Dom Theodore has a great term: “wallpaper”. When he was in New York at CBS, one of the other stations in the company was doing something called, wait for it, “The Payroll Payoff”. Based on their history of doing easily forgettable contesting, he sighed and said “Ugh. Wallpaper.”

Great stations usually have the intestinal fortitude to just throw caution to the wind and do something a little off-center.
Why? Because that’s the best part of being huge and successful: doing stuff that breaks the mold. It’s a freedom to have fun.

Hot 89.9 in Ottawa is a great example. For them to have more listeners, they’d have to wait for their current audience to breed. That’s how many they have. So a few years ago when female air talent were submitting tapes to fill in for Kelly on Regis & Kelly, they did the opposite. Mauler from the morning show was transformed into “Molly” and “her” tape was “her” at events and on the air, dubbed by Jenni his co-host. He was an actual runner-up. And because God has a sense of humor, he actually made it as a Regis replacement. Read more…

I can deal with assholes and I can deal with sleazebags and I can handle when promotions don’t go perfectly but the thing that just makes my head do the whole Star Wars Death Star Blowed Up Thing is when stations miss opportunities to market themselves.

And when I say “miss” I mean it in the context of not changing up the imaging, doing something on the morning show, doing some social media posts, maybe some web graphics or a weekend theme, or even just showing up for it.

The reason that a station in Chicago missed the Bears in the Super Bowl was that “Our CHR audience doesn’t care about football.” In Chicago. Maybe the biggest grouping of sports nuts on the planet. Read more…

There are so many metaphors that tie Radio to politics and even romance. And since some of these are fairly large, I guess they would be megaphors.

Politicians are prone to embellishing the truth. I know. It’s a shock. Do you need to sit down and collect your thoughts? They will maybe exaggerate a little to make their events or policies or successes seem even bigger or better or more successful than they might actually have been.

Why? Because sub-conciously people want to be affiliated with things that are larger and more popular than the competition. Or, at least have their choice validated.

The same goes for romance. I’m not going to tell the woman I met at Happy Hour at Chili’s that I drive a 1998 Ford Explorer with rust spots. I will probably tell her that I’m looking to upgrade my ride and am pitting two dealerships against each other to get me the best deal on a ’17 Escalade, and if they want my business, the rims had better be free.

I know a woman from my little corner of east central Minnesota whose ex-husband wooed her with his management job at Aveda and he was also enrolled at St. Thomas where he was working on a Masters in Business.

Uh…”management at Aveda” turned out to be in their distribution department (loading dock) and the St. Thomas thing was really some kind of highschool equivalency course. Whoops. He now drywalls and she got the kids.

Even the marketing of products is tweaked to improve or embellish their appearance. When I worked at Emmis in Minneapolis/St. Paul there was a photo studio on the level below us that specialized in menus and labels and other imagery of food. It was fun to hang out and they showed me the ropes in their kitchen on how to prepare a Perkin’s hamburger so that it looked bigger and juicier than it already was. It involved under-cooking, some coloring and lights.

How does that apply to us?

Well, we’re in the shopper comparison business too. Read more…