"I Was There"
Ninety-Third of a series ...

I received a Christmas gift from a friend. The book is titled “Fresh Air”….and it is a series of chapters written by “marketing gurus on radio”. These are the “best interviews from the Radio Marketing Nexus”….and is edited by fabulous researcher Mark Ramsey. Mark is president of Mercury Radio Research. If you haven’t read “Fresh Air” please buy it and read it. If you haven’t checked Mark’s site please do so.

I read the book carefully. If you are a newcomer to radio programming and marketing of radio you will find a lot of tips from the writers. You’ll need to know most everything they have presented to score rating points.

I, for one, have always…since day one in the business…thought that programming and marketing should be thought of as a marriage. I like to write about marketing because it is where the ACTION is to increase ratings. I got serious about marketing when I became a program director. I was able to stay ahead of my competitors by using marketing tricks. The original TOP 40 and Country 40 stations were loaded with marketing ideas to make the listener listen longer…or tune in more frequently. Todd Storz and Gordon McLendon were the pioneers of recruiting audience by using marketing techniques.

I realized down the line that programming was about 10 percent of audience recruitment, and marketing was 90 percent. It is still the way I program.

I hooked up with research guys who were into marketing…looking for researched ideas that helped increase ratings. And, furthermore, the researchers looked not only at the present but also at the future. New formats can be identified by the research, and then marketing of the format creates the home run. A case in point was twenty years ago when WQCD in New York became a commercialized jazz radio station. The GM of the station brought in researchers, marketing people, and this humble broadcaster to determine how to market the station to achieve 25-54 success. I know because I WAS THERE. If you look around you will find the most successful stations today have a marketing magic about them.

Marketing can be an on the air campaign and/or an outside advertising campaign for a station. It can be ANY trick that attracts audience.

So, when it is time to change a format take a good researched look at your market and target demos. Then apply some unique, distinctively different marketing to the new programming!!!! Yep, that is the phrase I use…”distinctively different”. It is easy to do and it will work!!!

e-mail Kent kent@kentburkhart.com