Programming veteran Chris Mays signed on as PD of Alpha Broadcasting’s Triple A KINK/Portland last October, charged with maintaining a heritage audience while building the younger demo in a PPM world. In this week’s cover story Mays talks about her strategy to achieve that, while also sharing some unconventional wisdom on how to do it.
Chris Mays
By Jack Barton
Triple A KINK/Portland PD – or Programming Guru as her card says – Chris Mays has spent her lifetime in radio working in jobs from jocking to promotions to programming in formats that have included Rock and AC. But Mays is probably best known as the Station Manager who, during Triple A’s infancy, flipped Seattle’s KBRD to launch what has grown into one of Triple A’s most respected outlets, KMTT, The Mountain. After over fourteen years at The Mountain, Mays left Seattle and Triple A for a stay at AC KLLC/San Francisco in the middle of the last decade, and then set out on a consulting path, until Portland’s locally owned and operated Alpha Broadcasting approached her in late 2010 to take over the programming reins at KINK.
In this week’s Cover Story, Mays talks about tackling the issues that face programmers today, while remaining relevant to all ends of the demo, including those that have been loyal listeners for decades. She also puts forth an idea or two that may be contrary to “conventional wisdom,” but make a great deal of sense.
When you came into KINK, the station was struggling to recapture its diary numbers in a PPM world. What are some of the challenges PPM creates for a station that plays a lot of new music?
That’s one of the things we had to change about KINK. We’re not playing as much new music as KINK once formerly was. People like to say that Triple A listeners are “too sophisticated” to carry people meters. But the reality is, if you look at the cume on most of these stations, somebody has a people meter on their wrist or their ankle or whatever, because they have the cume. So people are listening to those stations. It’s just that the real reported listening is different than the diary, top-of-mind awareness reported listening. It’s our challenge to keep them listening longer and to keep them returning. It’s more difficult with a format that isn’t built on a huge cume basis, as Triple A has primarily relied on TSL, and people meter is really about cume. If you have a strong cume you should be able to build the TSL.
You also had other challenges that come with a successful heritage station like an aging audience, multi-media and in-market competition. Talk about the process of evaluating a station’s current place in the market, as well as the steps you can take to maintain an existing audience while growing the younger audience.
I came in asking a lot of questions. I call it “peeling back the onion.” The questions were why we do things the way we do, how long we have been doing it this way and if it’s still effective; just evaluating everything that the station did. I believed that we were slightly off target musically in terms of the market. Portland, while it’s very hip, is a relatively blue collar town. It has a lot of hippies – there’s still waterbed stores here – but the basis is blue collar; the logging business.
All you have to do is listen to stations that are at the top of the heap on the people meter, and most of them are gold-based radio stations.
I’ve found that KINK veered away a little bit from that position. It was a tad too contemporary and needed to be placing a little bit more emphasis on balancing the newer music with the legendary songs that stand the test of time.
The cell that the station has performed the best in has been 45–54, primarily women, and obviously that’s not enough to live on. We have to grow that demo. We have to include men in the segment. We have to work to bring in the younger side of things. So I’ve moved the new music portfolio side a little bit more toward the Black-Eyed Peas, Portugal the Man, Florence & The Machine, and then added on some of the more mellow side of people’s favorite artists that are well known by KGON and the Oldies stations like The Stones, Petty and Springsteen, and combined it with the core KINK music.
But even Triple A isn’t just about the music. How else do you address the issue of maintaining the station’s heritage while still seeing growth?
We’re trying to liven up ourselves. We’re trying to have more fun. We’re trying to be more light-hearted and less NPR. The station traditionally has had a very serious approach, and we’re trying to add a little bit of levity without being goofy. We’re using more audience participation in contests, more Facebook, more Twitter, involving the audience more on-the-air, off-the-air, and in the jock approach. I’ve made a few changes and the nature of the changes have been to create more of a lifestyle-friendly, fun approach, as opposed to the more serious traditional approach of KINK in the past.
You mentioned working toward more audience involvement over all platforms. How do you mesh the social media side with the terrestrial radio side?
There are so many ways to do it, and we’re really just at the tip of the iceberg. Facebook is our primary source right now. We have over 14,000 Facebook friends. I’ve looked at other radio stations around the country and that’s a pretty phenomenal number for any station. So that’s an actively engaged audience that’s really more socially involved or tied into us. We used to rely exclusively on our database and our email programs to deliver internal messages about our product to our fans. But with Facebook you can be very immediate, very air active.
We had a contest recently to give away trips to the Sunset Sessions. How we did that was with musical montages, and they were really hard. There were five songs and you had to name the five songs and the artists in the correct order. I’m telling you they were about ten seconds long, and they were really hard. The final one was all whistling songs, five songs with whistling. We found out that people were using Facebook to collaborate with each other, where they would say, “I’ve got the first three, does anybody know what four is?” They were virally spreading the message and working with each other to try and win the contest.
It’s obviously an easy informational tool and a way to get out changes about what’s going on at the station or something special that’s coming up. If we have an appearance in the Bing Lounge and it’s not fully booked, you can go on Facebook and say that the next ten people who like us will receive a Bing Lounge invitation.
You’ve always been a believer in live and local radio, values that have become harder to maintain as technology has continued to advance and budgets have continued to shrink. What can the programmer of today do to pursue that direction?
I’m blessed that I’m in a circumstance where Alpha only owns the stations in this cluster. So we are local. We’re not a big corporation, and we are primarily live. The weekends had been voice tracked until I got here. I begged and pleaded because we cannot go from Friday night until Monday morning without being able to react to a situation like what occurred in Tucson on a Saturday afternoon – or if the weather changes or if the Ducks win – and go through the entire weekend without any reference to that. There’s just so much stuff that happens over the course of a weekend that it’s really dangerous not to have any live programming on.
I have managed recently to hire some part-time air talent for the weekends, and I’m very excited about that. I think that will help the station tremendously, having people there to answer the phone, to respond to email. All of those are things that when you’re not live, or you’re not local, you can’t do. I know we are under tremendous financial pressures, and there are certainly decisions that need to be made. I would just suggest to people who are in a position to make those choices that there might be other places that would be better cut than your on-air talent.
Such as?
We made the very, very difficult decision to stop streaming our SBR side channels. We had four of them. We had an Acoustic channel, a Blues channel, a New Music channel and a Lights Out channel, and they were incredibly popular. People used them a lot and they were great imaging for the brand. However, we were paying for music licensing and we were paying for bandwidth. While the cost from SBR was quite reasonable to put the stations together, the more people used them the more expensive they became, and they’re not encoded. So somebody can sit at work and listen all day long to the KINK Acoustic channel, and we get no diary credit and we’re paying for it. The bandwidth and the music licensing for those channels was adding up to $4,500 a month. That’s a salary. That certainly pays for weekend, part-time people.
Yes, if people don’t like your music or they’re in the mood for something specific like the all acoustic music, they’re going to go somewhere else. But why pay to provide them that option? They can find it if they want it. They could go to Pandora, certainly. But we were providing the options for them to leave our terrestrial and our streaming signal. So that’s an area that we felt was not in our best interest financially to use, when the $50,000 could be reallocated to have live programming on the weekends.
So you decided to focus on your core business first?
You’re right! I hated to do it. I love SBR and the channels were fabulous, but really, it came up when we started talking about if we were going to have a Christmas channel this year. There’s a solid base for doing so, to prevent them from going to the other station that’s playing all Christmas music. However, if you’re playing hit Christmas music on your channel and they can get it 24-7, it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
Was there backlash from people you would have considered important core listeners when you did that?
Yes, there was a lot of backlash. But what was interesting, some of the most heavy users – people who listened continuously all day long, at work for eight hours a day – were living in Phoenix or Indonesia.
Today, everybody’s workload is heavier and radio certainly does not offer the perks that were there for previous generations. How do you create an environment that encourages staffers to remain creative and productive given the extra responsibility and tasks that they’re asked to do?
I do it by being open, by being transparent, by giving them as much information as I feel is appropriate to share with them without sharing corporate inside information. I try to keep them as knowledgeable about what’s going on in every department in the radio station as possible. I listen to their ideas. I offer suggestions, but I don’t put down mandates. I don’t say they have to do it a certain way. I just ask if they’re about doing it that way and that seems to generate their thinking process. Sometimes you find that people are ready to do something, and all it took was you bringing it up.
Let’s close with your thoughts on the future of the medium of radio.
The demise of radio has been greatly exaggerated. It’s free, people like free. As long as it remains relevant it will remain a viable medium. We should give up on HD. It’s a waste of money and time. We should stick to our primary terrestrial channels and streaming, advancing our stream. I have a contrary point-of-view regarding putting FM radios on cell phones. I believe there are apps for that if people really want to listen to their radio on their cell phones. But for the most part they don’t want to listen to a radio on a cell phone. Finally, the more important effort would be to get AFTRA to allow us to stream on the spot so that we could simulcast our primary and secondary signals. I’d have a 4.5 share radio station, but I can’t add it up because the commercials aren’t the same and that’s ridiculous.
[eQB Content by Jack Barton]
