Passion Picks

Can They Make A Measurable Difference?

In a culture that relentlessly celebrates youth, choosing the right passion picks can still make a difference. For ordinary listeners who don't own their own companies or have enough cash to start a hedge fund, barriers to staying active as they age remain. We're primarily talking here about the audience that listens to Urban AC stations, although many of the concepts and applications will work for any format. They're simply passion basics.

If you're the only Urban Adult format in the market, you don't have the luxury of allowing another station to warm up a song or artist before you start playing them -- even if you're passionate about them. While being passionate about a song or an artist is still vitally important for new music exposure, today we have to rely on other media to help acquaint listeners with jams and performers that we can play with confidence and without the risk of the audience punching out due to unfamiliarity.

One of the things that programmers have to look at today when considering a new song is the amount of exposure it's had in the marketplace whether from other radio stations, the Internet, iPods, iTunes, Pandora or even national commercials. Those are factors that didn't even exist a few years ago. If you're first on a new song you're passionate about, you're going out of a limb, but unfortunately, that's where the fruit is. If you're right you could become the new music leader, the station the audience tunes to for new music.

However, even if you're right, you can't stay out there. You still have to come back to the core. But you can't simply play it safe, either. Programmers who dig in their heels and stick with core artists who may research well but may no longer be relevant, take a huge risk. Remember, just because a song or an artist tests well in the familiarity category doesn't mean the audience wants to hear that same song or artist over and over again day in and day out.

Acceptable Unpredictability

In time, it's likely that loyalty among youthful thinking, but aging listeners will be eroded less by the exploits of eternally youthful adults and more from a longstanding demographic trend. As they've moved through life, this generation has influenced and altered societal attitudes on everything from smoking marijuana to Botox. What Urban radio has to do is to march to a different drummer, play the music they're passionate about and offer compelling content between the jams. They have to fulfill the need in the marketplace to service adult listeners who aren't being served by other format-similar stations.

Start looking for jams that your audience loves outside of a limited, artificially defined sound. You should always pay attention to the researched hits, but still include an occasional surprise, whether it's an exciting new song, an "oh wow" jam from the past, or a new passion track that breaks format boundaries. Passion picks in 2010 have to include some element of acceptable unpredictability.

Passionate Management

Passion shouldn't be confined to just programming. Management too has to be committed to understanding the role passion plays in their world and how it can affects ratings and sales. From radio management's standpoint, it seems they're still focused on efficiencies and cost savings. So what happens to passion? We have to get them involved and we need their support. We have to show our management teams that passion is the one ingredient that might make a difference.

Can we pare back and step up without compromising quality and passion? The short answer is yes, but it requires programmers to really to be in tune with their listeners. That's where the passion comes in ... or should come in. But passion takes time. Who has time for passion in the PPM world of electronic measurement? The answer is we do. We have to. The whole process is a learning experience.

From an analytic standpoint, programmers have to go about their jobs differently. The necessity of keeping track of everything you're doing as well as everything your competition does is one of those ongoing areas that can't be overlooked. Which station has the most passion in terms of a particular on-air event? You have to know so that when a weekly comes out, you're not just staring at numbers and looking at ups and downs. As a programmer you're looking at cause and effect. There is an immediacy with PPM we don't have with the diary. But just because information is available in a flash doesn't mean programmers should react as quickly.

You definitely have to look at it over the course of not just the weeklies, but evaluate it month-to-month or even over multiple monthlies. If you spot something troubling you can move to correct it much quicker, but hopefully, not overreact when it comes to a poor weekly. Whether it's a diary world or a PPM world, a brand is a brand. The necessity, care and feeding of a brand doesn't change with the meter; it just demonstrates it to us in more profound ways.

Urban programmers we've spoken with recently have said they found many correlations to things that they may have wondered about in a diary world that the PPM confirmed in a more specific, granular way.

PPM Requires You to Stand Out & Blend In

Everything becomes important when your station is attempting to compete in a world measured by Arbitron's PPM. Sometimes you want to stand out. Other times you need to blend in. You want your passion to stand out along with your imaging and production, so that it conveys just the right stationality, vibe and presence. You want to shape your imaging and production to complement the attitude of the station. You need to know who the target audience is and a little about their lifestyle. Then you want to plug in imaging and production that make you memorable.

There is one area that is seldom talked about that is becoming increasingly important as the "Generation Y" continues to grow and suddenly has several more media choices. And this is the problem of commercial irritants that are always present once we stop the music. Most Urban stations have competitive weaknesses when it comes to placement of commercials and in-house production.

PPM is showing more young listeners are using radio than originally believed. Urban stations have a goal to retain their audience for longer periods with PPM. PPM data show lower Time Spent Listening (TSL) than with the diary, so it's important to structure your programming to keep the average listener listening longer.

It's important to avoid "tune-out lines" such as "We'll be right back" or "Back in three minutes." Instead you might want to say "Coming up, we're going to tell you where Kanye West hid his new girlfriend, and we're going to hit you with this week's most-requested new jam."

We all know that listeners' tolerance for commercials is very short -- especially if they're in their car. Most programmers believe stacking the spots or clusters in the last quarter-hour is the one way to win. They logic is that it lends itself to better quarter-hour maintenance. That assumption is based on the notion that the audience stated their listening as beginning at the top of the hour and lost interest with each subsequent quarter-hour. That theory holds that the first three-quarters of an hour featured smaller stopsets than in the last quarter-hour.

Others said that listening begins pretty much equally around the hour. With the meter, both of those theories have to be revised. Why? Because recall, for the most part, is no longer a factor. But that doesn't answer the question of how to make spotsets less of a distraction ... and therefore less of a tune-out factor.

The answer is to make certain to hook on the left side of the stopset, set appointments and remember commercials have burn-out just like records -- only faster. If nothing else,

occasionally change the order in which the commercials are aired.

Even passionate programmers can't eliminate commercial tune-out. But what they can do is to understand it, prepare for it and figure out what will make the audience return if they leave or stick around because it's just too much trouble to keep punching around. Once those fickle fingers find your frequency, your passion can make the pre-set punch permanent.

Word.