Back in the last century for most of the top PD’s in the biz it was a given that Consistency was one of the most important factors in ratings success. Good ratings came from 1) keeping listeners tuned in for at least another quarter hour and 2) giving them a reason to come back again soon for some more listening treats. I’ll talk about that some other time. Here I want to point out two other elements in radio formatting consistency; music flow and balance.
1) Music Flow: Get back to music as quickly as possible. The music has to stop for the commercials. Without the advertising, we don’t exist. But people come listening to us for the music and the more time we spend away from music the more likely some of them are going to switch to another station. A station with a 12-minute commercial load would usually format three 4-minute breaks or four 3-minute breaks or six 2-minute breaks. The last one was the best in my book because: “This is Rocker FM where you are never more two minutes away from another great song!!” Also, wipe it from your mind that people don’t like commercials. They do. What they don’t like is “too many” commercials.
2) Balance: The Arbitron ratings reports told us that morning listeners between six and ten AM listened to the station for an average forty minutes each day. In that time frame, the station should broadcast some of everything it does. If the morning host was funny and/or topical, he could do two bits and both of them needed to be thirty seconds or less. Weather needed repeating two or three times in the forty minutes. One newscast or one full ‘cast of 5 minutes and a Headline ‘cast of sixty or ninety seconds. Big city stations included a couple of commuter traffic reports. You can do all of these things and still play at least six songs.
Today, it is hard to find a corporate-owned station (that’s every station in every big city for the most part) that doesn’t format six minute commercial breaks. And many (most?) of them put a minute or two of morning host chit-chat next to the spots; it can be a dozen minutes before these “music” stations play me another song. And today in Austin Texas where the Country station KASE used to rack-up ARB shares in the mid-to-upper teens year after year is now sitting with a 3 share.
