While walking the dogs today I was listening to The Bower Show on AltSportsTalk.com (my online station). Bower was talking about things on my mind (like the Letterman finale) and he rolled for 75 minutes without interruption.
That got me thinking.
There are so many talk stations in the dumps these days. Plenty of second tier sports stations not really doing anything. What if they went all-in chasing TSL in PM drive for a while? Commit to three or four books and see what happens. Stay with me…
When I was putting together Comedy Central Radio, one of my premises was the difference between morning drive and afternoon drive.
In the morning, you don’t even want to be in the car, and you aren’t that excited about the destination. You are distracted. The last ten minutes of your commute will be the most congested part. So you need traffic reports. You want to know what happened. You punch around. Or you listen to the news stations. Maybe pop on some Howard or the local phony phone calls guys on the Zoo. You’re leaning in (if we were in a room together I’d do some body language with a pantomime steering wheel). So in the morning I think short form stuff works, which is what we did on Comedy Central Radio – short clips.
But the drive home? Ah, the drive home. On the drive home you are leaning back (more pantomime where I am leaning back in my driver’s seat with one hand on top of the wheel). That first ten minutes is the worst part of the drive, but once you get out of downtown and cross the bridge or tunnel or whatever the bottleneck is, it’s smooth(er) sailing. And you’ll be happy when you get home.
So on Comedy Central Radio we created The Drive Home and played the best material, long-form specials without interruption. No spots. No clutter. Just a long back-to-back two half hours of comedy on Monday-Thursday, and an hour from one artist on Friday.
Back to your sports or talk station.
What if you applied this logic to your format? Let’s take three or four books and let a host try to build an audience. A real audience, attached to the personality. Let’s roll from 5 until 6:20 every day. No spots. No stupid 20/20 Sports Flash. No traffic report that the news station does better. No PI spot for dick cream or other crap. 80 minutes of solid entertainment.
I’m not even saying to make a big Look At Us statement. Just do it. I’d even say not to make a thing of it so that down the road when you start to monetize the bigger audience that you haven’t boxed yourselves in. Maybe 9 months from now you slip in a live read or two along the way.
Yeah we all have budgets to meet. You also have a 1.6 that’s going to be a 1.0 in 2020. In that same year today’s 24 year old will be 29 and listening to podcasts not your stick.
Remember Howard Stern? If you don’t know the name he was the afternoon guy on WNBC and he talked a little in between commercials and records. Even when he moved to FM he was playing records and doing traffic reports for a while.
Then he started going long. And look what happened.
This is where you say “but that was Howard Stern!” Yep. And what are you doing to create the next Howard Stern? You’re making him stop down from 5:20 until 5:23 and again 5:26 until 5:34 with crap in an age where I can get all that info in two seconds on my phone.
Crap is gonna get you a 1.6.