Make Sure Your Radar Is On

To paraphrase Seth Godin, a radio station is an idea factory with a transmitter attached. And to quote him verbatim, “Sometimes we spend more time than we should defending the old thing, instead of working to take advantage of the new thing.”

If your radio station – in fact, if the radio industry – is to survive and thrive, it needs new ideas, ideas that will delight and excite the audience, our advertisers, and even the popular press (imagine radio getting some positive press!).

New and good ideas can come from anywhere, and often they are from “outside” – outside your department, your station, your company, and even your country. That’s because “outsiders” are less bound by convention and “the way we’ve always done (or think about) it.”

Americans aren’t always good at accepting new ideas, especially from “outside.” My company has advised radio stations in a couple dozen countries around the world in addition to the U.S., and one thing we’ve noticed is that this conversation tends to end differently here at home versus elsewhere:

Person A – Hey, what about this? Let’s (describes new idea)…

Person B – Hmm…who else has done this?

Person A – no one.

Person B (in America) – Ummm…I don’t think so.

Person B (in another country) – Great! We’ll be the first!

That’s a generalization, and there are some exceptional innovators and risk-takers in American radio. But overall, we Americans would rather have someone else be first.

American radio is about to be given the opportunity to import a great idea from another country, and we’ll see who today’s risk-takers are. The same country that gave us Drake, Neil Young, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Celine Dion and the jet stream has developed a music-and-talk hybrid approach to music radio that has proven to be a ratings juggernaut. It was first done in Edmonton, Canada, and has ranked #1 with 25- 54 adults there for 38 of the last 40 quarters – that is, almost nonstop for ten years, with both men and women. The second station to adopt the concept spent a year getting to #1 and has now been on top for two years. Within the last four months two other markets have joined the movement with Toronto, the most ethnically diverse market in North America, being the latest.

These stations get their content from their listeners, much like Facebook and YouTube base their businesses on user-generated content. The non-music portion of the hybrid comes from listener text and calls giving their own “what happened to me when….” stories in response to topics and questions posed by the station’s personalities. The audience becomes the star.

We call it “Social Radio.” The Canadian stations brand themselves as “Now” or Today” and those are good names as well. We tend to think of it a concept or an approach instead of a “format” because the basic idea can work with different music strategies.

We believe this is a phenomenal idea, and my company is leading the charge to bring this to the U.S. If you’d like to hear a sample just flip over to www.burnsradio.com/social-radio.

Now, to bring us back to the main point: the Canadian folks who’ve done so well with this concept got it from “outsiders.” It wasn’t invented in Canada…they got the idea from BBC-2 in the UK.

Good ideas can come from any direction. Make sure your radar is always on!