|
RELENTLESS RADIO |
| Author: | Jerry Williams |
| Published: | May, 2000 |
| A little more than a year ago a grassroots campaign began among Christian programmers to extend the life of currents. The reasoning is that it takes longer than 12 weeks of moving through medium and heavy rotation for most listeners to gain any kind of familiarity with a song. To a large degree that campaign has been a success. There have already been more multiple week number ones on the CRR chart this year than in any similar time period in memory. The record companies are adjusting their release schedules to allow songs a longer shelf life. And more stations are staying on more songs longer. Playing currents longer accomplishes two results. It gives listeners more exposure to each song, increasing the probability of familiarity, which helps us as a format develop heritage. And because songs stay on stations' playlists longer, there are less slots for new adds, which increases the probability that only great songs are being added to fill those infrequent openings. The challenge then is to continue to extend the life of currents and to be increasingly vigilant to add only truly great songs. There is a related issue to extending the overall life of currents that we as an industry have yet to address. The issue is that it may not be enough to simply extend the number of weeks a song remains in current rotation; what may be equally, if not more important is how many spins a song gets each week while it is in a current rotation. That issue was actually touched upon during the CRR 1999 AC Radio Seminar this past September in Atlanta. During his Sunday morning session Val Garris, of Stratford Research, suggested that programmers use an already widely accepted sales formula to calculate the optimum number of weekly spins necessary to reach an average listener. That formula is known as OES, or Optimum Effective Scheduling. Now before we start breaking this down and plugging in some numbers, go grab a cup of coffee, your calculator, and your latest Arbs. Let's start by looking at one of the most common arguments heard by Christian programmers. "Since our format's TSL is traditionally higher than other formats, doesn't that mean that our listeners are already hearing our currents enough?" The answer to that question is generally, "No". Open your Arbitron and find your Monday through Sunday, 6am till midnight TSL (Time Spent Listening) for Persons 12+. If you're in double digits your station is doing pretty good in this area. The number one TSL station in Atlanta (not a Christian station) comes in at just over 10 hours per week. I've seen Christian stations with TSL as high as 12. For the purposes of this demonstration we'll go beyond that and say our station in question has a TSL of 14 hours. We'll also say that this station has 14 heavy currents and plays them 3 per hour and programs music 24 hours a day. So over the course of a week this station plays 504 heavy currents with each individual heavy current receiving 36 spins. The average listener to this station is hearing 42 heavy currents. That means that at best they're hearing each heavy current 3 times per week. But in reality they're probably hearing some 5 or 6 times and others far less. How can you tell if your currents are being heard often enough to make an impression on all of your listeners? That's where OES comes in. OES calculates the turnover of your audience and how often you have to play any element (a commercial, promo, or in this instance a heavy current) for that element to reach your average listener. To figure turnover you divide your cume by your AQH (average quarter hour) persons. So let's get back to our fictional station. Say they have a cume of 100,000 and 6500 AQH persons. That gives them a turnover of 15.38. The other figure you need to calculate OES is 3.29. You multiply turnover by 3.29 to reach the number of weekly spins necessary to reach that average listener. In our example that number is 50.6. That's a significantly higher number of spins than they're giving their heavy currents right now. And that means that their average listener is not being reached by their total heavy current rotation. So what can they do to rectify the situation? They can increase the number of heavy currents they play each hour. Or they can play fewer heavy currents in their library. Or they can increase their AQH persons. You'll remember that earlier we said this station plays 504 currents per week. So if they opt to keep airing 3 currents per hour they'd have to decrease their heavy currents library to 10 to reach their OES of 50.6. Or they can keep the rotation at 14 titles and increase the number per hour to 4, giving each title 48 spins per week, which is pretty close to their OES. Of course the best solution would be to increase their AQH persons. To move their OES to within view of their current spins per week on heavy currents (36) they'd need 9000 AQH persons. The purpose of this discussion is two-fold. First it's to further encourage us to play our currents long enough and often enough to reach each listener and build familiarity and heritage. Second, it's to remind us that we can't program our radio stations in a vacuum. We have to constantly be aware of how listeners use our stations, when they listen, for how long, and how many of them there are. For your reference, here are the formulas we used in this article: OES |
| copyright 1998-2004 RELENTLESS COMMUNICATIONS | Recommend RELENTLESS RADIO |