Radio Drops #12: Station Identification: Over-Do It

Identify Your Station. Identify Your Station. Identify Your Station.

At first, saying your call-letters once between the records was sufficient; listeners easily remembered the station when it was the only one in town playing their type of music. Then music listeners moved to FM and there were more and more choices. Then the streaming tsunami and the number of listening options is overwhelming. Getting a NEW listener is difficult enough; we gotta get’em to come back to listen again. To do that, the listener has to Remember Your Name.

Watch the video on YouTube: Radio Drops #12: Station Identification: Over-Do It

You Can’t Say Your Name Too Often

In the first third of my long career I was a disc jockey and program director at a dozen different radio stations, PD at nine of them. I was on the air at all but two, I think: Milwaukee and New Haven.

In each of those jobs I really only had one competitor, if that: the other station in my format. In Milwaukee there were, I don’t know, say 20 stations. I was the Top 40 station, and there was only one other Top 40 in the market. That’s the one I had to beat.

The program director’s job was to be number one in his format, whether urban, oldies or country, and then to go as high in the overall ratings as he possibly could, in hopes of beating all the other formats and being number one, baby.

I say that to say this: you got to identify yourself. People listen to the radio all the time, but it is astounding how many of them cannot tell you the name of the station they are listening to.

Lost in the Diaries

The problem was really compounded when the Arbitron rating system came out. It took over from a telephone rating system called Hooper, which was, well, I can talk about that later, but it was a very accurate rating system, I believe. With Arbitron, people are required to write down every station they listen to, if they participate properly.

I got a real eye-opener the first time I went to review those diaries in Beltsville, Maryland. My station was getting the short end of the stick because of call letter confusion. I was in New Haven, Connecticut, and my station was WAVZ. Just down the road is the biggest Top 40 radio station in the world, WABC. Now say that quickly: WABC, WAVZ, WAVZ, WABC. Right?

I saw in the diaries where people wrote down the name of one of my disc jockeys and then wrote W-A-B-C, and I didn’t get credit for that diary. The sample is so small that in that first book, my numbers dropped a point, point and a half. Bad for a new PD. They came back a year later, but by then I’d been fired for some other reason. I can tell you about that later.

Overdo It

Back to my topic. You cannot identify your radio station too much. You have to over-identify it if you’re going to stick in people’s minds. Even if they’re enjoying it, they’re going to forget what they were listening to unless you imprint it in their heads.

The very first radio consultant, and I’ll talk about him more as this little series goes on, was a guy named Mike Joseph. He started consulting in 1955 and did just Top 40. He was very, very strictly formatted, he just about always won, and he over-identified his stations to the point that us radio guys could hardly stand listening to them. It was so repetitive with the station name.

Mike’s last big station was in Chicago in the ’80s: WBBM, the CBS-owned FM. He called it B96. High-energy Top 40, a very small playlist, and the jocks had to say B96 at least four times every break.

Out of the record: “B96, that was Elton John with that song. B96 temperature is this, B96 time is that, and the B96 weather is coming up.” Into the spot break. Out of the spot break: B96 promotion, “B96 plays all the hits,” “This is B96,” a jingle, and into the song. WBBM-FM’s ratings doubled within 18 months.

Even in a smaller market, where ratings competition is not quite so much a thing, you still have an immense amount of competition. Just think about everything that’s available on people’s phones now. So identify yourself. Identify yourself with your community, and overdo it.