With BDS and social media trending and all of the other opportunities for low-effort research and analysis, Radio has kind of forgotten that sometimes, you just need to go out and talk to people. It’s the best market research ever.

Wild in San Francisco launched strong but 10 months into it, it was still trying to find its music niche. They’d tried to out Urban KMEL, which failed. They tried mainstream CHR in a market where that had never really been a strong format. So, what was there to do?

Jerry Clifton pointed out that with the demise of Hot 97 in San Jose, there was a HUGE disenfranchised Hispanic audience 30 miles to the south, so he and Rick Thomas (greatest PD, possibly, ever) went down and hung around San Jose for about a week. Just went around to bars and corner markets and parks and record stores and talked to people.

“Someone needs to play Old School!” came back again and again and again. Rick had come from Z-90 in San Diego but really had just a passing knowledge of that music so they spent a few days immersed in it, went back to Wild, started adding in artists that included Roger & Zapp but most importantly, opened up the station to a million Hispanics down the road, and boom: they beat KMEL in a year.

God bless Coleman Research but they would have never pointed the 107.7 programming in the direction of Old School.
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I remember the morning that Mancow blocked the Bay Bridge pretty clearly. It’s hard to forget when a GM calls and leaves a breathless voicemail that said “Turn on CNN!” followed by a dial tone.

The biggest bacchanalia of a press orgy that I’ve ever seen in regards to a radio station that:

1. Cost nothing.
2. Did not involve the ingestion of water.
3. Did not disrupt the commute of 200,000 people.
4. And basically did not involve death, injury, maiming, the destruction of property, the violation of international banking laws and did not result in lawsuits, terminations, suspensions or the public pillory of a morning show.

Was…

In the Fall of 2012, weeks before the General Election, the White House reached out to Democratic operatives in battleground states and asked them to pick music stations for morning show interviews.

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When I’m on the road, I always try to squeeze in a meeting with the morning show because they’re hopefully the most creative entity in the building, and creative people inspire me.

What you find with great talent is that they’re really inquisitive. They ask questions. They’re curious. They’re driven to be better. And they’ll usually be NSA-like in their creeping of other shows. They’re off the air, they meet with their cast members and start looking to see what they’re peers did that morning.

So I’ll usually ask the hosts and support crew who they like to follow. They’re a couple of syndicated shows that, if they appear to be true fans, it raises a red flag. Not because these shows aren’t successful but they haven’t done anything that is truly remarkable in years. No one has ever gone into work and said “Holy gosh Mr. Smithers, you’re not going to believe what Karl & Googie did this morning.” I get a lot of Kanes and Mojos and Fitzs and Chet Buchanan’s in the U.S. That’s neither good or bad. Just an observation.

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