TERRESTRIAL VS. SATELLITE… MORE ON THE GREAT DEBATE Gord Marratto We’ve recently returned from the CAB annual convention where we heard discussions about digital radio, changing consumer behaviour, maintaining your “brand,” and the Canadian radio policy review. The session we thought could be the most interesting to radio broadcasters was, “The prospects for ‘Local’ in a Borderless World,” because it matches up with the ByrnesMedia battle cry, “LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL”. No other topic on conducting good radio will mean anything in the future unless we all heed the need to reflect our communities. Unfortunately, the session seemed to miss the mark and dealt in a somewhat ethereal way mostly with television.
Oddly enough, we heard some Canadian radio broadcasters paying lip service to the need to be local while their own stations are operating on automatic pilot……..all day! For those who think that “announcerless” radio is the way of the future…WAKE UP! Listeners can get a full menu of ALL their favourite selections loaded onto their iPods. Why would they accept anything less from your station? The answer must be the local content, which only you, the local, terrestrial broadcaster have the capability to offer. Local radio’s greatest asset is its ability to marry up news and information with a listener’s favourite music format. I will accept that the average listener might hear 2 or 3 selections out of 10 that they wouldn’t have chosen if they had downloaded to an iPod but they get their fix of time checks, recent news, sports scores and weather forecasts, along with a little humour from the DJ as a trade-off.
The alarmists keep reminding us that youths have totally ignored radio and are lost to our medium forever. Unless you have information I’ve never uncovered, teens, as a demographic group, essentially have no interest in worldly or current affairs. They have no apparent need for information until they take on more of life’s major responsibilities. As proof, when was the last time you saw a 15 year old reading a newspaper? Since they can get precisely the music they choose from their iPods, they have no interest in listening to radio either. When marriage, mortgages, families and possessions turn young people into consumers, they invariably begin searching for information. Yes, these days some of that is sought from the internet but the local news, weather, sports and information are still best found on local radio. As people reach late 20’s they come to radio and that’s borne out by BBM national figures, which show that overall radio tuning is down only marginally.
At ByrnesMedia, we provide our clients with daily enriching information to include in show prep. More importantly, we show air talent how to turn this information into interesting LOCAL bits and make their shows stickier. We help your news department to use contemporary radio style in their writing and reading. We work with your programming and promotion people to create a meaningful brand, and then use great imaging to sell it.
Elevating a good radio station into a great one isn’t rocket science but it requires focus on some critical elements. Our job as broadcast consultants is to remind you of those elements and to help you and your staff attend to them. When we take on new clients, we leave them audio of their current sound and one year later, we do the same thing again. If the improvement isn’t absolutely apparent, we didn’t do our job and expect to be fired. We’re proud to say we haven’t had to face that circumstance. I would like the opportunity to tell you about the services we provide. It costs nothing to get the important details. It may be the most important investment of time you’ve ever made. Phone toll-free to: 1-866-332-1331 or e-mail me at: gord@byrnesmedia.com. |