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Yesterday was my brother’s birthday. It’s funny that no matter how
old my brother and I get, not matter how often we see each other, or
no matter how busy life gets I always remember how old my brother
is.
It’s simple. He’s nine years older than me. I do the math.
Do you frame everything your station does from the perspective of
what’s important to your listener? In essence, do we match up the
station’s benefits with the listeners’ needs?
When I was 23 years old I was hired at my first BIG station. It was
obvious that every air talent on that station was better than I was.
Frankly, I began to question whether or not they had hired the wrong
guy. When the ink on the deal was dry I asked the program director
why he hired me. He said it was because of one break that I did on
my audition tape. In what I considered to be a throwaway PSA I said
that “you might want to write the number down on the dust on your
dashboard”. My PD told me that if I, at my young age, was thinking
while I was on the air about what the listener was doing at that
moment, that I was someone who was ready to be taught the other
stuff.
Recently I heard a radio station that positions itself as “local and
independent”. I realize those terms may be a really big deal to the
radio station management team who is competing with the big radio
conglomerates across the street, but I have to really wonder whether
a typical listener would possibly care about the radio station’s zip
code or the name on the FCC license or whether they own and operate
any other radio stations in town. My friend Mark Ramsey has said
that listeners don’t care about where you are, they just care that
you know where they are. But that’s a discussion for another time.
I often begin seminars with the words, “For people to see things in
the same way, it is helpful for them to be standing in the same
place looking in the same direction at the same thing.”
Recommended task: Listen to your station for one hour and evaluate
whether the people on your station are talking about things from the
perspective that will most resonate with your listeners.
And Happy Birthday, big brother!
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John is a partner in Goodratings
Strategic Services, and has been a successful major market disc
jockey and program director for such companies as CBS, Cap Cities,
Westinghouse, Sandusky, Gannett, and Alliance during his 38 year
broadcast career. John joined Goodratings’ partner Alan Mason in
1999.
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