Preparing for the Spring 07 Ratings Period

In Radio and Records edition for the week of March 5th, I contributed to a column in the Rock section that Mike Boyle was doing on Preparing for the Spring Ratings Period. Mike also wisely added some great comments from other programmers and pulled out the highlights from our piece.

I have the whole piece below to help as you prepare for the Spring Ratings:

Set Goals – Before you set a plan you need to pick the right ‘tools’ and that means making a plan. Look at the following measuring sticks:

• TSL or Cume – Do you need to get the audience you have to listen more or do you need build more cume? Cume usually means outside marketing and getting noticed in the market place to build more brand awareness. Extending TSL is more of an on-air issue where music consistency, playing the ‘hits’ more often, extending listening through stop sets, and keeping the station exciting are the key tools.
• Competition – What are they attacking with – Morning show, new music tricks, contesting, hitting the streets or outside marketing. Review their music with a full MediaBase or BDS system breakdown. You may need to build a bigger defense into your plan.
• Community Opportunities – Are their any events or promotions that can make you really stand out.
• Review your Hot Zips – are there new areas you need to cover, are there areas where the competition is winning and you are not?
• Imaging – Are you using every opportunity around the records to build the brand, recycle, make your promotions/events stand out, and maximize your music position? Is the creative fresh and topical?
• Research – Re-sort the library if you have a recent music test or online data. Review the perceptual if you have one. If not take a look at your recent listener advisory board meetings with the audience – if you don’t do them start them up you need to listen to the audience somehow.

Listen Carefully before you plan: Get away for a full day – no calls, email, or other distractions and listen. It’s best to do it like a consultant from a hotel room. Monitor the market and your station in as much detail as possible. Be objective – imagine you are a listener and pick apart your product as well as the competitors.

Now that you have set the table you can plan:

• Music – Full software review. What are your most frequently played songs? Are they the powers? Review the turnovers – any categories moving too slowly to make an impact with the audience? Review the currents and recurrent categories carefully. Are there songs in the recurrents or currents that are burnt or have faded? Put them on hold or drop them till you know. Look at your flow – do most 15 minute segments reflect the range of the station in eras, tempo and key artists?
• Imaging – How fresh are the sweepers and promos? Do they promote the product or mostly spend time being too creative. We’ve all seen that great commercial and can’t remember the product – is your imaging guilty of this?
• Personalities – Meet with the whole team and with each show and do a critique. You may find the last time you had a session with all the air staff a while back. Get them all tuned up.
• Promotions – Have your plans well organized with a daily calendar. You need to make sure you are prepared and taking advantage of every opportunity. Make a full calendar and also make sure you have enough promo/sweeper/liner inventory to get enough reach and frequency on you major efforts.

Be the leader and the coach:
Calm in the face of attacks
Organized
The Man/Woman with a plan.

In today’s world we often see programmers tackling multiple stations or even branching out to other markets in many companies. All of these steps to make each station a winner take time and the ability to focus on one product at a time. Budget your time and fight to take 2-3 days on each station you work with and go through all the steps. Yes, it takes a lot of time and effort – but that’s the price of winning.