HOW’S YOUR IMAGE Chris Byrnes – ByrnesMedia Imaging is often what set’s one radio station apart from another. I’m sure you’ve heard radio stations that sound very hip and with it, and most times it’s largely because of the imaging; those little quick messages between the songs that hopefully sell the benefits of listening and perhaps even compel you to listen longer. A recent trend has been to dispose of announcers altogether and use imaging as the sole mechanism to weave the music, spots and news together. If you were to add up all the imaging the average radio stations runs over a week you would quickly come to the conclusion that the most frequently heard elements on most radio stations are the imaging messages. So it makes sense that any Program Director would want to carefully define a strategy to ensure the imaging is on message and appeals to the radio stations target audience. This can be a daunting task and I’d like to start by offering some questions to help you arrive at what might be the best approach for your radio station.
Why run imaging? Image messages are aired on a radio to firstly identify the radio station frequency and location which is required by broadcast regulations. This formal ID was used by aeroplanes in the early days to assist them with navigation. Clearly this is no longer a requirement given the sophistication guidance systems used by today’s modern aircraft. Still radio stations are required by law in Canada to formally identify themselves once per hour within 10 minutes of the top of each hour. This must include frequency and location. The other reason to run imagining in rated markets is to increase recall and hopefully get more ticks in the audience survey diary. Radio stations get credit for their formal call letters such as CIHR, their frequency such as 104.7 or their positioning statement such as “The World’s Best Music.” There has been some talk that in the new PPM measured world this type of imaging will not be so important given that radio stations get credit via electronic signals that are transmitted by the radio station and picked up by the people meter. However stations that tried this in the US have not put most of the imaging back on the air and reduced the number of long music sweeps without any imaging because they were concerned the radio stations were losing their identity and sounded rather “naked’ and boring without the imagining. This is one of the reasons radio stations in non rated markets run just as much imagining as stations in rated markets. In short imaging helps create the brand. We call this “stationality” which is what sets one radio station apart from another.
What are you trying to achieve? This is an important question that I suspect is not often asked by those in charge of the radio station imagining. If you were a product manager for a new line of breakfast food, this question would be clearly defined in writing long before the first box rolled off the production line. So let’s look at some of the things you might want to achieve via imaging. Selling the benefits of listening is often one of the main reasons to run recorded imagining on a radio station. Carefully crafted scripts and appropriate production to catch the attention of the target listener are just some of the tools used to help the radio station stand out. Creating clear point of differences between your station and your competition can also be important. If you play more music than your competitor, run more local news, traffic and sports these might be areas to promote via imaging. One advantage not often promoted is being the local radio station. This is not really a benefit unless you can sell a specific listener benefit. If there is a storm coming you might say “We the local radio station that will tell you if the schools are open, the roads are clear and if the school buses are running. Listen tomorrow from 6am as the XXX-FM storm centre has the most accurate up to the minute information to help you get to school work or where you need to be.” Another important imaging tool is the radio station positioning statement. Hopefully this has been tested against your target audience and actually means something to them. It’s often a sobering exercise to look through the diary comments only to find that few, if any, write down the station positioning statement. Start the imaging exercise by defining what you want to achieve and how you will use imaging to assist that goal.
How will you measure your success? In short how do you know that the job is done and the message had got through to your listeners? You might consider running a reach and frequency analysis via your ratings software to establish how often you need to run a specific message before the average listener is exposed to the message? The general rule of thumb is that a listener needs to hear a message three times per day for a week before they will absorb and react to it. I encourage radio stations to be mindful that the radio stations largest client is always the radio station itself based on the number of spots it runs each year. Therefore the station needs to ensure appropriate systems are in place to track and measure the imagining campaigns and then modify the imaging strategy accordingly.
What tracking systems will you put in place? How often do you listen to a radio station and hear the same material running month after month? There comes a point where the material becomes stale and has less impact on the average listener. Unless you’re using software or have a good system in place to manage the scheduling and track the number of plays it’s easy for imaging to get lost within the depths of your hard drive automation system and play forever. RCS offers a software program called Linker that does a great job of managing the entire process. One of the real benefits this program offers that I have not seen anywhere else is the ability to track the number of plays and warn you when material needs to be updated. If a few dollars a month is not in your budget then devise something that will work for you. In the past I have used flip cards in the control room and asked the announcers to pick from the top and turn over the card. You can control the frequency and rotation by the number of cards in the system. I have also used a one page grid sheet that listed the various categories I wanted scheduled (station promo’s, jingles, liners and imagine cuts) and I would hand schedule these on this one page. The announcer would look at the appropriate hour and locate the various elements he needed to insert into the program. This also ensures you do not run a liner and a record promo for the same item too close together. I am not a big fan of allowing the automation system to rotate imaging because often these systems not do a very good job. I was at a station recently and heard the same cut played three times in a short space of time. Even though the system was configured to rotate cuts on a specific number it did not operate as desired. I also encountered a similar problem recently at a station using another automation system where it appeared to unload a series of “rotators” and a large percentage of the radio stations imaging was not playing at all.
How will you keep it sounding fresh? Having a system in place to ensure your imaging is changed is perhaps the most important aspect of the entire process. If you’re not using software or don’t have an easy way to track the number of plays a cut has received you need to develop a simple system that works for you. Some stations put the creation date in a filed in the automation system so they can easily access that. I used to map out my imaging update timetable on a spreadsheet and shared that with creative and production so everyone involved knew what was expected. I know some PD’s who start their year by mapping this out in their day planner which also works.
Keep it simple Limiting the number of categories and the number of cuts in rotation makes the process easier to manager and increases the changes of the imaging doing its job. All too often radio stations confuse the listener by having too many different imaging messages playing at any time. The end result is that the station ends up being famous for nothing. The other area that is important to focus on is ensuring the sound matches the target audience. Some production people make the mistake of jamming too many different production elements into a short image cut and often end up confusing the listener because of the “wall of noise.” After the material has been produced listen carefully to each cut to ensure it matches the feel of the radio station and will appeal to the target audience. By the way be very selective about using clips from television shows in the imaging. For example there are entire web sites dedicated to storing the various clips from The Simpson’s, but using too much of Bart can make a radio station sound corny and very un-hip. If you’re going to use audio from television use clips from the big rating shows of today and ensure the audio is from the heroes of your target audience.
Conclusion I appreciate that we have only scratched the surface on this important topic. Imagining a radio station properly is no easy task, and it is not something that the PD can spend five minutes on once a month. It takes careful planning and flawless execution. But it is the one thing that can help differentiate your station from others abound you, especially when more stations are sharing artists and music. The key is finding the right people within the radio station who have the passion and the required skills to bring this to life. If your station imaging is sounding stale then consider bringing in outside help to either conduct an imaging seminar for your staff or farm out the process to one of the many shops that specialise in this work. Call our office for more information at 905-332-1331. |