Know Your Medium

Many broadcasters assume that they are the centre of the Radioland universe and that listeners lend their full attention to their every word. Nothing further could be the truth. In fact, your average radio broadcaster is lucky if they have control of “half an ear” for most of the time.
In the first of this series, we’ll review the reality of listening habits and explode a few myths in the process.

People generally do not listen attentively

In many developed markets, the average person spends about 2 to 3 hours a day listening to radio - but as an accompaniment to other activity. Surveys of radio listening in Australia, for example, revealed that the average person tunes in for about 3 hours a day. But then something strange happened. When Australia’s statistics bureau did a study of the public's use of time, an amazing discrepancy popped up: the average time spent listening to radio was about 5 minutes a day!

This was enough to send your average station manager into an apoplectic fit, but rather than assume that one set of data was rubbery, saner operators would immerse themselves in the ambiguity to find out what it revealed. It revealed that the 5 minutes represented listening as a primary activity. For the other 2 hours 55 minutes, people were engaging in other activities and listening to radio as a secondary activity.

The above has an upside and a downside. The upside is that radio can become a portable companion to people’s lives and can penetrate where other media cannot. The downside is that you, as a radio broadcaster, have to work your butt off to arrest the attention of your listeners at vital moments.

Radio is an ‘Unconscious’ medium

Only a small percentage of listeners listen to radio as a primary activity. Most radio listeners are background listeners who are drawn into the foreground only when a positive chord is struck (when something is presented to them as of high relevance to them, or they consider the material important enough to listen to).

People do not actively process every word uttered on the radio. As sentient beings they are conditioned to unconsciously scan for words and signals that link to their interests, beliefs, values, needs and wants. It’s only when a presenter or talent says or does something that “clicks’ with their internal filtering process that attention is given.

When giving half or more than half an ear to the radio, people listening to radio search for patterns in the information delivered and tend not to want to follow the linear or logical construction usually found in print.
People want information quickly and in bite sized chunks.

Radio presenters/DJs who do not sound mentally focused and honestly passionate about what they are saying will fail to grab at least half an ear of their listeners. They will enter the twilight zone of white noise, producing background sound, but not the kind of sound that arrests the attention or imagination of listeners. Presenters must be mentally connected and committed to each and every idea the present.

Radio is not very important to most listeners.

Radio is not nominated as a high value commodity. It's a bit like air in the minds of listeners - not important unless you have trouble breathing. So Radio is not at the top of the list of things that interest most people. Even if radio is something they use every day, they don't spend much time thinking about it.

Though nearly everybody listens to radio, a lot of people hardly notice it. If your station went off air permanently, would anybody care much? Or would they just switch to the next most similar station?

The trick is to increase the number of listeners who value your station very highly. This is not achieved by trying to sound the same as the most popular station, but by offering personality, experiences and content that are unique, important and relevant to your target market.

Lots of people listen to radio when they’re alone.

The later it is at night, the more likely they are to be listening alone - unless they're young. The young are increasingly turning off radio in pursuit of other activities like gaming and the world-wide web, downloading their music and using their iPods to construct their favourite playlists.

Aim for a more intimate sound late at night, but do try not to sound like Kate Moss on Mogadon – that’s old hat and irritating. Learn how to communicate one-on-one and use rhetorical devices that allow youoyou’re your listener to share “private space” See my book, the Charisma Effect for techniques on how to communicate in private space.

Radio listeners are fickle…and so they should be!

Many people listen to two or more stations, but by using different radios, in different settings. Most switching is to and from "off," not between stations.

Your biggest competitor may not be another radio station, but another type of activity, especially if it requires full concentration. Your job is to make your program a ‘must take’ that overrides or at least accompanies other activities.

The way you make your station a ‘must take’ is to pay particular attention to the space ‘in between’ programmed content. The spaces in between songs are absolutely critical – if you don’t make many of them a ‘magic moment’ in some way or another, expect your listeners to view you as a not-very-interesting jukebox.

People's habits are slow to change – except when they’re not!

Say you’re part of the line-up, or introduce great new content to your station. You may expect your audience to improve, but the audience doesn’t improve and may even drop. The statistics show that often audiences fall before they rise. Some people who were loyal to the previous content and people may switch off and the people who may become riveted by your new stuff may not even know about it in the early stages, even if it has been promoted vigorously.

Don't be like some panic merchants and give up the game. Keep making your program as compelling as you can, making sure that you are resonating with your target audience. It often takes up to twelve months before a new line-up or novel content begins to produce better results.

The exception to the slow rise in audience numbers for a new program is interactivity. Research shows talk back programs, request programs, and programs with higher levels of audience participation often generate rapid rises in audience numbers. Often significant rises are registered within a month – the main reason being that people talk about it to others.

Listeners have favourite stations.

Most people have a favourite radio station, and may have favourite personalities. They know where to find it on the dial, and they know approximately what programs it offers, at what times. Most listeners have only one favourite station, but others have different favourites for different times of day, or for different situations - maybe one station to listen to at home, another while driving.

This force of habit helps stations (including yours) to keep their listeners, but makes it difficult to increase the audience by taking listeners from other stations.

Boring markets make listeners uneasy

With the merging of radio stations into networks and the buyer up of stations by corporations that don’t have a feel for the medium, the content mix of many markets is becoming predictable and ‘same-old’. This offers a great opportunity for independently owned station and front-line talent to exploit.

In many instances listeners are listening to their number one choice of station not necessarily because they love it, because it is the station that they dislike the least!

There are three factors that will help you win over audiences from your competitors in boring, same-old markets. 1. Increase the level of enjoyable interactivity, 2. Build up your listener trust quotient (The same way you would seek to build trust with an individual) and 3. Get your listeners to ‘love’ you. The latter element is the most important – to gain love you must provide emotional experiences to your listeners.

The cheapest way to increase your averages is to increase Time Spent Listening

Audience measures usually change together. The station with the highest reach will usually have the highest share, as well as the highest duration of listening. These three measures are related mathematically: as long as the total radio audience doesn't change - and it seldom does, much - a station's share is proportional to its reach multiplied by its average duration of listening.

Getting your current listeners to spend more time with your station is only limited by your creativity. Apart from eliminating as many switch off opportunities as you can, make the station more attractive to existing listeners by giving them more emotional experience (more reasons to love you), more ‘magic moments’, more cliff-hangers, more forward promotion (make it seductively compelling) more things that will help them improve their lives, and more differentiation from other market players. When you do this, the new listeners usually

Summary

Top radio stations and top talent have at least two things in common. They know their audiences and they know how to inspire and motivate their audiences.
Top talent these days either instinctively or consciously seeks ways and techniques of drawing audiences into a shared space. My book the Charisma Effect, shows a range of methods and techniques to draw listeners into shared space.