DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

British Airways has a long, proud history of lousy advertising. Their losing streak continues with this radio commercial.

What do you picture when you think of “London”? Some guy giving a tedious tour?

And those idiotic, unrealistic tourists hanging on his every word? Guess whom they’re supposed to represent?

The target audience.

This commercial tells us the tour guide’s story (albeit in a patently, insultingly fake manner). It should be telling the story of the targeted listener, visiting London via British Airways. And more importantly, showing us the results those targeted listeners will experience.

(Excerpted from Randy Michaels’ FUNDAMENTALS OF RADIO PROGRAMMING.

There is a hierarchy of importance in any radio station.

What is most important about your radio station?

The Product?

No.

Bottom Line?

No. The most important thing is your signal.

If they can’t hear you, it doesn’t matter.

You can put together the greatest radio station anyone has ever conceived, but if people can’t hear it then it isn’t worth it.

The first thing you do when you program a radio station is look at who you cover, where the signal is strong.

The signal, by the way, isn’t that circle they have on the map in the Sales Department. “Signal” is a very complex thing.

How much signal does it take for the average radio to work? There’s no good answer to that.

In the absence of any other strong signals, .5 millivolts may be killer on FM.

But if you have a very strong transmitter next door, you can have what’s called desense. Cheap radios have their internal amplifiers all turned down by a nearby strong signal. A car radio hears it while a clock radio doesn’t and a Walkman doesn’t.

You have signals that cause intermodulation, which spoils the reception of another signal. As you think about your programming, you should know a lot about your signal.

There are neighborhoods where it’s good and neighborhoods where it’s bad. Radios where it’s good, radios where it’s bad.

When I go to a market for the first time, I drive around with a dozen different radios. I go through office buildings, I listen in different neighborhoods on different kinds of radios and really try to understand the signal.

The signal is first & foremost; that’s your Distribution. Procter & Gamble knows you can’t buy Tide if you can’t find it on the shelf. It’s all about Distribution.

If you don’t have the best signal in the market, doing too well can be a problem. Because if you do really well on a secondary signal, somebody with a great signal can take your position just because they’re easier to find on the dial. There are dozens of examples of this.

Signal is the most important thing. If they can’t hear you, it’s a problem.

When I was building Jacor and later Clear Channel, I started with transmitter power. I didn’t care if the format was Religion or Polka or whatever. Just give me the biggest transmitter. WLW/Cincinnati was the first radio station I was a part of buying, and it was bankrupt. But I wanted the 50,000-watt transmitter.

It all starts with the signal

Here is where you can read the entire FUNDAMENTALS OF RADIO PROGRAMMING, and here’s where you can hear it.

September, 1994 (continued):

Two incidents stand out in memory of my return to the Leipzig (Germany) airport, as I prepared to fly to Hamburg. One was running into European radio legend Ad Roland
(pictured below, in his pirate radio days) as I waited to go through security.

If you’ve ever attended my How To Create Maximum Impact Radio Advertising seminar and heard me tell the “Matthew In Leipzig” story, here’s the first-hand account of that event.

Ad greeted me with a loud, cheerful, “So, Dan, do you have a bomb in that suitcase?” In the U.S, of course, making a joke like that in an airport is against the law. It didn’t seem to please the Leipzig security guards, either.

There were two guards, both of them big and surly, looking like the stereotype of an East German border guard. They spoke very little English. One noticed my computer case and demanded, “What is that?”

“A computer,” I replied.

“Turn it on.”

So I fired up my Macintosh Powerbook. Seeing that it really was a computer, he scowled and turned away, gesturing to indicate that he was through with me.

I started to shut down the computer when an odd thought struck me. The Powerbook had a built-in condenser microphone, and I had recorded my two kids on it. I opened the appropriate file and called to the guard, “Excuse me??”

He looked up, surprised and suspicious. Unsmilingly, I waved him back toward me — a rather insolent move, I thought. He came over and I pointed to the computer screen and then clicked on the mouse. Out of the computer came the voice of my four-year old boy: “Hi, my name is Matthew!”

I don’t know what the guard had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t Matthew saying hi. I smiled and said — in completely ungrammatical German — “Mein kinder.” The guard smiled broadly and called his partner over to see this.

I played it for them a couple of more times and then closed up the computer. They turned back to the people standing in line — but this time with smiles instead of scowls.

Meanwhile I kept thinking, “This should be a tv commercial for Powerbooks.”