3-10-2014
I?ve often said that the primary job of the general manager in a radio station is to keep the program director and the sales manager from killing each other. When my broadcast group gave me a GM?s office, I looked behind the door expecting to find a black-and-white striped shirt and a whistle.
I walked away from that GM?s job 28 years ago, but I never got out of radio. And I recently realized that I never really understood the job of the program director. It always seemed to me that his job was mostly to babysit irresponsible announcers and be an annoying impediment to sales.
I began my radio career as a part-time announcer, working on a little AM station on weekends. The fulltime announcers at our big FM sister station let me hang around the edges of their conversations. I remember one rant from an announcer called Brother John. ?How come the salespeople make all that money? We?re the heart and soul of the radio station. We?re the ones the listeners love! If it wasn?t for us, those salespeople wouldn?t have anything to sell! And whose idea was it to play 12 spots an hour? We could be number one if we didn?t have to play all those stupid commercials.?
I remember it vividly because it?s the moment I first realized that my career would be in sales. The staggering stupidity of Brother John?s rant makes my knees weak and my vision blurry. I said to myself, ?I am definitely not one of these guys.?
In those days no one, not even the most carnivorous of the sales staff, was suggesting more than 12 spots per hour. Most program directors were trying to push that number back to nine.
I thought those program directors were idiots and obstructionists. I now realize that I was wrong. Horribly and tragically wrong.
Google is an interesting company. There are no tricks you can pull to get Google to elevate you in its search rankings. If you want Google to lift you to the top of its search results, you need only help it serve its customers. Google doesn?t consider the companies that give them money for ads to be its ?customers.? Google believes its customer to be the person who types a search query into its homepage: ?Provide the answer that person seeks, and we?ll lift you higher in the rankings.?
Google?s market cap hovers at about $400 billion. Clear Channel?s market cap is about $17 billion. Do the math and you?ll see that Google is worth about four times as much as all 10,000 of America?s commercial radio stations combined. Google is valuable to Wall Street because Google values its ?customer,? and correctly understands that customer to be the public.
Radio no longer values that customer, and we?re being punished for it.
It has taken me 35 years, but I?ve finally opened my eyes. The job of an account executive is to protect the advertiser and enhance their investment. The job of the program director is to protect the listener and enhance their experience.
?Just one more spot per hour. The listener won?t notice. Certainly we can add just one more, right? Or are you suggesting we should do without the revenue??
A cafe owner, famous for his soup, was told by his accountant that he could boost his profit significantly if he would add just 5 percent more water to the recipe. The accountant was right. The water was added and no one noticed. Months later, the cafe added 5 percent more water, and still no one noticed. Later, more water was added. And then a little more, but never more than 5 percent because we now ?know? that customers cannot detect just 5 percent more added water. As you suspected, the cafe owner didn?t lose his customers incrementally, but all at once. ?The soup here just isn?t as good as it used to be.?
I was told that story by a multi-millionaire Wall Street speculator. He says American businesspeople have a peculiar blind spot to the all-at-once backlash that comes with watering the soup. He said American businesses expect to see incremental declines when they are incrementally abusive, but that?s never how it works. When the wife packs up to leave, she takes the kids and leaves all at once.
I teach advertising professionals ? mostly small-agency people ? in a monthly webcast. This is a question that was e-mailed to me a week ago:
The dominant morning radio show in this market is a talk show featuring a pair of shock jocks on an otherwise rock music station. If you take away the morning show, this station is middle-of-the-pack at best.
For the past several months, they?ve been airing two commercial breaks per hour in the morning show. Each is 8-10 minutes long and with the mix of :30s and :60s, typically has nine to 11 spots. We feel the station could care less about the commercial environment they have created. We have broached the subject with them. They basically shrugged us off.
At first, we thought about attempting to negotiate a ?first or last only? commercial position with them, but now are considering spending their budget somewhere else ? like Pandora or another station that is strong in the A25-54 demo and has a less cluttered format.
1. What would you do in this situation?
2. What do you think we should tell the station?
Maybe I?m wrong, but I think the customers are noticing the water in the soup.
Roy H. Williams is president of Wizard of Ads Inc. E-mail: roy@wizardofads.com.
(3/10/2014 8:33:32 AM)
Amen-And the stations using certain satellite netowrk music programming are forced by the network to run far too many commercials, PSAs, promos, etc. to fill the mandatory breaks. Really waters the soup. But how about TV? I simply can't watch commercial television anymore. Thank God for PBS and Ruku.
(3/10/2014 7:44:47 AM)
Amen! Years ago, Clear Channel made a valiant effort with their 'less is more' strategy, but with the serious debt load and other issues burdening them, it fell by the wayside.
There has not been enough soup in radio's water for years....maybe it's time we started serving stew instead of 'soup'.
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