HOW TELEVISION COULD BE HELPING RADIO Chris Byrnes – ByrnesMedia Television may be losing its way, which could be good news for some of the other mediums who have had to suffer through a drop in readership or a loss of time spent listening.
The reason is pretty clear if you turn on the television most nights. Gone are the intriguing plot lines from those must-watch shows. Also gone are the favourite actors we form an affinity with to the point where we will even program the DVR or VCR to catch an important episode. These days it’s all reality TV or gloried game shows that occupy prime time. Why? Because it’s cheaper to offer a member of the public a chance to win a million dollars than it is to pay an actor a million dollars per episode, which is what each of the cast of Friends were paid in the last two years of that show. If you can endure dining on rats and beetle larvae there is always the chance to win a cool million dollars as Richard Hatch did on Survivor. In the first week of May the ratings were dominated by reality-based shows including; “American Idol”, “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race.” By the way, the Jeff Foxworthy game show, “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader,” just missed a top 10 slot.
Television is making the same mistake that radio made some years ago. Instead of competing aggressively for eyes and ears, they have cut costs for whatever short term gain that may bring. Long term, this will hurt the medium. I turned on the television the other night and the major channels were offering a two hour show of “Dancing With the Stars.” The following night it was the two hour season final of “American Idol.” The next big show being promoted is “America’s Got Talent” with celebrity judges such as David Hasselhoff and Sharon Osborne. If that won’t encourage more people to turn off the boob tube this summer, perhaps all the re-runs will.
I am hopeful all this bad television programming will encourage more disgruntled viewers to check out what else is out there. Some may even rediscover that old dependable medium called radio. Sadly, most radio stations have given up investing money or resources in nights and prefer to run generic voice tracks or have turned over evenings to a syndicated show which comes from another country or at least another time zone. And while the level of talent on some syndicated shows is often better than the fresh out of the box local DJ, these shows often fail to make a connection with the audience because they cannot weave the all-important local content that relates to a specific geographic area.
Given the high costs of developing talent and the low costs of distribution, it's easy to see why radio executives turned to syndication and voice tracking to stretch their on-air talent across as much of the country as possible. The Former CEO of Continental Airlines, Gordon Berthune - the man credited with taking that airline from worst to first in terms of customer satisfaction on time ratios and profits - said it best when he compared selling customers on an airline to selling them pizza… once you take away the cheese, sauce and topping, you're left with nothing but a piece of dough. An airline can't differentiate without good service and unique features. The same can be said of radio, it just isn’t compelling to listen to when the talent is tracked from another market because the listeners cannot identify with them.
With all the resources available to radio today we should all be playing the right music to appeal to our desired target demographic, so the focus has to turn to what happens between the songs if we want to sound different than an iPod. Radio needs to sound live and local if it is to be competitive with all the other offerings out there. We cannot play more songs in a row than an iPod but we can compel people to listen, providing the content is relevant and interesting. One of the challenges today is that there is often nowhere for young talent to develop their skills, because lots of radio stations are down to one or perhaps two live day-parts with the other “off peak” hours being tracked from another market or handled by someone in the building who multitasks and gets the job done. Take a look at where most of the top talent on the air today got their start and chances are you’ll find it was in late night or overnight radio. I refer to this as the “Global Warming syndrome.” We all know it’s an issue but we choose to do nothing about it because it will be a future generation of broadcasters who have to live with the consequences.
I recently took part in a program review of the broadcast and communications program at Fanshawe College in London and one of the suggestions from that review is to make the overnight time slot of nearby radio stations available to qualified students so they can get some real experience on the air. I think this idea has merit because it allows a person graduating from a broadcast college to also have some real world experience.
As an industry, we also need to do a better job of selling the benefits of radio, both internally and externally. Radio is not viewed as a great career by a lot of young people these days because the medium is not seen as being relevant to them. I recently had a professor at a broadcasting college tell me that there is more interest in the television and newspaper courses in his college and often the people in the radio course are there because they could not get into their preferred course. And yet, radio today still does the same great job of informing and entertaining audiences as it did twenty or more years ago. There are numerous examples of radio stations providing critical information to the communities they serve that saves lives, or at the very least improves their way of life. One example that springs to mind is the job the radio stations in the Okanagan Valley did during the forest fires of 2005. The Police and emergency services relied on the radio stations to broadcast critical information as the fires changed direction and forced the evacuation of hundreds of homes. For thousands of people, radio became their only form of immediate information during a time when hundreds of families lost their homes and all their belongings. Radio is relied on for everything from road closures, school bus delays, or sporting cancellations all the way to civil emergencies and natural disasters. Radio, arguably, does the best job of informing the public, but is often taken for granted.
Perhaps the CAB should put some resources into a campaign to promote the benefits of radio. Marketing the benefits of the medium to grow audience and attract people to look at radio as a career is something our industry has never embraced. Instead we have focused on cost cutting, which does not allow much room for innovation and reinvention in order to stay relevant. In England, every household pays £135 a year for a radio and television license which all goes to the public broadcaster. This fee is about to increase by 3% and a recent study confirmed the average person in England is prepared to pay even more for access to these services. Clearly, the average Englishman believes in the benefits of the BBC. The lack of subscribers prepared to pay for satellite radio in North America indicates apathy towards paying for a radio service, even if it includes Howard Stern. Before that apathy creeps into terrestrial radio we need to all take a long hard look at what we can do to protect a product that is used by 90% of Canadian’s each and every week, but for shorter and shorter periods of time each year.
So until the television executives wake up to their mistake and improve their programming, my hope is that radio programmers and executives will take the opportunity to look carefully at every day-part and develop unique and interesting programming to both attract listeners back to the forgotten day-parts and develop strategies to extend time spent listening. |