24. 11. 2012
Fish Where the Fish Are
I’m from Alaska where fishing is a major part of our economy. Fishermen have a saying “Fish where the fish are.” There’s a lesson here for radio program directors. You need to know when your target listener is listening to the radio or when your listener can be enticed to listen to the radio. This means either having research on when your target listener is listening or doing your own research to determine when that listener is likely to be listening. Then you need to act on that information.
One of the major mistakes I find program directors making is assuming that the listener is like the program director. Too often stations program for the convenience of the DJ and not for the listener.
For instance, in most countries radio listening drops when TV primetime starts. (There are exceptions; with the increase in internet use there may increased listening in the evening while people are “multitasking” while on line.) But I have seen, in city after city, stations investing staff time in late evening programming that serves a small listenership while letting early morning hours run off the computer playlist. The reason is that many radio people are night people and they want to work at night. This is programming for the convenience of the programmer and not the listener.
On the other end of the day, most programmers hate getting up in the morning. I do too, although I did a 5 AM program for several years. Yet, in most places in the world, morning time is the best time for radio listening, from the listener’s point of view.
I have heard the arguments. “People don’t listen at home before they head out to work.” They don’t listen if you don’t give them something to listen to.
When I go into a town I do some simple research. I stand out by a busy intersection and count cars. I note when the car traffic peaks downtown. I watch when people start pouring out of busses. And then I back time. If the peak of traffic hits parts of Yerevan, Armenia, for instance, at between 8:15 and 8:30 in the morning I know they got into their cars sometime a few minutes either side of 8 AM, which means listeners are up, if they have breakfast, at around 7 or earlier. Stations need to do this kind of research (and more) so they don’t base programming around assumptions based on how they or their close friends live their lives. Go one step beyond counting cars. Call the police to find out when traffic peaks in different parts of town. That way you may be able to target different groups of listeners. In Amman, Jordan I found that there were two peak traffic hours in both the morning and the evenings. One was for professional office workers and the other for people in retail or services.
Once you find out when people are on the road go deeper into it. Call different businesses to find out when they start work and, if they are retail, when their peak traffic times are. Find out when schools and offices start. As manufacturing begins to re employ workers find out when shifts start and stop. I have often found that assumptions around when people go to work are based around old data.
In Eastern Slovakia there was a period of massive unemployment and stations programmed around that. When Whirlpool opened a new factory in Poprad making appliances patterns changed drastically but radio programming did not. The new factories started their morning shifts at 7 AM, and unlike under the old management, the international managers enforced starting shifts on time. We did focus groups in Poprad and found that the average factory worker, who started work at 7, got on the bus around 6:10 or before. They had to leave their homes before that. If the workers ate breakfast that meant that they wanted local news and weather at about 5 AM. The workers actually resented the fact that the local station did not start its local programming with news and weather until 8 AM, an hour after they had to be at work.
Even the teachers and the office workers in the focus groups said that 8 AM was almost too late if there were mothers getting kids out to school while needing to be at work themselves at 9 AM.
Existing radio research showed that there was no appreciable radio listening before 8 AM in Poprad. With focus groups we found this was because there was no decent local news and weather programming on the air before 8 PM. The focus groups showed us that if there was decent programming people would listen. Fish bite when there is bait and if the bait is set where they are hungry.
The station made programming changes, kicking and screaming. The hosts made all sorts of excuses about why they couldn’t do radio before 8, but management forced the issue and in the next rating book there was a radio audience from 5 AM on, and our target radio station more than doubled its listenership overall. The follow-up showed that people not only listened more to the station in the morning, but audience picked up all day. Further, people’s attitude to the station picked up. With this knowledge the station was able to tailor its morning program for factory workers in the early morning and office workers and shopkeepers in the later morning. When the factory added extra shifts and went 24 hours the station found that people leaving work at 7 AM appreciated the news and weather updates at the station’s “traditional” morning time, 8 AM. It’s important to keep up with listener’s lifestyle changes and change your programming accordingly.
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Rich McClear is a broadcaster from Alaska who has worked for almost 20 years helping stations develop in emerging markets. He was Director of the Serbian Media Assistance Program from 2008-2011.