KPRI/San Deigo PD Haley Jones arrived at the highly respected Triple A outlet three years ago taking over a station that had battled signal issues and a highly competitive market to maintain an audience in the market. Since then, Jones has seen the number rise, culminating in 4.0 share in February. Jones talks about the strategy used to achieve that success in this week’s eQB
Haley Jones
By Jack Barton
When Haley Jones left the MD post at KSWD/Los Angeles to head south to San Diego’s Triple A KPRI, she was taking over a station that, while highly respected in the Triple A community, had battled signal issues and a highly competitive market to perennially score around a 1.0 share in Arbitron books. Since then, Jones has applied the skills she learned over years in programming at outlets like KFOG/San Francisco and KMTT/Seattle, along with her passion for both music and radio, to lift KPRI to a 4.0 in the last PPM numbers, with the station trending the same for the following month. With PPM making it even tougher for stations focused on new music to score big ratings, how did she do it? Read on and find out.
When you got to KPRI it was a station with a perennial 1.0 share. Now there was a big 4.0 share in that last book. What was your strategy in driving these numbers?
Where do I start? Honestly, it’s some luck. We have great music, it’s a great time for Triple A and I’m fortunate enough to have owners that believe enough in the brand to market the station. I don’t mean that we’re spending a million dollars in marketing, but we have a great little TV commercial and we’re buying weeks here and there; it’s really moving the needle. I also have a staff full of phenomenal pros that are ridiculously focused right now, and they’re working on every little teeny, tiny detail. When we listen around the market and we listen around the world, one of the things we’re finding is everyone is so busy, that they don’t sound engaged on the air. So we work really hard to sound engaged. What a concept, right? I don’t think we nail it 100 percent of the time, but we’re trying and we’re doing better than we did a year ago. I have a great MD now (Bryan Schock) and I have a consultant by the name of Tim Moore. He’s a phenomenal talent coach. It’s a lot of things coming together. It’s three years of blood, sweat and tears, not just from me but from the entire staff.
Assuming your staff is just as over-worked as all those other stations’ staffs, how do you keep them focused and engaged?
I ask them please and I tell them thank you. I work really hard to be a good manager. Not that I pull it off everyday, but I read a lot of books on how to be a better manager. I meet with them a lot, and just as I ask them to be engaged on the air, I do everything I can to be engaged during our meetings. And we talk a lot about the less is more concept. It’s about communicating in the over-communicated world. It’s about making what you do say count, as opposed to adding a lot more breaks. So we spend a lot of time self-editing.
One of your concerns from the time you walked into KPRI has been being able maintain the station’s status as a leader in breaking new music, while still competing in the PPM game. You seem to have solved that.
We certainly are more mass appeal today than a year ago, and definitely more mass appeal than we were three years ago when I came here. I feel like I walk a tightrope every day; mass appeal enough to be competitive, yet always looking for unique records that make KPRI different. And it’s a balance of that every day, every music set and every quarter hour.
Right now, KPRI is playing Bruno Mars, but we’re still playing The Avett Brothers and Ben Howard. So it’s just balance. I can’t take a shot on every record, but we try to pick the best ones to take a shot on. Ben Howard is a good example of that because that record really connected for us.
Playing cool, new records is a little harder when every format is picking up the ones that only Triple A used to play. When you have Pop stations playing Mumford & Sons, fun. and The Lumineers, how do you differentiate yourself?
You get a different vibe when you listen to KPRI than you do on other stations, and there are still records in that quarter hour that make us unique. So on the Pop station in town, you’re just going to hear hit after hit, and then after 30 minutes you might hear the same hit after hit after hit. On KPRI it’s a really nice mix of then and now. We’re still playing The Rolling Stones, The Cure andDepeche Mode. Mix that in with The Avett Brothers and Bruno Mars, and now it starts to sound like KPRI, and that’s different from what you’re getting across the street. It’s one of our biggest challenges. I’m not sure I have it completely figured out, and it’s a really good question.
How much do you rely on your gut and how much do you rely on traditional resources to try to figure that out?
There are way too many resources today to not have to rely on your gut. I can have a record that has awful M scores, but great research with my database or with my P1s. What do you do? Often times I’ll play it anyway. I look at every little piece of information and then at the end I look at what my gut’s saying, and usually my gut breaks the tie. Obviously with a brand new record you don’t have anything other than your gut.
Can you cite some examples of gut successes and maybe even once or twice when you were wrong?
We played Gotye before everyone else, obviously that panned out. The Head and the Heart is a record that nobody else in town played, but it’s still one of my top testing records; it won’t go away. I can’t kill that song, even if I wanted to. Another great record I think the format missed is John Mayer’s “Queen of California.” That record has been Top 5 for me for months and months and months; again, a record I can’t make go away. Times when my gut didn’t pan out? There are a lot, but I don’t want to call anyone out.
You spent some time on the record promotion side, which might give you a little bit better perspective of the demands on everyone’s time. How can radio and labels work more productively with each other?
That’s a big question. It’s so competitive right now; it’s more competitive than ever. I think it’s harder than ever. Somebody really smart once said to me that PPM is like the big black hole, and eventually it sucks everyone into the middle. San Diego is one of the most competitive markets in the country, if not the most competitive, because of all the Mexican signals. We have two Alternatives, for a long time we had two Hot ACs, and we have three Pop stations. The list is just endless. There are times when KPRI will be out on a limb and play a band 1000 times, and really put a stamp on it and one of our competitors will end up with a show with that band. Do I jump up and down and scream? Sure. Do I think it’s okay? No. How do we work better together? When I figure it out I’ll let you know.
Communicating is obviously key. We need more advocates for our format in front of really important people. That said, the challenge at our format is the Number One record at Triple A probably means maybe 100,000 units sold, and 300,000 units at AC, and a Number One record at Pop probably means 3 million. Follow the dollars. It’s a challenge that Triple A will continue to have. Certainly success stories like KPRI, Cities97 (KTCZ/Minneapolis-St. Paul) and KGSR/Austin won’t hurt, it can only help.
Tell us about some of the plans you have for KPRI to both take advantage of the unprecedented success you’re having and to ensure that it continues.
Welcome to my long sleepless nights; success brings a whole different set of issues. It’s really interesting how it works. It will take being innovative. We will need to continue to be engaged. We’ll continue to need to put our time and energy and effort into every little detail we can.
Let’s move to a question that people talk about every year in Boulder at our Triple A Conference: a clear definition of the Triple A format. What’s yours?
KPRI is an Adult Rock radio station for San Diego, although I’ve grown fond of the fact that people don’t get Triple A. I’ve heard stories about competitors who say, “KPRI, why should I worry about KPRI? They’re Triple A!” That’s great for me. It allows me to go unnoticed. But yes, Triple A is Adult Rock that means different things for different communities.
[eQB Content By Jack Barton]
