while.
My guess?
It’s because the economy sucks.
Radio stations are making cuts left and right.
Those cuts include “unnecessary” expenses like sending creative and production people for training.
So the vast majority of attendees were there on their own dime. They were there because they wanted to be there.
And something else interesting about these folks.
To borrow the lovely British expression, many of them (yours truly included) had been “made redundant” by their employers.
Actually, I should qualify.
UPPER MANAGEMENT AT MY COMPANY TRIED TO MAKE ME REDUNDANT.
My boss wanted a compromise, which meant making me an independent contractor.
My response was, “OK, I’ll do it,” then using the ensuing free time to start my own company (with the invaluable assistance of my lovely wife).
And this leads me to the other really cool thing about so many of this year’s Summiteers.
All of those people who’ve been let go or chosen to leave jobs have really exciting things going on.
The inimitable Bob Souer, who so many readers would know as a long-time Salem Broadcasting production and voiceover figure, just left the Billy Graham organization.
Bob’s voiceover career has flourished remarkably. He’s now devoting himself full time to breathing life into other people’s scripts. He is also employing both his son and his daughter as part of his operation. (Maybe it’s just me, but Bob was also looking as if he might’ve wanted to join the leather enthusiasts next door.)
Pam Tierney, a long-time TV sales rep and part-time actress in Chicago, has been coming to the Summit for years to soak in the voiceover training.
She was planning to leave her job, didn’t feel right about it, waited, and a week later was laid off with full severance. She has plenty of cash and her acting career is flourishing wildly.
The most surprising attendee was legendary California disc jockey Bobby Ocean.
Bobby was there because the radio broadcasting landscape has changed. He wants to see about reinventing himself in the 21st century.
It was also Bobby who put voice to something that partly explains what’s going on here, and defines the problem with radio — why so many of these fabulously talented people are doing so incredibly well outside of broadcasting.
“THE PEOPLE RUNNING RADIO TODAY ARE NOT BROADCASTERS.”
His statement was short, efficient, and loaded with dynamite.
Indeed, there are no broadcasters in charge of broadcasting at large.
Yes, there are pockets of resistance. There are small station groups and family-owned companies that will stay healthy.
But by and large, it’s bean counters who make the decisions.
In my case, this explains how a national award-winning Creative Director — who can document his ability to generate ROI for his clients — gets axed after more than a decade of performance far beyond the level of the meager salary he was being paid. (That’s not puffery. I’m good at what I do. I’m also flawed. And I was earning about half the national average — a trade-off for the freedom that came with the gig.)
Evidently, the people in charge at the top had no concept. It’s not as if anyone knew enough to say the ridiculous: “He’s keeping our clients on the air? Let’s get rid of him!”
THE IDEA THAT IT WOULD COST THEM MONEY TO ELIMINATE AN EMPLOYEE CERTAINLY NEVER OCCURRED TO THEM.
Similarly, talented creative people across the nation are being eliminated from positions where they’re really needed rather badly.
Without talent, without dedicated people committed to making the medium better, you have nothing.
In one rather inexcusably cynical cost-cutting measure, the head of one major broadcasting company eliminated all the overnight air personalities, replacing them with full automation.
Quizzed on it, he is reported to have said, If these people were any good they wouldn’t be working the overnight.
Where do you think new air personalities come from? They’re hatched fully formed from the head of Zeus or Mel Karmazin?
Imagine if anyone had been asinine enough to say that about a legendary figure like Jean Shepherd, who was a middle-of-the-night sensation for ages.
ZERO UNDERSTANDING, ULTIMATELY LEADING TO ZERO REVENUE
It’s fascinating that people who are in charge of a medium that requires creativity to operate have no comprehension of creative capital.
And the proof that these people are indeed creative is evidenced by their continued success once the corporate conductor punches their ticket and sends them on their way.
Good, talented, creative people are going to thrive one way or another. That’s why so many of them, even in difficult times, are flying in from all over the country to convene at an event like Dan O’Day’s (and possibly consider an avocation in leather enthusiasm).
However, broadcasting companies that were once filled with these good, talented, creative people are suddenly going to find themselves pointless, pathetic and unprofitable.
You can’t eliminate the people who breathe life into what you sell, who give your clients’ advertising the fuel for success, and expect to continue having success.
It’s tragic, really.
For the companies, that is.
For those of us who’ve had exit strategies foisted upon us by ignorant, unaware, bean counting imbeciles (I mean that with love), it’s just an opportunity we never counted on.
Granted, the bean counters will always have jobs. They can use numbers to rationalize their way out of anything and continue failing upward.
As for those of us who convened at the Dan O’Day International Radio Creative & Production Summit, we are busy being profitable and having a much better time — including the opportunity to wonder about the leather enthusiasts.
