Jacobs Media: Expanding The Radio Tent

Fred Jacobs

JACOBS MEDIA Pres. FRED JACOBS posts to the company blog, "Over time – hundreds of rating books, scores of perceptual research studies, and all those focus groups – you begin to establish format parameters. Whether you work in Hip-Hop, Country, News/Talk, or Rock, you learn who's in the tent, as well as who will likely have little or anything to do with your station.

"Sure, NIELSEN sharing reports often indicate odd sharing patterns, often with stations that seemingly are incongruous with yours. More often than not, you explain those listeners away as outliers, anomalies, or simply ratings glitches that happen from time to time. It's easy to get comfortable with your format boundaries – and if you test your music and other variables – you begin to settle in on the gender, age, and ethnicity splits that define your core and secondary audiences.  In fact, most stations get narrower and narrower – interviewing within a tight demographic and testing many of the same songs over and over again.

"But that's fine and logical if all you're doing is staring at radio data. When you open your mental parallax and begin to look at audiences through a new lens, you begin to see a different picture."

Read the full post here.

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