Until now, I never realized what type of technology is radio’s true strength: Emotional technology.
Jeffrey Hayzlett is Chief Marketing Officer for Eastman Kodak.
Imagine the situation Kodak found itself in when suddenly its bread & butter product — film — was considered obsolete in a digital age.
(Gosh, I can’t think of another industry facing similar challenges. Can you?)
In this video snippet from this year’s PD Grad School, Hayzlett eloquently and gently reminds us what Radio needs to do to survive.
Hayzlett is author of the current best selling business book, THE MIRROR TEST. It’s worth clicking on this link and grabbing a copy. (I already have mine, and I’ve made notes on almost every page.)
After graduating from the Bill Wade School of Radio & Television in Hollywood, I ran an ad in the “Situations Wanted” section of Broadcasting magazine:
“DJ, good commercials, tight board. Will relocate.”
To my surprise, someone offered me a job. I sold my few belongings and moved from Los Angeles to a tiny town you never heard of.
My first day on the job, the PD gave me the task of “carting up” some commercials.
If you’re too young to know what that means, go read some other blog. No, wait — come back, I’ll explain.
Commercials produced outside the radio station arrived on a 7″ reel of magnetic recording tape. A universal production chore was the transferring of commercials from the tape reels to tape cartridges, or “carts.” The carts are what we played on the air.
Okay?
My PD told me to dub some spots from reel to cart.
To his surprise, that was a problem.
Although during my four months of intense training at the Bill Wade School of Radio & Television I played lots of carts, they never taught us how to record onto an audio cartridge.
I’m sure one of the highlights of my PD’s radio career was the day he learned the new DJ he’d imported from California didn’t know how to hit the “record” button on a cart machine simultaneous with hitting the “play” button on a reel-to-reel machine.
Spend an entire day at home, listening to four formats you never listen to.
One of the Big Dumb Things that radio people do is pay attention only to what’s happening within their own format. As a result, everyone in that format is exposed to the same limited set of stimuli.
Same Old Stimuli lead to Same Old Ideas.
But New Stimuli almost always produce New Ideas.
Pick the four formats that are farthest from your own — formats with which yours has the least in common.
Listen to each station for two hours.
Keep three separate lists during this listening day:
1. A list of everything you hear that they are doing better than your station.
2. A list of everything you hear that they are not doing as well as your station.
3. A list of everything they are doing that is new to you: a new way to get into or out of news, a new way to brand their programming or promotions, a new way to enhance their “more music” or “up-to-date” news image.
You should end up with several tactics that are not being exploited by your direct competition. If you adapt them for your own on-air use, they will be completely new and fresh to your listeners.
