Nuvoodoo Research: Leigh Jacobs & Carolyn Gilbert
We’ve been reviewing what we learned about personalities in our study for this year’s Country Radio Seminar as we prepare for a CRS 360 in the weeks ahead. At the big study presentation in Nashville, we showed that 3 out of 5 County radio listeners (1,185 of them in a nationwide sample of 1.500 Country music fans 18-54) like at least a few of the DJs on Country stations (and over a fifth consider the stations and DJs part of their community).
In that presentation we used AI to help us review and summarize thousands of open-ended comments we collected from respondents in our sample. For the upcoming CRS 360 webinar, we pulled from the file of open-ended comments and will be sharing nearly a hundred of them throughout the new presentation. It’s the consistency of what respondents say they value in the hosts on Country radio that made us want to share these comments. We hope it drives home what really matters. We’ll be sharing more from that presentation here in the future.
In the TV era, radio’s distinction was that it’s live and local, right? Though, even in the heyday of the DJ era, most of the “local” programming consisted of pre-recorded music. Radio gave more time to its on-air talent in the days before PPM and that allowed some greater amount of “local” content. More importantly, listeners had fewer listening options – especially away from their homes.
PPM measurement taught us that non-music content needed to be limited and carefully controlled to minimize tune-out. Even before the mobile Internet became as ubiquitous as it is today, consolidation meant that larger radio companies could deploy their best talent to do “local” shows across stations around the country. The best of those performers use resources available on the Internet to do show prep for distant markets and stay in touch with local management to have a finger on the pulse of a distant market.
The pressure to maintain profitability in the face of a difficult revenue environment has led to cutbacks so that fewer performers are doing more shows in more markets – sometimes minimizing the opportunity to do diligent local show prep. The result is less localization and fewer opportunities to maintain the illusion of being “live.”
Radio remains free – and “free” is important to some. But there are free, ad-supported versions of DSPs. While the ads in those versions can get repetitive, the commercial loads are lower than on broadcast radio. And, yes, the free versions of those services limit the number of songs you can skip, but the algorithms improve with every skip.
As we’re also becoming accustomed to being able to skip an ad on YouTube after five seconds, a 60-second radio commercial – especially one with bad creative – is an eternity. Of course, we need fewer commercials, but shorter commercials would be an improvement, and BETTER commercials would be amazing. Podcasts are quickly learning what radio learned decades ago: spots read by the hosts draw in listeners and generate results.
Listeners generally don’t care whether hosts are local or live (or in some cases whether they’re there at all). Many listeners are just hoping to hear some songs they like before commercials come up. If the host is entertaining or informative, that’s a plus. If their comments are recent enough to sound live, that ups the chance that their comments are relevant. If their comments are about the local market that also makes them more likely to be relevant.
Today it’s more important that what’s on the air is relevant than sounding perfect or even professional. Working to make what’s on the air relevant to a station listener, working to make it unique and interesting, working toward connection with the listener is critical.
Determine the local issues and interests of your audience and get involved on and off air. Find out what makes them proud of your market and reflect that on the air. Make contact with listeners. Reply to emails and texts. Respond to comments on social media. Answer the phone. If you can’t afford focus groups, set up a listener advisory panel and talk to them in-house. If you’re too busy to set up a listener advisory panel, talk to them at community events or at paid appearances for clients – keeping in mind that those folks will probably be kinder and more enthusiastic than the average listener.
Make sure what you learn from listeners gets reflected on the air every hour – hopefully more often. If the programming elements most likely to tell listeners what market the station serves are the commercials, you have room to improve the relevance of your programming. Getting this local information on the air means spreading that information and what to do with it through your air staff – even when those staffers are people you never see because they live 600 miles away from your station and record their shifts from home. It’s not easy, but it’s important. You must play the ratings game to build ratings, but you must serve your local community to remain relevant in the long run.
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