By Bob Quick

Bob Quick

I recently spent about six hours at an unofficial reunion of a radio station I helped launch 25 years ago. A couple of the folks there were legends in the market on both the on-air and management sides of the building.

Over the years and people coming and going, none of us have any ties that still work at the station. In fact, since we launched the station, it has gone through four ownership changes. So, needless to say, there is no one in the building who was witness to the history of the station or really even has knowledge that some of the originals are still living in the market.

Five years ago when I still knew some folks in the building, I reached out to see if there were any plans for an official 20^th anniversary celebration. Nope. Nothing. Not even on the current management’s radar.

The station’s history is not lost on your listeners. Most people are born, go to school, and settle within 18 miles of mom. According to the New York Times article “The Typical American Lives Only 18 Miles From Mom,” only 20 percent of Americans live more than just a couple of hours from their parents. It flies in the face of all those holiday movies where the prodigal son or daughter returns home from some far off place to spend the holidays with their small town, backwards family.

I personally was with the station when it launched and left after about 10 years. I wasn’t the last of the original launch team to leave but was one of the last. I returned to the market to sell advertising for another station after about a 7-year absence and I was humbled to be remembered by some folks at a remote about a year after my return. It had been almost 10 years since I last cracked the mic in the market and they still wanted to take a picture with me!

Sadly, forgetting our history is easy in radio. It is also out of the realm of our frame of reference because radio so transient. Then add consolidation and frequent ownership changes…our history has gotten lost.

Some AM stations are approaching their 100^th anniversary soon. Talk about history!

In the rush of consolidation, I remember old promotional items, jingle packages, airchecks, even commercials…all tossed in the dumpster for the sake of progress or to save space in a move to a new building. What a shame.

What we do affects people’s lives and our history is not lost on our long-time listeners. They remember the crazy car promotion or the fireworks show or the charity drive. These events impacted their lives.

I also remember a story from this particular station told to me years ago. There was a factory in town that blew an 8 o’clock whistle for decades, maybe even over a century, and you can still hear it today. Our morning guy picked up on it way back then and added a steam whistle sound effect to his show daily at 8 o’clock no matter what was going on. It was a local thing that any consultant just didn’t understand. He told me years later he was asked by a man why he stopped playing the whistle. You guessed it, new management came in and thought his whistle wasn’t something they’d like to continue. To his credit, he didn’t gripe to the listener about it and he was floored why he was asked about it. You see the man and his son always knew where they had to be on their trip to school in the morning by the time they heard the whistle, whether they would be late or not. It became their little private game. His son died unexpectedly and the whistle continued as a daily reminder of those great memories for the man. So he never understood why it stopped and he was compelled to ask.

What we do affects people.

One of the discussions we had at our gathering was a toy drive we did annually through a station promoted motorcycle ride. Oh, the station still does the promotion and one of our historians in our crowd mentioned he heard a talent talk about how the ride this year was “the biggest ever.” He was scoffing at the number of riders mentioned in the break counted 200 when we used to draw 7 times that number.

Don’t misquote me, I’m not belittling the station’s efforts. Any charitable endeavor by radio should be praised and saluted.

I mention it because it’s one example of forgetting our past. Maybe if the radio station made some of these, for lack of a better term, old-timers, ambassadors of the station for historic or annual events they could not only bring that perspective to the promotion but also add an element of nostalgia and make it even more successful.

The point I’m trying to make is that you have people in your market with a long history with your listeners that may or may not still be on the payroll. And when radio is most embraced by Baby Boomers and Gen X, there is an opportunity to play on their nostalgia by bringing back some of the folks from the past when doing long-standing promotions or creating an anniversary event. It takes a little leg work on your part if you aren’t a native to the market, but you’ll benefit from the bond these trailblazers made with your listeners.

Bob Quick has performed just about every job in a radio station…on-air, programming, operations, sales, and management. Currently he works with over 300 radio stations in his 29 state territory as Manager, Radio Partnerships at Motor Racing Network and helps numerous other small and medium market stations through his business Quick Radio Consulting.