Consultant Gary Begin of Sound Advantage writes in a piece for TALKERS today about why some morning radio shows fail to launch. He offers six reasons for this that can be avoided if management really wants to create a successful program. Reason number one? Because the hosts are just not that good. See Begin’s complete article here.
By Gary Begin
Sound Advantage Media
You know the routine.
Your radio station introduces a new morning show, and you sit back and wait for the magic to happen.
And you wait…and you wait.
Still, the audience doesn’t know them, doesn’t care about them, or knows them and still doesn’t care about them.
Why is this happening?
There are six reasons:
One: Because they’re just not that good
It’s true! Radio managers are not famous for spotting and nurturing talent.
And a result: Being good is hard!
There’s a reason why Howard Stern was fired to the top. There’s a reason why it’s a safer bet to plug in Ryan Seacrest than to take a chance on somebody nobody knows (for better or worse). There’s a reason why the freshest young voice with a unique point of view prefers to launch a YouTube channel rather than work its way up the long, hard slog of the radio ladder.
Radio fans know what they like and don’t like, and everything else will likely fall in the vast, bland, vanilla middle. And while that vast, boring, vanilla middle can be tweaked with a bit of coaching or a new producer, there’s an old saying:
“You can’t polish a turd.”
Two: Because they’re not meaningfully different in a crowded field
Guy’s name and Gal’s name in the show title? Check.
Impeccable technical execution? Check.
Show producer/board op? Check.
What about plugging in all the radio morning show best practices? Check.
The problem with formulas for what makes a great morning show is that every station has access to the same procedures. And when every radio station is playing the same morning show game for the same audience at the same time using versions of the same bits, the audience will default to the show they’ve listened to longest, even if it’s not necessarily the best – because it takes a lot of time and effort to find the “best” and no time or effort at all to succumb to habit.
So why should I change the listening behavior that has served me well for years to sample YOUR show?
Three: Because listeners are barely exposed to them
It’s not only about how long a show has been on the air but also about how much exposure that show has had while it has been on.
I have a saying:
Listeners don’t listen to your morning show today; they listen to every episode of your morning show they have ever heard – today.
In other words, listeners bring their relationships with talent to each listening occasion. This makes intense morning shows powerful: They have a longstanding connection with their fans. It’s also why you can stream a market and listen to the dominant morning show without knowing why it’s so successful.
So, when you envelop your show in music, or the host opens the mic to announce a song, do a live read, announce another contest winner, check the weather, or emote some breezy phrase that dissipates into the radio ether within seven seconds, then the audience has less to know and fewer opportunities to realize it.
Why bother?
Four: Because they’re DJs and not humans
While there’s something comforting about a human voice on the radio, not every voice appears human. I’m not talking about voice-tracking here; I’m talking about content.
Humans have three dimensions – strengths and weaknesses, flaws, and blemishes. All on display.
When those dimensions are not displayed in a movie, we call the character “shallow.” And nobody (willingly) makes friends with shallow beings (although we’re happy to laugh at their expense TV).
Five: Because management doesn’t want a great morning show, they want a cheap morning show to be great
Too often, we’re not aiming for greatness; we’re aiming for extraordinary cheapness.
That’s not how Jimmy Fallon got the “Tonight Show” gig or how excellent radio talent is born. We fool ourselves into thinking the cheap voice can be better if only the audience catches on. And then we are disappointed when they never do.
This is not to say you always get what you pay for, but you certainly never get what you don’t pay for.
I recently ran into an old radio friend – a former morning host – now long out of the business. He was approached by a station in his market to do a weekend gig – live. And for this, he would be paid what he described as “the kind of money I made just out of school.”
Either he will say “no,” or the station will get from him what it’s paying for, which is precisely what it wants and much less than it pretends it wants.
Six: Because “liking them” and “listening to them” are two different things
Your new morning host may be a great guy and a model citizen, but if I’ve got 20 minutes of drive-time, I intend to spend it with the most compelling, entertaining, or informative morning show I can find, not with an audio Boy Scout.
Gary Begin can be reached at garybegin10@gmail.com.
Consultant Gary Begin of Sound Advantage Media writes today in a piece for TALKERS magazine in which he says that quite often there is a disconnect between the brand of a radio station and the brand-supporting messages that the sales staff is presenting to prospects. He says, “Experts in branding seem to be coming around to the idea that the power to make or break your brand-building effort lies not in the quality of your advertising but in the customer’s experience at the point of sale. In radio, that’s your over-the-air product and how your ad rep handles the advertiser.” He adds, “To navigate and successfully cross No Brand’s Land effectively, marketers must start by adapting brand message creation and delivery to today’s strategic sales processes.” He says there are two trends that will drive marketers’ efforts to create brand-supporting content that helps salespeople sell.” Read about them in his column here.
By Gary Begin
Sound Advantage Media
Broadcasting executives spend millions building their radio station’s brand in the marketplace. But is it being spent in the right place?
The frontline salesperson is a marketer’s greatest asset in creating brand justice and impact. But if you ask brand managers to look at their brand-building budgets, you’d probably see expenses allocated opposite to what drives brand purchase decisions.
Brand marketers continue to pump big bucks into extensive ad campaigns while doing next to nothing to deliver relevant, brand-supporting messages at the all-important, more significant level—the distance between a company’s sales voice and a prospect’s purchase decision.
What’s the answer?
It probably lies somewhere between (1) the unwillingness of radio stations and brand managers to go further “downstream” with their strategic recommendations and (2) the lack of useful tools to get them there.
Welcome to No Brand’s Land
Increasingly, a company’s branding success depends less on what they sell and more on how they sell it. Selected experts in branding seem to be coming around the idea that the power to make or break your brand-building effort lies not in the quality of your advertising but in the customer’s experience at the point of sale. In radio, that’s your over-the-air product and how your ad rep handles the advertiser.
On one side of No Brand’s Land, brand marketers can control all the implementation, ensuring the advertising campaign is right on, the media coverage generated by your on-air promotion is consistent, your Web site looks the same, and your corporate design is in place.
But on the other side of the No Brand’s Land, salespeople are still doing their own thing. They are cutting and pasting old proposals with outdated information and incorrect messages. They’re fabricating homegrown collateral tools and PowerPoint presentations that are, at best, inconsistent with corporate positioning or, worse, downright inaccurate.
The most frightening thing for brand marketers is that these cobbled-together documents must walk the halls of prospective customers, representing the company’s brand at the most critical points in the sales process. Ouch.
Adding insult to injury, the field-fabrication virus spreads exponentially as this lousy information is perpetuated across the channel on the brand’s intranet.
Crossing Over No Brand’s Land
To navigate and successfully cross No Brand’s Land effectively, marketers must start by adapting brand message creation and delivery to today’s strategic sales processes. Two trends will drive marketers’ efforts to create brand-supporting content that helps salespeople sell.
Trend #1: Value Selling
For more than a decade, sales training and methodology experts have focused on improving the consultative selling skills of salespeople—especially in complex selling environments. The concept is simple: first, salespeople identify customers’ needs; then, they demonstrate the ability of a solution to respond to that customer’s specific needs successfully.
Often called Value Selling or Solution Selling, this dynamic and interactive sales process replaces previously static, one-way techniques that debate the merits of competing features and functions.
While salespeople move toward creating a much more customized sales experience for each prospect, most marketing departments continue to deliver generic messaging using static collateral tools—a one-size-fits-all approach for a one-to-one world. No wonder salespeople are forced to scramble to create custom content, piecemealed from various sources, to demonstrate they have listened to the customer.
The first thing brand managers can do to help is translate their high-level positioning into street-ready value propositions and solution messaging that speak to customers the way salespeople have been trained to sell:
Trend #2: Dynamic, Personalized Collateral Building
Value selling has raised the bar, forever changing customer expectations about sales experiences. Customers expect company interactions to be personal, relevant, and tailored to their specific needs.
Meanwhile, marketing departments have tried to keep pace by adopting segmentation strategies, doing their best to tailor messages and create more customer-relevant positioning. However, the tools to deliver these increasingly sophisticated messages through the sales channels have lagged. So, we’ve seen a proliferation of static collateral tools designed to fit every occasion.
Unfortunately, salespeople are neither warehouse managers nor librarians, and they have difficulty tracking and finding suitable materials when needed. In response, marketers have set up sales intranets to supply 24×7 access to support materials.
While these intranets improve accessibility to materials, they don’t resolve the most significant issue facing today’s value-selling salespeople: the need to provide prospects with dynamic, personalized sales communications. With only static documentation, salespeople begin creating unique, customized documents for each sales situation.
Typically, this happens at the expense of the brand and the company. The lack of consistency between radio stations and from salesperson to salesperson—undermines the millions spent on brand awareness advertising. The extra time spent by salespeople crafting these personalized proposals, presentations, and collateral pieces keeps them from time better spent with customers.
Marketing’s big win is that every radio salesperson, even within a multi-entertainment environment, will now communicate a consistent company message. Imagine the brand-building power unleashed when sales reps begin delivering a persuasive, powerful, and pre-approved message at every point of customer contact.
Gary Begin can be contacted at: garybegin10@gmail.com.