Chris Herrmann has spent a lifetime in radio, most notably at Classic Rock WCSX/Detroit, followed by a stint as PD of then-Triple A WBOS/Boston, leading to his current gig as PD of Pamal Broadcasting’s Triple A in New York City’s suburban Westchester County, WXPK (The Peak). Herrmann speaks to FMQB about the process of branding a small, local station with a limited budget in a tertiary market while facing challenges from the major market flamethrowers with major market resources, and how The Peak is winning the battle.
Chris Herrmann
By Jack Barton
Chris Herrmann has spent a lifetime in radio, most notably at Classic RockWCSX/Detroit, followed by a stint as PD of then-Triple A WBOS/Boston. But one of his greatest challenges came in 2004 when Pamal Broadcasting offered him the opportunity to sign on a Triple A in New York City’s suburban Westchester County,WXPK (The Peak), with the mission of branding the station as the local suburban alternative to NYC’s non-comm Triple A, WFUV.
Of course in a format that shares audience with many other formats, Herrmann not only found himself competing with ’FUV, but with Classic Rock WAQX (Q104) and, eventually, WRXP, a younger-leaning Triple A/Alternative hybrid. Through it all, despite an economic downturn and the resource crunch that has been put on the entire industry, Herrmann and his staff have managed to build a radio station that not only scores well in the Westchester market 12+, but – in Westchester – outranks all of its competition in the 25-44 target demo, pulling in a 4.0.
In a recent conversation, Herrmann spoke to FMQB about the process of branding a small, local station with a limited budget in a tertiary market while facing challenges from the major market flamethrowers with major market resources, and how The Peak is winning the battle.
You’ve recently seen some Arbitron numbers that bode well for WXPK. Tell us about them.
It is very validating in that we not only are competing 25-54, but at some measure winning, and not with extreme Time Spent Listening against a small quarter-hour or small sample; we’re actually doing it the right way with both cume and quarter-hour. It’s old Arbitron methodology; there’s an imbedded keeper diary within Westchester that nobody sees that is bought by my company and comprises the five counties of the Lower Hudson Valley. But, we’re able to break out the Westchester and the Rockland side of it, and in Westchester in particular, where we have a city grade signal, we did very well. We made the Top Five, 25-54 Adults. So we’re happy, and that validates the assumptions that we’ve made all this time and the position that we’ve crafted here in the marketplace.
Do you also show up in market rankings for New York City and the Connecticut markets?
There’s seemingly a perception wall right there on the Connecticut border. I can’t quantify it in any particular way, but it’s always been hard to convince folks that live in Southern Fairfield County to pay a lot of attention to a Westchester-based radio station, and vice versa. According to the Fairfield Split People Meter, we might have broken through that. We’ve been Number One in Southern Fairfield County for five of the last seven months. It’s very small sample size, but we do have some listeners in Southern Fairfield County as well.
When you’re talking about the New York stations, are you doing anything to compete with them in the actual New York metro or do you stay focused on Westchester and the surrounding suburban counties?
Well, at some levels our signal determines that. But we signed the radio station on seven-years-ago with a fair amount of certainty that a hole existed in Westchester County, Rockland County and Southern Fairfield County in between WFUV, Q104 and – at the time – K-Rock (WXRK). In between those three radio stations we saw a great opportunity for what Paul Marszalek (The Peak’s consultant at the time) would call a state-of-the-art adult radio station, and I would term a mainstream Triple A radio station. Seven years later the Arbitron numbers that we just talked about would tend to validate that the decision was a good one.
Talk about the challenges of competing with major market signals in a suburban community.
I honestly didn’t know how challenging it was going to be when I first got here. I looked at it as underneath our signal were potentially 1.8 million human souls, and if I did my job right I might be able to get a quarter of them interested enough to be cume, and another quarter of them interested enough to be P1. What I didn’t understand were a couple of inherent challenges. One is the challenge of selling national advertising; it’s virtually impossible. Almost none of our advertising is sold in a transactional way (we’ll give you this market share, you’ll give us this percentage of your budget). That just doesn’t happen. Our sell is completely conceptual, relationship-based and hyper local; better than 95 percent of our business comes from local advertisers, $2,000, $3,000 and $4,000 at a time.
The other part of being embedded in market Number One is the challenge of doing the economics of radio. The radio station is very lean, not having a tremendous amount of money to throw at talent and support staff, and making a go of it. So, when I finally got my head around it a month into the job, it was like, “Wow! You just gave me a slingshot and I’m supposed to take down the lions here. This is going to be hard!” But once I got past all that, I found it a little bit liberating to not have the layers of management and control to deal with.
With the NYC stations purporting to be “local” to every region of the market, what do you do on air to differentiate The Peak as being “more local” to Westchester?
We have done a couple of things. One is just always remaining focused on our product; what’s happening quarter hour-to-quarter hour on the radio station is as good as can be. I will freely credit Marszalek with a great moment in our history, uttering the expression “New York’s Backyard.” We knew we needed to identify the station as “a place.” We didn’t want it to be too artificially constructed, but we never wanted to imply that we’re a New York City radio station. To my mind, local is as local does, and we never tried to switch pitch anybody. We didn’t just come to the conclusion that we had to be local, we embraced it. Seven years ago I realized that was the way this thing was going to work. There are a lot of things we can do against the concept of “The Backyard.” It’s inflected on the Web site, and Voila! We had a position. We’re World Class Rock For New York’s Backyard.
Beyond that, what other tools do you use to keep the local audience focused on the fact that you are the “most local” station?
We certainly have a Facebook page. We certainly have a large and vibrant group of P1 listeners that we can sprinkle with email blasts and also have some fairly traditional ways of reaching out to them. As it turns out, my brother is a software developer and he is coming to me with a test of a new software of a location-based marketing platform for folks with smartphones, and I’m very interested to see how that works.
At the end of the day, local is as local does. Our advertising base is local. Our disc jockeys are local. We try to speak to local conditions and local events. We make sure that our news is focused locally; that our traffic is super-serving this particular area. As we see print completely fall apart, this market doesn’t really have a dominant newspaper any longer. So we’re seeing the rise of many of the hyper-local websites delivering news and compelling stuff for local communities and we’re trying to build some allegiances with them.
That would be most of what we do. And of course we show up and we do appearances and put on concerts. We have ourPeak Performance Series in Mamaroneck so we’re constantly articulating the local communities to make up West Chester County and Southern Rockland County and Rockland Counties.
With life and business becoming much more globally driven, how do you see the future of local radio, particularly in the smaller, tertiary markets?
I still find that a good local radio station is a charming entity, and over time people need guidance in this world. You need an auteur, a concierge, somebody to filter for you. Apparently the blogosphere spends a lot of time doing that, but I still maintain and believe that a good local radio station can do that as effectively as anybody.
Give it a place in your mind: New York’s Backyard. Everybody knows where New York is and most people can imagine what New York’s backyard is. Put a product on the air that is compelling; that informs you about new music, plays great old music, and speaks to you in an adult, intelligent way. It’s a winning combination. Now I just have to spread the seeds a little bit farther.
[eQB Content by Jack Barton]
