DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

This is another in my series of brief yet relevant radio job descriptions.

A radio station’s I.T. (Information Technology) Department might be one guy who’s juggling multiple stations.

It might be an unknown number of “guys at corporate” (i.e., at the corporate office, somewhere far away) who may or may not respond to urgent emails from your station’s manager or program director.

The I.T. Department’s Job Description

To manage the flow of information to and from employees.

That means maximizing the ease of information flow while protecting the integrity of the company’s information.

It does not mean erecting clumsy, inefficient systems that inhibit the ability to communicate with each other and with others.

It doesn’t require any special ability to erect a firewall that promiscuously rejects e-mails with no flexibility or accountability.

Your I.T. department should be working for you. Not the other way around.

If your I.T. department tells you what your company can and cannot do — regardless of what the owners and managers want to do — then at least call it by its appropriate name:

The I.P. (Information Prevention) Department.

The opening line of this commercial is promising.

As an experiment, stop the audio player after the ad’s first sentence. Then imagine what kinds of information you’ll learn during the rest of the commercial.

You played just the first line, right? Okay, now play the rest of the radio commercial.

The opening line promises to share some “amazing” information with us regarding the amount of food our family goes through in a single day.

Okay, I’m intrigued.

Is it X number of calories, which converts to enough electricity to power Y number of light bulbs for Z hours?

Is it twice as much as the amount of food a typical American family consumed two generations ago?

Here’s the “amazing” information: Our family has breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks.

Wow. Who knew?

Hint: An insipid, inane opening line does not encourage the audience to keep listening. Which is why so few of them ever will hear the rest of that commercial.

The latest issue of my Radio Advertising Letter features two exceptionally valuable tools for helping to define a new commercial campaign, plus a sly method of making sure your station gets all the credit it deserves for generating “remote broadcast” attendance.

This posting is for subscribers to add their own comments….