Philippe Generali

Since joining RCS USA as Product Manager in 2000, Philippe Generali has risen up the corporate ladder as RCS' influence grew substantially. He created the Media Monitor division in 2003, was named Pres. of the just-merged RCS/Prophet company in 2007 and most recently, added Pres./CEO duties for Mediabase, which has also become part of the RCS empire. With experience in technical engineering, computer technology, marketing and management, Generali is certainly equipped to lead one of the radio and music industry's most influential high-tech services. Here's his vision of how RCS will continue to lead the way.

Now that RCS has merged with Mediabase, what changes are in store for both companies once they become one entity?

Both identities will stay separate, with Mediabase being a music data company and having a different sales staff. The brand is phenomenal and we are going to expand it to the rest of the world. We have 23 RCS offices around the planet, selling our products in more than 100 countries, so we have the ability to bring Media Monitors and Mediabase to everyone.

From a technical standpoint, we needed to upgrade our hardware, software and the operations. We need to improve the way we did our business. The goal is to increase speed overall without any negative effect on the accuracy of the data.

What are the benefits to the client for the increase of speed?

Labels want to know as early as possible how songs are doing. We publish charts very early, around 6:30a on the East Coast. We're aiming to publish earlier. The last West Coast airplay has to be in at midnight, which is 3a Eastern; so whatever we do after that has to be done quickly. Every minute counts; we want to make sure we have every station monitored as soon as possible. We're now using new powerful machines to do that and we are continually optimizing the software to count every spin more efficiently.

How do you plan on accomplishing that?

We were able to invest in brand new equipment requiring one-sixth the space, while increasing the efficiency. On the software side, we got rid of the OS/2 back office software and we just hired two new programmers to help us revamp and improve the desktop software as well as our website look and feel.

We are also lucky to have two iconic personalities running the business. We just promoted Nancy Deitemeyer to EVP Operations. She is one of the founders of the service. And we also promoted Alissa Pollack to EVP Integrated Music Marketing so she can take charge of expanding our worldwide coverage. Both Nancy and Alissa are the best people in their field.

The merger with Mediabase did necessitate some personal changes and downsizing, especially with the advent of new electronic technology. The transition had some hiccups, so are you confident that you're on stable ground and that electronic technology will offer as good, if not better data?

The worst is behind us. Did we have a perfect transition? No. Could it have gone better? Certainly, but from here on, I really think it's all good. The hardest tasks have been done in moving in the new equipment, changing the back office software and training our people on the new software. From here on we can build on the solid foundation that we've laid out for the past six months to a year. Now we can propose and build new solutions because we're better and faster.

What new features are in the offering from Mediabase?

Coming soon from Mediabase will be, for the first time, a worldwide distribution service called Musicpoint. This will give labels the ability to send a song around the world of Selector users with one click of the mouse. This will also be terrific for all the RCS clients who will be able to add a song right into Selector for airplay. This effort will be coordinated with PlayMPE.

There has long been the notion of weighting spins, because drive-time spins are more valuable, for instance, than overnight spins. Have any of your clients suggested, "Hey, is there a way to weight, for instance, drive-time spins and lessen the weight for overnight spins?"

We're open to all suggestions ... and we have heard people talk about weighting airplay based on the time of day it airs. Obviously, weighting the audience is something that can be done, as we already do some of that in the Country charts. We'll take our guidance from our customers. I would say anything goes, but what really counts and matters is to be relevant. The #1 challenge for us is to stay relevant ... and the yardstick for that is to accurately gauge the success of a song. We want to remain that way, so wherever the customer wants us to go, we will go. There's no reason why a new formula wouldn't work better; it's a matter of crunching the numbers in the most appropriate way.

Is there any interest in "counting" songs played in bumper music or commercials?

That is not in our current business plan, but we will go wherever the industry will lead us.

Has Mediabase considered monitoring selected Net radio station spins?

The industry will tell us if adding Net radios makes sense or not. We have already been doing satellite channels for a while. More important is the relevance of what we do. One of Mediabase's mission statements is to measure the success of a song. This includes radio, but we are meeting with P2P monitoring companies to explore new charting concepts.

We've seen the growth of Oldies and Adult Hit stations. Have your clients expressed an interest for more spin coverage there ... and perhaps, create more charts?

We already do a lot of specialty format charts, such as Christian radio. There might be some other narrow formats we could monitor, much like Hot AC from AC... or Urban into Urban AC. At this time, we don't see today a need for spinning new formats, yet we wouldn't hesitate to monitor a new niche format as soon as a significant number of stations are represented. Until a niche format reaches that tipping point, there's no reason to go there.

Has the advent of the PPM had an impact on Mediabase?

Definitely. As a matter of fact, that's how we created Mscore. A few years back, we first thought about song data from Mediabase and combining it with the know-how of Media Monitors. In terms of PPM, we use it to better analyze the impact of repeated airplay of a song on the audience -- specifically when the public starts switching to another station and how they react to new songs. We found some very interesting trends, which is why we developed Mscore with Mediabase.

What makes Mscore important to your customers?

This is a new technology that creates a different paradigm. Mscore is interesting because it's not what people think it is; it doesn't necessarily measure whether people like a song or not. It's purely based on what they do, whether they switch away from the station that is playing that song. People are usually doing other things while they listen to the radio and Mscore takes that in account in its calculation. We monitor them when they switch off that station or switch away. Now you can interpret that data in many ways.

We certainly work with our clients and talk with them on how to use this tool ... and explain what's normal and what's not normal. We point out that Mscore is not necessarily predictive of the future. Mscore is one of many tools programmers can use. It does not replace focus groups, callout and auditorium testing, but it certainly can be an interesting part of the equation. It's good to know what a PPM panelist does while a radio station is playing a song

Have programmers started to overanalyze Mscore data?

From our vantage point, we believe Mscore, like everything else, should be used in moderation and be one of many tools at a programmer's disposal. We have talked to a lot of programmers and there's a constant back and forth. Three weeks ago, we changed the way we captured Mscore spins; we started discounting weeks when a song didn't get enough spins. Once we started doing that, I got an angry call from a customer who told me he had been programming exclusively from Mscore for the past three months and he'd been getting nothing but good PPM numbers, so he wanted us to put it back the way it was. Mscore had become his bible because it always worked for him.

For this particular programmer we offered the old way as an option, so he could use it the way he always did or try the new way. One of the things about RCS, Media Monitor, Mscore and Mediabase is that all of these services are built to service the needs of our customers. We have over 9,000 customers in the world and regardless of the country of origin or the language; we do our best to make our customers happy and generate their loyalty to us.

Some people feel Mscore really isn't applicable to new music, but is best for judging the freshness and burn of gold and recurrents. Agree?

It's a commonly accepted that most people are initially adverse to new music, yet we found that wasn't always true. Despite those who say people automatically switch off a station that's playing something unfamiliar and new, we've found plenty of cases where a song would have a slow start that gradually build momentum. But for Rhythmic and Urban formats, you can see new songs come out and make a major impact right off the bat ... a first-week blockbuster ... as well as new songs that slowly attract the musically curious.

Mscore would seem to emphasize the importance of front and back-selling songs.

It's a night-and-day difference. Anything you can do to excite the listeners to your music will positively impact the song's Mscore. When it comes down to it, listeners are very docile and anything that radio can do treat them as friends and raise their interest in what you're going to play ... is good. That's basically what radio's all about.

Moving on to the land of Selector, are there any new products coming out from RCS?

Along with Musicpoint, which we already talked about, we are putting the finishing touches on our new automation system ZETTA(r), which will certainly be the next step for all our stations currently using legacy brands. We also have a new Traffic system called AQUIRA(r), which is one of the most complete traffic systems every conceived.

Are there new ways to use current RCS products that programmers have by-and-large ignored or are unaware of?

GSelector, which just passed the 500-station mark, has the ability to use Mscore data to help a programmer schedule songs by how they're doing with their specific audience. The PPM will also have an impact on the future of music scheduling. Our recent upgrades in GSelector include speed improvements that help centralized programming organizations and improvements for local PDs who work in a multi-station group. Imagine all local stations in each particular format inside a broadcast group sharing one central server.

At the same time, each station's local PD can have his or her own music coding and remotely access its version of the library of the shared song that it elected to play.

At the management level, consolidated information about these commonly programmed stations is accessible in real time, making the creation of a "format captain" job totally realistic. No other music scheduling system, including our own Classic Selector, can program different stations with one database

Are there certain things or attributes to using Selector that many have overlooked?

Yes. The #1 thing they overlook is to upgrade your tools. We have an unbelievable team of people at RCS who are former programmers with hundreds of years of combined programming experience. We have a lot of radio veterans on our team, who have helped us come up with some fantastic tools over the years - the latest being GSelector, for example - where everything you want to have as a programmer is in GSelector, which provides enormous power at the click of a mouse.

Sometime users of the current Selector overlook how good the new version is. We now have more than 500 users of GSelector and every single one of them has the same story -- they were a bit apprehensive at the beginning, but after a while they understand how much better it is. Just this morning I talked to an APD who said, "I was kind of afraid of using it, but now it's phenomenal. I don't even have to do a lot of manual editing." The editing result is better than version 12, yet we have people who have been using the same tools forever.

It sounds like part of your job is convincing your own clients to get out of their comfort zone with version 12 to try GSelector.

That's exactly right. It's human nature to play it safe and have an attitude of "If it's not broke, don't fix it." When Microsoft Word 2007 came out, how many people preferred to stick with version 2003? Now it's 2010 and there are plenty of people still on version 2003.

Our radio clients have lives that are filled with constant requests from management. With that kind of work pressure, it's more than a bit difficult to find the time to learn a new tool and get out of their comfort zone with what has been working well for them up to that point. It's completely understandable. The good news is that those who do take the chance and try the new GSelector usually get rewarded after investing that extra hour to learn the software, because they'll save many hours down the road and be more productive.

How many of your customers are still hanging on to the DOS version?

There's no DOS version of Selector anymore, just the classic version 12, which can be run on any version of Windows. In the 15 years since then, there are no DOS ONLY versions to buy.

Overseas in our international markets, we have a minority users holding onto version 12, while the rest have gone to our latest windows version 15, or GSelector. The U.S. is actually more conservative; we have 500 users of GSelector and several thousand users of version 12

How do you respond to the feedback from users who have been integrated into the new technology?

The great thing about RCS is that it's been here for more than 30 years, so we know our customers. They've been with us for a long time and they are very vocal about what they like and what they don't like. We take a couple hundred calls every day in the U.S. alone between Selector and NexGen Digital (automation) support. The constant feedback is what keeps us sharp and on our toes.

We have one of the longest on-going 24/7 call-in support systems in the software business. This is part of the fiber of our company. We literally talk to our customers every day. That is one of our strengths. We listen to what radio is saying.

Finally, how confident are you in a radio rebound ... and what do you see of RCS/Mediabase's fortunes in that context?

When radio's revenues go up, our customers start smiling again. It certainly makes for an easier conversation, I can tell you that -- not only in the U.S. but overseas. The mood has improved, which certainly improves our relationships.

In that light, we continue to be "conservatively aggressive." We definitely have new products to help programmers incorporate new music. As I mentioned earlier, stations can now directly add a song into Selector for multiple stations or formats with one click of a button, which can save a lot of time. We're also looking at ways to stay relevant by working with P2P companies about their "spins". It makes sense to look at all the ways songs are being played, exchanged and downloaded on the Net.

We're also rolling out Mediabase in Australia and around the world. Mediabase has to be a global business to continue its growth.