DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

It’s amazing how much smarter I’ve become about how to get along with radio station management now that I no longer have to do it.

Back in my disc jockey and PD days, my idea of “diplomacy” was to try not to raise my voice while pointing out to my manager why he or she was an idiot.

A while ago I received a help request from the program director of a station that is owned by a large radio group:

“Months ago I received corporate approval to attend an industry conference, with my registration to be paid for by the radio station. I’m expected to participate in the corporate programming meetings prior to the conference.

“But I can’t get the station manager to issue a check for the registration. Whenever I ask about it, he just says, ‘We’ll have to talk about that later.’

“I’m already paying my own travel and hotel expenses. Compared to how much money I’m making here, I’ll have to go into debt if I pay the registration fee, too.

“Frankly, if I weren’t expected to be at the programming meetings, I’d be happy to stay home. But I’m on the roster of attendees, and they expect me to be there.

“Should I remain passive and not make a big deal about it? Should I call the Corporate Director of Programming and ask him to call my GM? Or should I take vacation days and register myself with no reimbursement?”

Instead of asking the Corporate Director of Programming to call the GM (which could cause you conflict with the GM), I’d suggest calling him and saying, “I just wanted to check in with you and let you know that it looks like I won’t be able to attend the meeting at (Event). Although it was in the budget, I just can’t seem to get our GM to authorize the registration.”

By putting this in a phone call rather than an e-mail, the message can’t be copied & passed around to other people…e.g., the GM.

Meanwhile, you’re not complaining about anything or anyone. You’re simply calling the Corporate Director of Programming, apologetically, to explain why you can’t be at that meeting he wants you to attend.

Don Pelham

On Tuesday, Don Pelham spent 2.5 hours teaching radio station account executives How To Sell Radio Advertising To Car Dealers.

I’m making the mp3 recording (along with the PDF Study Guide) available for download for just a few days. If you’re a radio station account exec, GSM, GM, etc., you really should download your copy now.

But even if you don’t, here’s a free excerpt that should help you: Don’s Five Questions You Should Ask The Car Dealer.

The following is excerpted from Fundamentals of Radio Programming by Randy Michaels….

If you have a music station, then I would say music probably is the most important part of your product. But I am disappointed by how poorly most stations rotate music. By the dissonance between what the PD thinks is going on and what a hard analysis of the music system shows.

I’d like to offer some suggestions on thinking through music rotations. It’s common to look at a station’s research, to analyze the spins, and it’s typical that we’re not spinning the biggest hit records. If you looked at what we’re spinning vs. the call-out data, they don’t seem to line up.

There are a lot of reasons for that, peer pressure probably being the largest. If you do research, you spend a lot of money on it. And then you get influenced by the trade publications or by what certain big-name PDs are doing.

Every record has a life cycle: Introduction, Adoption, Maturity, and then Decline. And those curves all can look different.

But record companies have an agenda. You may have a record you’ve been playing for 12 weeks, and it’s still a Power. But it’s dropped off of the trade publications, so I’d better move it down.

What?? Who cares about the trades? Who cares that the record label wants?

The record company says, “Oh, no, we’re pushing the next cut now!”

And the PD says, “Oh, well, I guess I’d better put that on. Screw the audience. The record company is much more important to me.”

You don’t even help the labels that way, because they do best when we play the music people want to hear. They’re in business to sell records. And although they have an agenda and they’d like to sell the ones they’ve picked, they really don’t care; they’d just like to sell music. And we’ll do better for them if we play hits.

And Country is the worst!

“Oh, he’s got a new song out! Got to take that one off.”

“But it’s still testing #3!”

“No, can’t play it any more. It’s not a Current; people will make fun of me. They’ll think I don’t know what I’m doing; I’ve still got that record in Power, and it’s old!”

Well, I’d rather have a good rating and big bonus than a gold record.

The opening line of a radio commercial has two goals:

• To get the attention of the targeted consumer

• To get that targeted consumer to listen to the next line of the commercial.

Most radio commercials fail. But not this one:

If you don’t experience “hot flashes,” odds are you won’t stick around for the second line of that radio commercial.

Which doesn’t bother this advertiser at all, because no matter how good the commercial is…

You ain’t gonna be buying.

But women who are bothered by those menopausal symptoms? They’ll continue to listen.

See, it’s really not that difficult, is it?