Once events are on the calendar it is time for the station staff to brainstorm ways to take advantage of each event, deciding which ones will work for promotions and which will not.  It is important to involve both programming and sales staff.  If you were at November’ Serbian Radio Days you will remember Chris Price’s excellent presentation on involving listeners in the brainstorming process.  The station needs to look at events that can help the station build listenership and can find advertisers

Once a list of dates and ideas is on the calendar and the station has a list of promotion ideas, its time to set up deadlines and find sponsors, prizes, talent, interviews, whatever the station needs to do to successfully pull off the promotion. With the calendar management can allocate staff ad resources needed to pull off the promotions.

At our news-talk station, our calendar pinpointed several holidays, some the obvious ones, like Thanksgiving (a major American holiday) and Labor Day (in September rather than May), and some not so obvious, including Dr. Martin Luther King’s Birthday (in January) and Worker’s Memorial Day (not a legal holiday, but a day in April set aside by labor unions to commemorate workers killed on the job.)  We purposely picked days for promotions in months when advertising was low (For instance, Dr. King’s holiday in January is in the lull after Christmas.) 

So, our calendar looked like this.

• January, Dr. King Day
• February (Valentine’s Day) 
• March (St. Patrick’s Day, there is a huge Irish American population in America.)
• April, April Fool’s Day
• April,  Worker’s Memorial Day
• April, Opening of Baseball season.
• May,  Memorial Day (commemorating war dead)
• June, Solstice, particularly important in Alaska.  In Russia they are “white nights.”
• July, Independence Day
• August, Back to School.
• September,  Labor Day
• October, Elections
• November, Veterans’ Day (November 11, honoring living veterans)
• November,  Thanksgiving
• December, Christmas
• December, New Year (to extend the Christmas season by a week, for in the West.)

Plus throughout the summer we ran baseball sports promotions. Summer is traditionally a slow advertising time for us.  That is a pretty active calendar.

For the FM station we created promotions for ethnic “niche” holidays that fall in the slow winter advertising period.  These included.

• Early January, Russian Christmas.
• Late January,  Robert Burns Birthday (The Scottish national poet, appealing to ethnic Scotts)
• February, Valentine’s Day (Romantic music)
• March, St. Patrick’s Day (Appealing to ethnic Irish.)

Robert Burns Birthday, for instance, is pretty obscure, but it’s an excuse for us to throw a party and a promotion that actually brought us some good return during a traditionally dead period.  We also put the program in a time slot where we traditionally had low listenership (evening) and developed a special listenership for that program, the promotions and those sponsors. 

All of these promotions were specifically chosen to carry us through the slow time, winter months after Christmas.

You need to work ahead.   On April, stations are already planning back to school promotions for August and September.  Depending on the listener demographics stations were preparing promotions aimed parents, grandparents, or students.  Stations I worked with on targeting University students developed promotions with computer stores, internet cafes, book stores and cafés where students hang out.  This was in April, but these stations already were planning for an event at the end of August. 

Successful stations think ahead, plan ahead, and look for new, perhaps obscure, events around which to build listener and advertising promotions.

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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.

The leaders meet weekly with the General Manager to brainstorm prospects and divide up the potential advertisers.  A team has a fixed amount of time to land an account.  If it fails it hands its records for that potential advertiser to another team to try to close a deal.  Each team can “protect” only one or two potential clients from being taken by another team if it feels it is close to closing.  (Or the team leaders can, by agreement, allow a team more time to close a deal.) 

Once a month there is a general sales meeting where all of the sales people gather for training, motivation and to share experiences.  (The station also arranges longer trainings for its sales staff.)  The peer pressure and competition of the team structure enforces discipline on the sales staff.  Team leaders set quotas for the number of sales calls each team member must make a week. The weekly and monthly meetings are mandatory and those missing without prior approval are fined. 

Each meeting starts on time and ends in exactly one hour.  Internally, the teams develop a spirit of cooperation with members helping each other land a sale.  Externally they engage in competition with the other teams to land accounts and win incentives.  There are individual and group rewards for performance.  I was skeptical of this arrangement because I generally prefer a unified sales effort, and can see a lot of problems in this type internal competition.  BUT the station has sold ALL of its available advertising time in a really bad market and is now working on promotions and advertiser incentives to enable it to raise its rates.  It is now restructuring its prices to give advertiser incentives to go from 60 to 30 second spots so it can increase the number of ad availabilities without increasing the time devoted to advertising.

In Jordan, a new program, Car FM, has helped one station increase listenership and ad sales.  Much of the traffic on the streets in Amman is taxicabs, busses and minibuses.  Car FM appeals to professional drivers with information about traffic, roads, and specialized news coverage.  The program won the ire of municipal officials because it served as a forum for drivers to organize opposition to a new parking scheme downtown.  The station has a loyal listenership among professional drivers and provides a target market for advertisers.  A further benefit is that people riding in mini busses and taxicabs listen to the station because the drivers control the radio.  It gives the station a large number of listeners who sample the station’s music and news and helps drive awareness of the station beyond professional drivers to the general community.

Several hours south, in Mann Jordan, the local station uses printed door hangers to target neighborhoods for promotions.  The hangers are a single piece of stiff paper, or cardboard, shaped with a hook on the top.  The station prints the station name and frequency and the promotion it is presenting and then sends students out to hang the promotion notice on the door knobs of houses and businesses in the target neighborhood.   This is less expensive than using the mail and can target listeners in a particular area for a promotion or a special program.  (By the way, the station in Mann has copied the idea of Car FM from the station in Amman and is also having success.)

In Vanadzor, Armenia a station went to all of the mini-marts in town.  It bartered advertising in return for the front shelves in each shop.  Then it went to national businesses like Noy Mineral Water and Ararat Brandy and told those firms that if they bought time on the station they would get preferred product placement on the shelves closest to the front of the store.  With the number of Maxi stores in Serbia I am not sure if this idea will work but it demonstrates how this station looked at helping an advertiser overcome a problem, product placement in stores, to land sales.

In Gyumri, also in Armenia, a station ran a second anniversary promotion with a contest.  The station rounded up 26 local merchants.  They sold advertisements at a special birthday rate.  To celebrate the birthday the station held a concert and tickets went only to listeners who answered questions in an hourly quiz, and the question?  “Name three advertisers you heard mentioned during the last hour.”  To pick up the tickets, winners had to go to one of the participating advertisers.  The station kept records of how many people mentioned each advertisement, that AND the winners going into shops proved that the station could get people into stores.  The station made a recording of the concert and offered CDs of the concert to the participating advertisers to use for their own promotions.  Of 26 advertisers signed up for the birthday promotion half renewed as regular sponsors.

One final idea comes from a group of Albanian stations.  Like many stations in the region, they find greetings programs a good source of income so they have created, in cooperation with an Internet service provider, a combined “on line” and “live on air” worldwide greetings program.  They run it late night in Albania when radio listenership is low, but the program runs in radio prime time in the States for those listening on line.   Between songs people from the Diaspora greet each other and people back in Albania.  The stations do not get paid cash to air the program (the internet company gets the money for the greetings) but they get, in trade, Internet service, a website and 24 hour local station streaming.  At least one station found that this program develops a strong enough evening listenership to be saleable during local breaks.   That station created a video New Year greeting card (on YouTube) that listeners can send to relatives in the Diaspora.  Diaspora members receiving the card are urged to participate directly in the station’s own local greetings program.  (This will work better for Serbia when it can use PayPal.)

These are a just a few new ideas I have picked up from stations with whom I have worked over the past few years.

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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.

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.

You can’t hold radio time in your hand. While you can listen to a radio commercial, you can’t see a radio commercial.  It is often difficult for the advertiser to determine if the commercials you run actually bring customers into a store.  That is why smart radio sales people put together packages that give your sales people something to sell that is concrete and results the advertiser can see.  The best packages bring people into a business and demonstrate the ability of a radio station to motivate its listeners.

A station in Bulgaria put together one of the best packages I’ve seen in my work in Eastern Europe.  The Lev had collapsed and the economy was down.  Yet at least one radio station defied logic and prospered in the face of economic collapse.  That is because of two truths.  The first is that Advertising works when people change habits, and an economic collapse causes people to change habits.  Remember, the “golden age of radio” in the United States happened during the great depression.  The second truth is that a good package motivates both advertisers and customers.

The Bulgarian package worked like this.  The biggest selling beer in Bulgaria was the Dutch beer, Amstel. When the Lev collapsed people could no longer afford an import.  Bulgarians had begun to enjoy traveling abroad, to Turkey and Greece for holidays.  But with a nearly worthless currency people could not afford that either.  Yet people still wanted to drink beer and take a summer break with the family.

The station put together a package with a local brewery and a local lakeside resort.  It invited people to a weekend party at the resort.  It contacted the local brewer, whose beer was much less expensive than Amstel.  The station convinced the brewery to be a sponsor for the party.  Both the resort and the beer company bought ads on the station, at a reduced package rate, inviting listeners to the weekend party.  The station used its contacts to get local bands to make it a real party.  In return for the reduced advertising rate, the resort and the beer company agreed to give the station a percentage of their sales for the weekend.  In other words, the advertiser’s risk was lessened and the station made a profit only if the party was a success.

The result was that the station made a small amount of money on the promotional ads and more on the percentage of the sales.  The beer company and the resort reintroduced themselves to a public that had drifted away to both foreign brews and waters while making money on the promotion.  And the station got great public promotion by sponsoring a party that attracted a lot of happy listeners.  They repeated this throughout the summer.

The party was the springboard for both the beer company and the resort to do continuing advertising.  “Times may be hard but you can still enjoy a good beer and a good swim at a family resort.”

The sales people had more to sell than radio time, which, as I said, you can’t hold in your hand.  The station demonstrated that it could draw a crowd, AND could sell beer.  The advertisers had immediate feedback that reinforced the importance of buying on the radio.

In Alaska our classical music station, KLEF, put together a package that got us great press and demonstrated the power of the station.  We have a classical music station that plays Mozart and Brahms. But we knew, from the age of our listeners, that they also like classic rock.   So when the Rolling Stones did a concert in Seattle, which is about 2,500 kilometers south of Anchorage, we bought concert tickets and did an advertising trade for airfare and hotel with a travel agency.  We also bought some tickets for a cultural event in Seattle more in line with classical music tastes.

Then we promoted the fact that “Your radio concert hall, Classic 98” was giving away tickets and airfare for a weekend in Seattle to see the Rolling Stones and to enjoy a museum concert.  The contrast of the two, the asymmetry, attracted media attention to the station, “Roll over Beethoven.”

We got three businesses to sponsor the contest.  One was a local furniture store.   One was a local TV station, and one was the travel agency with whom we traded for the air tickets and hotel rooms.  To enter you had to go to one of the businesses that sponsored the contest.  Hundreds of people came over the two weeks of the contest to enter. 

Each business was featured in our ads.  The travel agency and TV station paid us in trade.  The furniture store paid us in cash.  We demonstrated to them that we could bring lots of people to the stores, which made sales from the people who came to enter the contest.  We also showed the general public that Classical Music listeners could not be stereotyped as one-dimensional.

The promotion not only made us a profit, but also cemented our relationship with the sponsors and got us a lot of publicity that promoted future listening.

Thinking of creative ways to put together packages that can both move people to visit businesses and that can pay for themselves through trade is a good way to build an advertising customer base and to promote your station.  It is easier for your sales people to sell a package than to sell straight “time” on your station.  You can document a successful promotion package and use it in your sales kit to bring in new advertisers.  At our stations we spend an hour or two a week brainstorming package ideas.  Only a few actually make it to onto the radio, but enough do to help us develop new business, and promote our stations. 

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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.

Disc Jockeys started mixing up Black rhythm and blues music with white country and western and created what Cleveland Disc Jockey Allen Freed called Rock n’ Roll.  The establishment attacked Rock as being “a Communist Plot” to undermine the morality of American youth.  American youth loved it.  Soon stations that had sold for about a hundred thousand dollars were selling for ten million as AM radio brought a new type of music to birth.  Radio became commercially important while leading the rock and roll revolution.  Many people believe radio enabled racial integration in the US by making it possible for white kids to dance to black music.

Many AM stations had FM affiliates that repeated the AM programs.  In the mid 1960s the FCC in the US mandated that FM stations program separately from AM.  The companies that owned the stations didn’t want to bear the expense of separate programs so they let young employees do their thing, “Playing on the FM Band,” as the title of one book at the time put it.  The FM spectrum was not highly valued so local community groups were able to pick up FM licenses for very little money.  Those stations played music produced in stereo, like “Sergeant Pepper” and Bob Dylan’s “Folk Rock.”  It sounded good on FM.  These stations became the voice of the youth rebellion in the late 1960s, the voice of the Anti Viet Nam war movement.  These stations evolved into two separate streams of radio in the US, One very profitable classic rock and Adult Acoustic Alternative stations and the other community stations that evolved into National Public Radio.

In the late 1970s AM stations, again, became next to worthless.  They lost their music listeners to better sounding FM.  One trade paper seriously told station owners, in an article “Making Money from your AM Station,” to shut down their stations and sell the property on which the antenna sat for shopping centers.  One of the biggest shopping centers outside St. Paul, Minnesota has the address “Radio Drive.”  But then some smart programmers decided to find an audience that viewed itself as underserved.  Amazingly it was older white men who felt left behind by the youth revolution.  Talk Radio was born and many stations that had been the powerhouse rockers of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s became the powerhouse talkers of the ‘80s, ‘90s and 00s.

In Europe radio developed differently, but frequencies that authorities felt were “throwaway low power” served as an instrument of social change.  Look at the early days of B92 and Radio Index in Serbia and Radio 101 in Croatia and the dozens of local stations in each country that produced independent information.  Radio, because it is not as popular as TV, has always had a certain amount of freedom to experiment and innovate.  It was below the radar until it helped give birth to the “next new thing.”  That could be either in the realm of music or ideas

In the developing world radio is also having a rebirth in the form of very local, community radio.  In Indonesia and sub Sahara Africa, local radio frequencies that were ignored by large state broadcasters are becoming instruments of social and political change by broadcasting very local news and service information.  In the Arab world there are indications that as national TV services fall prey to the international satellite TV services and lose viewers new local community radio stations may be poised to fill the gap for local news that satellite TV cannot fill.

Meanwhile, in the US, radio has been pronounced dead again.  With podcasting, satellite radio, internet radio, the iPod and telephone downloads experts are telling radio station owners that they need to start thinking of doing something new.  But radio has a self-correcting mechanism.  When stations lose value they fall into the hands of creative people looking for an outlet for something new and that “new” can become “revolutionary.”  As station owners you have that opportunity.  It is risky, but Radio has remained successful only because it has embraced change.  The opportunities now, I believe, are tie ins with social media, developing an even closer relationship with listeners, while delivering service on  multiple platforms, on line, on phone, on air.  The future of radio is with those who embrace change.  Ignore radio at your peril.

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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.

Sometimes when an advertiser has a successful campaign on your station he feels you’ve done him all the good for him that you can.  He believes he no longer needs advertising, so he drops his campaign.  This is normal, especially with new advertisers.  My best advice is to keep in contact with the advertisers who no longer advertise.  In the long run they are your best future prospects.  Ask them what about the advertising that they ran worked, what did not, and note that for future proposals.  Keep up with their business.  Often advertisers who stop advertising will pick up again in 6 months or a year when their business starts to slow down.  Sometimes advertising will come and go in rhythm with the client’s business cycle.  You need to learn that business cycle.  Watch the business and after some time you will be able to pick up a pattern and know when it is best contact the advertiser again.  You can set up a schedule for your own sales people and ultimately for the advertiser.  At our stations some of our advertisers are with us only a couple of times a year, for instance at times of year when they have too much inventory and need to convert it to cash or before holidays.  It is my job to get to know these cycles and know when to make the approach and how I can help them with their problems.  By becoming familiar with the clients’ business cycles I can plan a promotion or package to work for the advertiser.

There is one hamburger shop in Anchorage that advertises a couple of times a year.  I went there about once a week for some ice cream and to talk with the owner.  At one point he noted business was down.  We talked about it and I was able to help him with a promotion that could bring people into his shop.  The key is to keep contact, keep your eyes and ears open, be concerned about the advertiser, not your station and periodically make an approach.

One way to make that approach is to find some special program or promotion that the advertiser will be interested in.  In this case I was able to talk to the hamburger man about sponsoring some fall baseball sports play-offs. I was appealing to both his personal interest in baseball (one of the reason to stop by each week is to learn what he was personally interested in) and to learn the interests of his customers.

Promotions packages and program sponsorships work.  Sometimes a business wants to be associated with a program and it becomes part of the company’s identity in the community.  We had an attorney who sponsored a program called “Democracy Now!”  The program had a small but absolutely loyal listenership. But those are exactly the listeners the attorney wanted to impress so he keept exclusive sponsorship of the program.  It is part of his identity in the community. It’s the same with some of our local sports advertisers.  They want to be associated with “the team.”  The Radio Spitak in Armenia had created that kind of program-sponsor relationship between a war veteran’s tribute program and an advertiser.

One other thing you may want to look at is pricing your ads.  You may also want to set up seasonal rates, with higher rates just before holidays and somewhat lower rates to attract advertisers during your slow times. (allowing loyal advertisers to keep the lower rate through holidays.)  You don’t want to undermine the ads you currently have by cutting prices to get new ads or to draw back lapsed advertisers.

Finally you should document successes you do have.  If an advertiser believes you have been so successful that he no longer needs to advertise, get that success story written down or, better yet, recorded.  Get pictures if there is an event, and create a portfolio of case studies that you can use with other potential advertisers and go back to that same advertiser in a few months to remind him how successful you were for him in the past, to remind him what you can do for him.  If he sponsored an event with the station take along some pictures and reminisce about the good time everyone had.  And don’t forget to tell your advertising success stories on your own air.  At our stations we have a few advertisers who are willing to make spots with us telling other potential advertisers about their success.  That serves two purposes.  It gets the successful advertiser some free airtime and it does more to convince your listeners, who may be potential advertisers, to consider radio advertising.

One important thing to remember is to keep records of each contact with an advertiser or potential advertiser.  Keep records of the outcome of campaigns on your station.  Records can be your roadmap.  Review those records before making a call and think of new approaches based on past history. Look for patterns and exploit them.  And remember the slogan on the coffee mug of one of my most successful sales people.  “Salesmanship begins when the customer says no.” 

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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.