19 Sep Wednesday, September 19, 2018
This Week in The Lund Letter:
> Set your imaging goals
> Get into content fast
> Rethink network news
> And the latest media trends
Lund Management Alert: Creating An Imaging Plan
Last week you read about the human connection of laughter and the importance of fun and funny imaging. In addition to humor, these are the other areas your station imaging should include:
1. Set the objective. What do you want to accomplish?
2. List the topics your imaging will sell – the morning show, at-work listening, listening to the stream and app, visiting the station website, using a smart speaker, music variety, music quantity, the station’s slogan, and attitude.
3. Consider “attitude,” frame your target. Men like sarcasm, women don’t. A “wise guy” attitude works with men but doesn’t with women.
4. Do not stack. Stay focused in each imaging liner on one objective and one topic.
5. Be aggressive in rotating your imaging. Humor can “burn”; no one wants to hear the same joke three times a day. Freshen the imaging often and add new pieces at least twice a week.
6. What else will enhance the imaging? Add another voice, a sound effect, a movie or TV clip, a piece of music, or a celebrity voice.
7. Utilize all your resources in developing comedy concepts – your staff, listeners, comedy groups in your community, social media, and current events.
8. Keep the imaging short as you don’t want the produced liner to be longer than 20 seconds.
9. Don’t overuse listener testimonials available from imaging production services. Most of these clips sound fake.
10. Incorporate a variety of imaging pieces as you want to be unpredictable.
Comedy can be the great differentiator for your radio station. Humor when executed properly in your station’s imaging helps cut through the noise and helps you stand out. If you can make someone laugh, there is an emotional connection with them. Anything you say beyond that is going to be more meaningful.
Brighten Your On-Air Sound
Your imaging liners should be creative and fun, and they need to reinforce the station image. Refresh your imaging liners today – Order a script of 100 creative imaging liners. For music stationsorder here, and for News-Talk order here.
Lund Time Tip: Practice the 8-Second Rule
When coming out of music, you don’t have much time to keep your audience listening. If you open the mic with a back-announce of the song played, the station name and slogan, your name and those on the show, a time check and brief weather, chances are your audience has left you. PPM has taught us that humans have a very short attention span. 8-seconds is the amount of time that someone will listen to a station before they decide to stay or leave it.
With a Music FM, start your talk break with powerful content. As the music ends a stopset begins, talents must engage listeners fast by delivering a compelling story or an enticing lead for a story. If you present a hook, have a dramatic statement or play an audio clip. In diary markets, still say the station name coming out of music, but drop or greatly edit the other info to plant the hook within 8 seconds. The goal is to keep your listeners engaged.
With News-Talk, start your hour, show, or come out of your commercial break with fascinating talk – a hook, an audio clip, or anything enticing to grab the listener and keep them enraptured by your story telling ability. Save the talk show phone numbers until you’ve given them a reason to call.
Highball time with your Uncle Otis, a trainload of funny delivered daily! Click to listen.
Lund News Room: Evolving Radio News
Radio can learn from newspapers. The National Newspaper Association saw cracks in newspaper dominance many years ago, mostly due to Cable TV and the Internet. Instead of acting on those challenges and readership erosion, papers were in denial betting their circulation numbers wouldn’t decline. They lost that gamble and new media won. Today, there’s panic in the newspaper model along with massive changes because of their failure to address the problems early on.
While radio listening is higher today than it was 50 years ago, radio news may also need a facelift. Network news sounds similar to the 1950s when the Mutual Radio Network had twice the affiliates of CBS and NBC combined. Network radio news likely ended in 2008 with the death of Paul Harvey.
The longtime ABC News slogan, “More Americans get their news from ABC News than from any other source”, was introduced in the late 1980s. The claim refers to the number of people who watch and listen to ABC News content on TV and radio. A major factor in this claim in the 80s and 90s was Paul Harvey; his three radio newscasts a day reached an estimated 25 million listeners.
So where do most Americans get their news today? No, it’s not the New York Times or NBC Nightly News. Today, more Americans get their news from Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, and AOL (Huffington Post).
How does local radio news sound today – and how different is it today than decades ago? Radio news seems to be on a creative autopilot dependent on stories from the AP (the local newspaper). We’re living in the age of innovation. While radio does great with disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, “news on the hour” is stuck in the 1970s and local news is MIA.
Selling Against Amazon
“Bulletproofing Your Business from Amazon” is the newest client session from Revenue Development Resource. This 3-hour workshop makes money for stations and helps close more business to keep customers coming back. Contact Mark Levy atmark@rdrtoday.com. Click here to visit his site and learn more.
Promotion of the Week: Football Widow Wakes
During football season, schedule a series of Monday night events for football widows. This can range from free dinners to movie screenings, special listener-only sales at client stores and “strip club” bashes for women.
Need a contest or fun promotion?
Every programming contest and sales promotion you need is in the Lund Contest and Promotions Guide. It features ratings contests, promotions for the major holidays throughout the year, and seasonal special events, and numerous sales promotions. Get contest ideas for any size market or budget. Order today, and get a ton of fresh contests and sales promotions. Click here to order your copy.
Lund’s Top 3: Invigorating Your Fall Marketing
1. Take advantage of every possible opportunity to own local events and keep your listeners connected to their community.
2. Plan your tactics carefully – and go for cume, TSL, or both.
3. Buy media wisely; schedule advertising properly (use an on, off, then on-again cycle).
Invigorating your fall marketing continues next week. Visit www.lundradio.com for more Top 3’s!
Are you marketing to General Managers or Program Directors and want to reach the 9,500+ readers of the Lund Letter? Email John Lund.
This Week’s Music:
CHR has a new chart leader with “Love Lies” from Khalid X Normani. Taylor Swift’s “Delicate” (Bright AC), Luke Bryan’s “Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset” (Country), “Girls Like You” by Maroon 5 (Hot AC) and Imagine Dragons’ “Natural” (Alternative) all top their charts for another week. Lund clients receive weekly music research information on current music plus regular updates on the best-testing recurrent and gold titles.
Lund Trend Watch:
Online Sales Growth
Retail sales are booming! FTI Consulting has released its 2018 US Online Retail Forecast. In it, the expectation is for this year’s online retail sales to reach $525 billion by year’s end. This will be a 15.9% gain over last year. 13.2% of all retail sales happen online. Increases are expected to level off in coming years, with a forecasted average annual growth rate of about 10% over the next decade.
Smart Speakers Beneath the Tree
Adobe Analytics is predicting that smart speakers will be owned by 48% of US consumers after the holiday season, up from 32% in August. These numbers may seem lower than previous articles about smart speakers, but those numbers were based on households, not individuals. The most popular everyday uses for smart speakers are listening to music (70%), weather forecasts (64%) and setting reminders (46%). Speaking of smart speakers and Christmas…
Alexa, Order Me A Christmas Tree
Last year, you could buy a fresh 3-foot Christmas tree on Amazon. This year, 7-foot trees will be available starting in November. Some of them will be eligible for free Prime shipping, and all will be shipped within 10 days of being cut.
A Lot of Pins
Pinterest now has 250 million monthly active users. That is up from 200 million in September 2017 and 100 million in September 2015. The majority of Pinterest users are outside the US, however. More than 175 billion Pins have been created by users to date.
Launching Your Ad Campaign!
Way out there. NASA is considering putting ads on the sides of its rockets, as well as selling sponsorships/naming rights to rockets and spacecraft. In addition to being a new source of revenue, the marketing would also increase exposure of NASA’s astronauts, scientists and missions. Something that has been severely lacking in recent decades.
Programmer’s Planner:
Here is a list of actions this week for the proactive program director:
Fall TV Premieres – Be aware of listeners’ returning favorites in this and coming weeks as well as trending new series.
Today, 9/19
Monitor fall advertising on your station and competitors.
Plan an auto sticker promotion to impact in-car listening. Utilize the Lund Sticker Stylebook for execution and sales ideas.
Fall TV Premiere – New comedy series I Feel Bad has a sneak-peak preview of its first two episodes on NBC tonight before its true debut in October.
Thurs., 9/20
Fall diary ratings week #2 begins. The second week of the October PPM starts.
Update the station’s website. Have links to websites students can check out for homework help.
Fri., 9/21
Consider taking a station to the All Christmas format in November; details next week.
Streaming Premieres – On Netflix: animations Dragon Pilot and Hilda, series The Good Cop and Maniac (Jonah Hill and Emma Stone) and movie Nappily Ever After.
Movie Premieres – Life Itself and The House with a Clock in Its Walls.
Sat.-Sun., 9/22-23
This weekend, monitor competitive programming. Listen to talents, music, promos, contests, and special shows.
Fall TV Premiere – On Sunday, Fox airs the first half of the two hour second season premiere of 9-1-1. The second half airs Monday.
Mon., 9/24
Provide a competitive station review to the GM based on monitoring conducted over the weekend. Discuss in your next programming meeting.
Plan your October sales promotions and Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s events.
Fall TV Premieres – On ABC, Dancing With The Stars (including: Mary Lou Retton, Nancy McKeon, Nikki Glaser and John Schneider) and The Good Doctor. On CBS, the final season of The Big Bang Theory premieres tonight along with season two of Young Sheldon (both also have new episodes airing Thursday, their regular night); new (reboot) show Magnum P.I. and the third season of Bull round out the night. NBC has returning The Voice and new show Manifest. Fox begins season two of The Resident.
Tues., 9/25
Today’s programming meeting… seek professional help! Invite the Sales Manager to talk about how well the station is being received on the street, the best-attended remote, the newest clients, or a terrific job that was done for a client.
Fall TV Premieres – FX has new show Mr. Inbetween. Fox has returning shows The Gifted and Lethal Weapon. On CBS, returning NCIS and NCIS: New Orleans are joined by new show FBI. NBC has This Is Us joined by new series New Amsterdam.
Thanks for reading
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About the Lund Media Group:
For over 20 years, the Lund Media Group has provided programming, music consulting, operational guidance, and research to commercial and public broadcaststations throughout North America and overseas. Whether you program all sports, all
talk, or all music, the Lund Goal is to help stations get more listeners and keep them listening longer. The Lund Consultants are a multi-format custom programming and management consultancy.
Call John Lund for more information about how the Lund Media Group can help your stations achieve more listeners, higher ratings, and more revenue.
Phone: 650-692-7777.
Email john@lundradio.com.