Yes, the title's in honor of the 2008 World F'ing Champions as they coast into the 2009 playoffs. (And with that, the ghost of 1964 pays a visit). This week's All Access newsletter is about using a down time to shake things up. Radio could use a sparkplug right about now. Do J-Roll or Victorino have any spare time?:
You know, now would be a good time for radio to take a few chances.
That's not how it works, of course. Management is, with good reason, freaking out over business, which is, to put it as charitably as possible, difficult. They're panicked over every dollar. And there's the omnipresent, omniscient PPM telling them, they believe, that your ratings go down every time you say a word with more than two vowels in it. No wonder that a large percentage of present radio management would prefer you shut up and play music, preferably all hits, preferably "Poker Face." Maybe "Boom Boom Pow" or "You Found Me" for flavor. And commercials. Assuming there are any commercials.
But you can't do that with every station, can you? (Can you? Please say no) At some point, there has to be recognition of the fact that radio needs to try new things.
Why not now?
A year ago, when the economy collapsed, some of the wiser financial minds noted that recessions are actually good times to start new businesses if you have the money (that, unfortunately, in this credit market, is a little bit of a problem). The theory is that if nobody is doing well, you're not under pressure to make the kind of returns you'd be required to show in a go-go market. You can make your mistakes now, and, by the time the market recovers, you're well-positioned in your category and the sky's the limit.
We can relate that to radio. Right now, we're in a weird transitional period. Revenues are obviously down. The PPM has changed things on the measurement side, and has programmers and advertisers trying to adjust. The impact of new media on younger demos is being debated. The world has changed. Yet radio today isn't a lot different from radio 20 years ago. Talk radio still means, mostly, political talk or sports talk. That's not to say they're bad. There are a lot of good political talk and sports talk stations out there, AM and FM, but ten years ago, when All Access took a chance and let me start the News-Talk-Sports section, I was looking forward to the day when there'd be a wide range of spoken word formats. By now, I thought we'd have stations all about, say, home improvement or food or travel or advice. We'd have comedy stations and financial stations -- not brokers selling you their services but serious market coverage -- and stations geared toward younger listeners' interests and stations talking about nothing but pop culture, scattered across your FM dial.
We got a lot of that stuff, but not on radio. Check your cable dial. And podcasts and streaming audio and satellite, too. These are opportunities, and terrestrial radio's not seizing them. Even presented with the opportunity of "multicasting" on "HD" radio, all we got were personality-free jukeboxes. And niche or unusual programming ends up relegated to off-hours on the weekends and sold at dollar-a-holler rates even though other media seem to be able to sell ads on entire websites and cable networks for the same niches.
This, however, seems like a great time to try this stuff out. Traditional ad spending is down, and down a lot. The usual categories are cutting radio budgets way down and sending some of the money to the Internet. Stations that don't have dominant ratings in their demos are going to be hurting for a while. If revenues are going to be off anyway, and if you can look at other media for success stories where products find a niche and sell narrow but lucrative audiences like travel buffs or foodies or investors, shouldn't radio be looking at the same thing?
Okay, so I may be way off here. Maybe there'll be no business to be had for that kind of programming once revenue starts to grow again. But I'm looking at the Internet and cable and I'm seeing that they find value in specific targeted niches, and meanwhile there are whole general demographics that talk radio doesn't bother trying to reach, as if they're not worth the trouble.
Right now, radio can't afford to ignore any possible audience. Wait much longer and the window of opportunity will be closed. And if the third or fourth or fifth FM station in your cluster is sucking wind trying to pull in the crumbs left by the bigger Top 40 or Country station in town, and someone else beat you to putting a talk station on FM, maybe there IS room for a different type of talk. It didn't quite happen in the first ten years of All Access News-Talk-Sports; maybe we'll see it in the next ten.
(Oh, and if there's not even a traditional talk or sports station on FM in your market, what the heck is everyone waiting for? Let's get that done right now, okay? How many examples of successful FM talk do you need to observe before you take the plunge?)
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No matter what brand of talk you do (look out, here comes the plug!), you'll find plenty to talk about at All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep column. This week's pile includes the shocking news that soda makes you fat, another nail in the coffin of telephone landlines, the trouble with Shorty Smoothe, taxing dogs, a dangerous spork, another reason to worry about going under the surgeon's knife, the slow and painful death of the daytime soap opera, how Congress is seeing the world on your dime, an amazing true science story in which a tooth replaces an eye, why the guy threw a lot of golf balls all over a national park, why people are driving carefully when they see the POLITE pull up on a motorcycle (that's not a typo), overweight pets, the now-celebrated Ernie Anastos F-bomb and the one where the little girl throws the foul ball back at the Phillies game, why it's hard to be the world's tallest man, and much more, including a ton of stuff about the economy (mostly severely depressing, of course), the Yale murder, Kanye West, and everything else that happened this week, all chosen with talk radio in mind. There's also "10 Questions With..." John Kobylt, the John of KFI/Los Angeles afternoon hosts John and Ken, last interviewed here exactly ten years ago, and the rest of All Access with the usual news, columns, charts, and resources that make it the radio and music industry's leading resource... all free. And there's a lot more coming, very soon, in the new All Access Version 3.0, chock full of improvements. No, that doesn't mean they got rid of me.
Next week, yes, it's time for the Incredible Shrinking Convention, 2009 edition, in Philadelphia. If you're going, do say hi when you see me. I'll be the guy downstairs eating his way through Reading Terminal Market.
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