Curing The Cume Crisis

"Think-ALong" Is The Goal

You remember that so-called "sing-along" theory we shared with you last year? Well, it works. When you can get your adult listeners to sing along with the songs you're playing, or more importantly, "think along," you're well on your way to capturing some cume. Cume has always been important for Urban formats -- and with Arbitron's PPM, it's going to be even more important. So what's the most effective way to build cume?

Well, before we get to what you should do, let's talk about what you should not do. You should not just place your one-liners and promos in the studio and leave them for weeks. Here's why: While continuous repetition of a message may eventually sink in, it's not nearly as effective as you might think with the baby boomers, Generation Xers and Generation Joneses. They bore easily and begin to regard these liners and promos as clutter.

The latest generational label is, of course, Generation Jones and many of our listeners are part of it. Too young to be boomers, too old to be Generation Yers, this smack-dab-in-the-middle group has its own quirks, cultures and cash. They could easily wind up with a diary or a meter.

It is somewhat ironic that our industry and the companies and agencies that serve it have allowed themselves to slip back to performance standards they once proudly raised as a type of creative growth flag that may have all but disappeared. Although we are affected somewhat less, Urban-formatted stations are nevertheless caught up in this problem as well. As an industry, we need to reinvent ourselves in the same way we so passionately ask our clients and those who judge us to. We need to become less purely creative-driven and more idea-driven. Naturally, we want the ideas themselves to be creative. What is the goal of all this reinvention and creativity, you ask? Bigger cumes. There are many problems affecting what we are calling the "cume crisis."

Left Brain/Right Brain Theories

In order to better understand what causes our cume to collapse or not to grow, we need to know a little about how the brain processes information. Research in neurology and consumer behavior has extended to these generational groups; they have similarities and differences. Once again we get into left brain/right brain theories and concepts. The left hemisphere of the brain is more specialized for processing verbal information and doing sequential analysis and consciously taking in what's happening. The left brain is the center for writing, speech and calculation. The right brain's major function is the processing of pictorial data, non-verbal information and musical impressions. The right brain seems to operate intuitively, almost automatically, without the individual listener even thinking about many of its functions, such as breathing, etc.

Remember, when the right brain dominates, a much greater number of exposures to a message (promo or one-liner) are necessary to be effective. When you shoot directly at the left brain, you have a much better chance of being effective quickly, and it has proven to be a more certain and speedier way to stand out from the crowd.

Radio listening for adults is essentially a low-involvement activity, especially for passive listeners. Most adults tend to be passives rather than actives; although there are exceptions, our studies have shown that high recall of content and message requires higher involvement, which activates the left brain and makes the listeners come out of the passive, low-involvement state of mind.

Now that we understand a little more about how the brain functions in relationship to building cume, it's important to know a little more about cume itself. In order to build cume, we have to get some different people to sample our stations for least five minutes during a given daypart. Most real programmers know how to do that. We've been doing it for years. The problem now is how do we do it when we have to run as many as 18 commercial minutes an hour? Many of the commercials are low-tolerance pitch spots with a toll-free number that have little or no creative value. Some stations have, at times, even exceeded that number and still managed to consistently land at or near the top of the ratings. But with the PPM, that's over!

This commercial-saturation issue is affecting all stations and ad agencies, along with consumer and listener resistance to the glut and the greed. As a result, marketing productivity has plummeted. Well-designed ad schedules on Urban stations have failed to produce results. Maybe they failed because they were the third or fourth ad in a seven-ad stop set. Bombarding listeners with more ads will only further alienate them and cause the cume to crumble.

The old demographics and psychographics of the '90s just don't work with today's Generation Jones. The traditional marketing model is not only obsolete; with this group; it is completely out of touch.

Cume Stations Are Destination Stations

I believe one of the answers to today's "cume crisis" is to make Urban formats destination formats. As our listeners age, their preferences naturally lead them to stations that play music that reflects their unchanged musical tastes. With Urban Adult formats, nostalgia is a critical part of the format's success. This format, in a lot of ways, is just reflecting back to that nostalgia. Urban Adult's core is 25-49, leaning female. When looking at that key group, their preferences aren't going to change much over time. But these same adults still want to hear some fresh new jams.

How do we make our formats more destination-oriented? By doing better research, asking better questions and getting better answers. Before we can do any of this, we have to know our primary target. Most stations have some strategic plan. In other words, they know they want to be #1 with a certain group of people. For example, mainstream Urban stations (those that claim they are #1 for hip-hop and R&B and blazing) should target 14-28 or 15-24 year-olds this Spring. Those groups drives this format in the spring and summer months when the audience composition has changed.

A lot of Urban stations have been paying too much attention to the females in their audience. They have to switch over and expand their target audience to include the males who are available to listen -- and who may get a diary or carry a meter. Almost all of these males are into hip-hop. Rap records start with males and cross over to females. When you research these rap songs with strictly females, there will be flaws and gaps. Females respond much more favorably to R&B love songs and ballads and the males respond pretty much to hip-hop.

Additionally, you have to figure out whether there are a significant number of Hispanics in the market. In many markets, this is a growing audience segment that cannot be ignored. It has been my experience that any market with even a small Hispanic population can benefit from the fact that young Hispanics gravitate to Urban and hip-hop music. These Hispanic listeners are an Arbitron-weighted group and they can help build your cume.

Depth And Packaging

Next we have to look at depth and what it means to the station's potential cume. Urban radio's depth is both its strength and its weakness. Listeners who grew out of old mainstream Urban formats (one size fits all) would likely appreciate a station with a large music library. However, two contrasting philosophies have developed on how to combine the old with the new. Traditional mainstream Urbans are really narrowly artist-focused with song depth. The new precept for mainstream Urbans is that they should play their format's favorite songs, play a lot of them, and play a lot of them in a row. As the format evolved, what we found was that when mainstream Urbans had a new competitor or because of the competitive makeup of the market, they had to move their vision of what they were ... if they didn't change, their cume suffered.

It's also been proven that offering "deep cuts" to listeners isn't necessarily a winning philosophy. Keep in mind that radio works on recalled usage. Everybody has a different tolerance level, but the challenge is how to take that formula, shake it up, roll it out again and make it sound fresh. The key is packaging. Packaging is another way to ensure freshness. The combination of the proper packaging and freshness builds cume.

In 2008, it is imperative to link the two and, in turn, bridge the divide between broadcasters and the advertising community. Usually the smaller, more independent marketing and communications companies develop the radical and transformative business solutions across a broad range of media for their clients.

What we need to do is to continue to use the above information to build new cume and strive to understand and adjust to the uniquenesses of our audience's generational identities. Then we would not only understand how to build new cume, we would also begin to understand a few other things -- like the reason so many women fake orgasms is because so many men fake foreplay.

Word.