 |
 |
|
Mike McVay , President, McVay Media
Mike McVay is founder and President of McVay Media, a full-service consultancy, serving Adult Contemporary, Country, CHR, Oldies, Rock, Sports, and News/Talk radio stations. McVay’s 35 years of broadcast experience include stints as an Owner, General Manager, Program Director, and Air Personality.
|
|
|
Professional football is always a great inspiration to me in how to direct a radio station’s programming or sales departments. Watching football on TV, I noticed the network detailing the attention paid to each individual player by the coaches who are located in the booth above the playing field. They actually take digital pictures of the on-field action and then E-mail the photos to the sideline coaches. The coaches’ look at every detail of the play, they look at what the competition is doing to them, and what they are doing to their competitors. They try to catch the players doing something right as well as catch them doing something wrong. They are teaching by using examples.
We critique air personalities or review the performance of sales people for that exact same reason. It is not always to point out the negatives or indicate to them where they have failed, but rather to encourage them to do better. Catching them doing something right gives them gratification because they’ve perfected a part of their craft. It also tells them what to do more of to stay on your “good side.”
Lately, we seem to be running into too many Program Directors who are reluctant to critique their air talent. Maybe their too busy due to consolidation, maybe they’re shy or maybe they just don’t have the energy to fight with an air-talent any longer than what is a bare minimum. Some major market PD’s that I work with have even told me “by the time an air-talent gets to this level, they don’t need coaching.” Amazing!
The classic situations are those major market PDs who make statements like “our disc jockeys know how they need to sound. If they don’t know how to do a great show, then they don’t belong here.” This approach sounds like a great way to encourage an aspiring personality to hang him or herself once you have given him/her enough rope.
The Program Director needs to realize that when they terminate a personality, they have in fact failed themselves, their employers, and their listening audience. You should try your best to hire wisely and then fire reluctantly. You owe it to the employee and your employer to work with talent to improve their performance to an acceptable level. Termination is the last thing that you do … after all of options have been exhausted.
Let’s start with coaching. I used to use the word “Critique” sessions, but I’ve come to realize that what we do is “Coach.” We’re not really “Critiquing.” To critique someone is to be a critic and find fault with them. If I’m coaching someone, we’re on the same team and we both want the same thing.
There are three styles of coaching that we like to employ in a rotating fashion. I’d like to suggest that you use these coaching techniques to help improve your air-staff, too.
They are as follows:
- FRAME-BY-FRAME: This method of critique reviews every frame in which the personality talks. Call-letter placement, basics, for example, timechecks and weather, etc., are all analyzed. Does the content disseminated by the DJ pass the WHO CARES test? Information talked about should be of interest to the target audience, one thought per frame. Does the DJ sound natural as he/she delivers liners? These frame-by-frame critiques should be returned to the DJ in written form, along with their cassette, that they could review each frame and read along. The PD should be available for questions and should explain EXACTLY what is meant by comments in the critique.
- OVERVIEW: This coaching tactic is presented in written paragraph form and discussed with the personality. The content flow music, and basics are all analyzed. This form of critique is not as critical as a frame-by-frame and gives more of an impression of what a listener may hear and feel.
- SELF-COACHING: The personality operates the tape machine and stops after each frame telling the PD how they feel about the show. This form of review is very interesting in that you will find most personalities are harder on themselves than the PD would ever be. They will tell you what they feel they need to do to improve their show. You need only guide them in determining the curatives and encourage them in this self-help method.
Get busy, now! The NFL uses Digital Pictures: we use digital audio . . . and fewer steroids!
|
