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Go With The Flow
November 29, 2005
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The Key To Longer Listening Spans Is Making The Station Flow
For the last three weeks, we examined the strategies involved in cume-building. This week we're going to look at extending time-spent-listening (TSL). To really maximize TSL, you have to make your station flow with continuous forward motion. All the elements, including the music, must interact and contribute.
Back To The Basics
A lot of what is involved in extending TSL and improving the flow are just an application of the basics. It starts with the air-staff being alert and conscious of what you're trying to accomplish. Tight board work -- whether the computer does it or not -- and even "tighter thinking" are key ingredients in the TSL process.
What you want to do is to produce a show in such a way that each element flows naturally into the next element. First off, the music itself should make the station sound familiar for the core audience. Then, it should promote longer TSL.
Music flow is determined by the music software, which must consistently be examined and fine-tuned. Once the daily music log is created, hand editing is a must to ensure the best possible song-to-song fit. Both urban and urban AC stations should work to find that careful balance of currents, re-currents and gold each week and avoid playing new songs, especially by unfamiliar artists, in a cluster. The idea of artist familiarity means to
program the artists with the strongest appeal within the rotation rules you have set up.
What builds TSL is forward motion within the format. It simply means promoing ahead to improve formatic flow.
The air-personalities should be constantly selling listener benefits. Benefits that promote the station's unique qualities should be airing often along with great songs. If the audience consistently hears meaningful reasons to listen longer, they will. Or, just as important, if they leave, they will return, which has its own Arbitron benefits.
How do you achieve this forward motion? There are several ways. One of the most common and most effective is through the use of carefully worded liners. These can be used to connect with what listeners are doing and ties your station to daily activities. Help your audience to use your station with "listeners usage" liners. "Listen to KISS when rolling to the mall this weekend." Or "Jammin-92 with ten in-a-row, starting with Mary J Blige, coming up next!"
Building great ratings depends on being able to consistently promote ahead to improve flow, extend TSL and even build quarter hours. You should never go into a stop-set without teasing ahead. Giving listeners something to anticipate creates aggressive momentum and flow.
Some often-overlooked things like multi-taking and overlapping with the marketing and even the sales department can help the process. A few years ago the engineer was just the engineer. The guy that worked in marketing just did the marketing. In many stations, however, that's starting to change. Working with different departments and fully understanding how they work can make a real difference. As a programmer you have to understand budgets, bottom lines and marketing. You need to know how the station works promotionally. You need to know how marketing creates an event.
In some small stations, we're beginning to see the PD taking over the promotion director's job. There are stations that still operate with little or no promotion budget and the promotional duties have been absorbed by the programming department. What does this have to do with TSL, you may be wondering?
Just this. Working with the promotion department to create great promotions can make a huge difference. Promos should create a picture in the listener's mind and capture their attention. To accomplish this, the "benefit" should be the first words spoken. The "feature" name can always be worked in later. Many promotion people who were ill-trained or not trained at all will not understand this and fight you on it -- until you explain it to them.
Create a Listener Connection
You increase TSL by constantly selling listener benefits. Doing this makes the show and the station more interesting and helps to create longer listening spans. One method I really like is one in which you have live liners that sell one of the station's unique qualities several times an hour. This aids listeners to better use the station and gives them more reasons to listen later in the hour and into the next daypart.
The Baskin-Robbins Theory of Programming
There is a Baskin-Robbins or "ice cream" theory that can help to increase TSL. Find the favorite flavors that everybody likes. Give them to the audience over and over again, until they tire of them. Then, replace them with the new flavors. But, here's the secret. As the audience begins to burn out and tire of them, give them a spoonful instead of a full scope. In other words, and we'll cover this in a later editorial, edit the long versions of
the songs down or place them strategically throughout the dayparts.
The other part of the theory involves targeting your biggest artists for better flow and quicker turnover. Use the artist separation rule in your music scheduling software to allow the eight or ten most important artists to come up more often than the average artists. There's a reason why there are so many songs from these artists, so don't try to artificially depress their presence. On the other hand, you can still maintain longer artist
separation time for the run-of-the-mill artists in your library.
Add one and move one. Each time you add a jam from a given artist into a higher rotation, move one of the older songs back into a lower rotation. In other words, if you move a song from power to re-current, move one of the older ones out of your recurrent category back into gold.
Accept slower rotations on new songs. A slightly slower rotation on the next cut from a popular artist isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, if you're still playing a song from Mariah Carey in "A" and you decide to add the new single in "B," you should be prepared for the new one to play less often than the other "B" songs. The hidden benefit is that your other "B" songs will get increased rotations while you still get to warm up the
new track.
And before we leave the music-scheduling category, you should avoid over-coding related artists. Make sure you don't make your job harder with related artists codes that are too strict. My suggestion is to only code those related artists that sound similar or that are too well known to ignore.
By employing some or all of the methods and concepts we've just given you, you can not only extend your time-spent-listening, you can dramatically improve your overall ratings.
I just try to pass on what's been passed on to me.
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