It is ironic that at a time when radio is under attack from many sides and radio should be at its absolute best, it has been plundered and is now at its most vulnerable. Long after everyone has forgotten how much talent and skill has been drained from the business, broadcasters will be wondering where all the listeners went.
Richard Harker
By Richard Harker
Group heads and general managers tell us that station revenues seem to be stabilizing. The large monthly drops seem to be slowing and those proverbial green shoots are starting to show. It remains possible that there will be more darkness before the dawn, but just maybe we’re bottoming out. In any case, it is a good time to reflect on the programming and marketing carnage that has been wrought, and the impact it will have in coming years.
We’ve lost a lot of good talent over the past few years. Personalities with decades of experience and personalities strongly linked to their stations have been sacked in an effort to reduce expenses. Live jocks have been replaced by voice tracking, local voices have been replaced by distant voices, and national personalities now fill an even greater part of many stations’ day.
Program directors who were once able to focus on creating a single compelling radio product are now saddled with overseeing multiple stations, even some outside their market. Most PDs pull an airshift, and now many handle music director duties on top of everything else.
Station advertising budgets have been cut and then eliminated. The only station promotions allowed are those directly tied to and paid for by a client.
Commercial load limits have drifted upwards as rates have plummeted. Concepts such as rate integrity and turning away business seem as quaintly obsolete as turntables.
Have any of these things happened to your radio station?
The greatest irony is that these cut-backs were made despite the fact that the majority of stations were still highly profitable at the time. In most cases, even with soft sales, the revenues generated by the stations exceeded the expenses of operating the radio stations. It wasn’t that stations were spending too much money. The draconian cutbacks were a consequence of the excessive debt the parent companies had taken on to create their radio empires.
Too little has been said about the irony of what radio has just endured. Radio groups paid top dollar and went deeply into debt to acquire radio station icons and legends only to turn around and plunder those same assets in order to survive their glutton.
Now what’s done is done and it is time to survey the carnage and reflect on what it means for radio station formats, programmers, and staff.
One thing is certain. Radio will never be the same. So many traditions (some would say luxuries) have gone away that groups will be reluctant to build the expenses back into the budget. Once a Chief Financial Officer figures out that you apparently don’t need an expense, you’ll be hard pressed to get it back.
How does one determine the value of an off-air PD? Or a PD that has just one or two stations to worry about rather than an entire market? How does one justify music testing when the station seems to be doing just fine without it?
The problem is that most of what we do in radio programming has what are called “lagged effects.” We do something, and it may be months and even years before the actual impact of our action is felt. Can we get by with syndicated shows? Sure–for a while. Can we get by without music testing or promotions, or advertising, or with twenty minutes of commercials? Sure–for a while.
Behind every Program Director’s desk should be a big sign that reads Payback is Hell. (Much more powerful then a sign that reads Lagged Effects.) Either sign will do. It is a reminder that there is a consequence to every programming action, but one that might not be felt for a while.
In fact, we often will have forgotten about what we did before we see the impact. As a result, we associate the result with something that happened more recently (and had nothing to do with the result).
Take the example of television advertising. Stations will run an effective television campaign and see no impact in the ratings. Sometimes the ratings will even go down. The GM will declare that TV doesn’t work and the expense was a waste. The next book the ratings will go up without TV and the GM will be even more frustrated.
What really happened was that the television campaign worked, but the full impact didn’t show up until months later. Countless academic studies have shown that this happens with most television campaigns. In fact consumer research shows that most changes in behavior occur very slowly. And so it is with listening.
Listening habits change very slowly. It is what we call Listener Inertia. A listener develops habitual patterns of listening. The clock radio is always tuned to the same station, maybe she listens to a different station at work, and may even use a third driving home. She probably listens to more stations than that, but she tends to go back to the same three over and over in a repeated pattern.
It takes time for a listener to discover a new station and then use it regularly enough to become part of the habitual pattern.
The winning over of a new listener does not occur in a moment of epiphany. As with the development of any new habit, behavior (listening to your station) that brings pleasure tends to be repeated. If the listener stumbles onto your station and likes what she hears, she will probably come back. But that process will have to be repeated many times before you permanently change her listening and it becomes habitual.
That’s why we have lagged effects. We do something good, we score points, but we don’t change long term behavior until we’ve done good things over and over.
The process that leads to changes in a person’s listening patterns works in both directions. Behavior that brings pleasure is repeated. Behavior that fails to bring pleasure is not.
Think about a favorite restaurant that you go to frequently. You go there because you like the food or the service and in the past you’ve enjoyed your meals there. You have a meal that doesn’t go well. The food isn’t quite as good. The service is not quite as friendly or prompt. Will you never go there again? No, despite the experience, you’ll probably go back, particularly if you have been eating there over a long period of time. Even if the second meal falls short of your expectations, you may still go back a few more times before you realize that the restaurant just isn’t as good as it once was. At some point you’ll probably stop going altogether, but it doesn’t happen right away.
We frequently find people who are unhappy with a station and yet continue to listen to it. Maybe they miss a favorite jock or the music isn’t as good as it once was, but they keep going back. Inertia is the only thing preventing these listeners from going elsewhere. If another station comes along at the right time, these vulnerable listeners will be gone.
What does that say about all the changes that radio has gone through? It says that the negative impacts of the many cut-backs will come over time. If your station has made many cut-backs and yet the numbers have held, don’t assume that the cut-backs didn’t matter. About the time that everyone starts forgetting those dark days, the station’s numbers will start drifting down. The drops won’t be dramatic, and because of Arbitron wobbles, there will even be up-ticks, but over time the numbers will start reflecting the consequences.
It is ironic that at a time when radio is under attack from many sides and radio should be at its absolute best, it has been plundered and is now at its most vulnerable. Long after everyone has forgotten how much talent and skill has been drained from the business, broadcasters will be wondering where all the listeners went.
Payback is going to be hell.
Richard Harker is President of Harker Research, a company providing a wide range of research services to radio stations in North America and Europe. Twenty-years of research experience combined with Richard’s 15 years as a programmer and general manager helps Harker Research provide practical actionable solutions to ratings problems. Visit www.harkerresearch or contact Richard at (919) 954-8300.
