Are You Effective?

We are focused on the wrong thing when we focus on cume.

Lot’s of listeners. Well, at least a lot of exposure of our audio to the PPM devices.

But at the same time, radio stations are making changes. And not one of those changes is designed to make listeners love us.

We try to keep the PPM meter from wandering out of range. We don’t have a plan for bringing them back. Retention, yes. Attraction, no.

But our job is really quite simple. Connect listeners and advertisers.

If we are not trusted by our listeners, they won’t respond to our suggestions, including our request that they go to a website, ours or that of an advertiser.

If we are not trusted, we lose the kind of extra value that made spots on the Larry Lujack show go for 3 times the CPM charged by other stations in Chicago.

If we structure our programming to bury our advertiser messages in huge 6 minute blocks, which pretty much guarantees that the message isn’t heard, we aren’t doing much to help our advertisers.

When listeners tell us that they prefer 1 minute of commercials and we give them 6, we don’t win their trust.

If we don’t hire talented people and give them the time and resources to build compelling commercials, we lose another opportunity to be of service.

When our on-air “talent” add nothing, we lose another opportunity to build an lead a tribe of people who are naturally cohesive in terms of age, and like-minded in the areas of culture and music. We waste a unique opportunity not found on an iPod.

Our only connection to listeners is as a source of music background during times when it is too inconvenient to tap into the Internet or personal music collections. Our only connection to advertisers is to deliver an audience of people who are not engaged, not hearing their ads, not benefiting from any halo of trust in our personalities or brand.

I suppose that I’m going way out on a limb here, but here goes…

That won’t work.

On the other hand, giving value to listeners and service to advertisers is fun, personally rewarding, and professionally effective.

Let’s do what does work!