Chris Brown Really Defined a Brand on Her Face.
Often it’s not the sound of the station that effects the listener… it’s the programming. It’s not how your make things sound, it’s what you’re told to make to define the programme that works (or not).
You can have the most amazing imaging in the world, but if your jock’s are bad, your ad breaks are badly placed and your music sucks – then you’re in for trouble…
And when it comes to whips and chains – they might excite Rihanna, but they leave some pretty brutal marks… just ask her about Chris Brown…
Ratings, regardless of how they are collected and their accuracy are the best thing we’ve got to determine how well a station is doing. The more listeners, the more money (in a nutshell). You don’t want your station’s sound to determine how people feel about you right? Right. But, station sound isn’t just about the sound… it’s about the programming concepts behind it.
Think of it this way… Station Sound is 50% the voices, the effects, the music and so on… the other 50% is the programming concept behind it all. It’s thoughts and questions like these: where will we place the imaging? Where will the ad’s play? How will we image around the ads? Where are we going to put promos? What voices do we want to use? Do we want cold/dry or produced production? Jingles? You get the picture.
Without asking these questions of yourself (or your Programmer) – you can’t begin to craft a imaging that is going to be effective. No amount of killer effects, great voices and cool music is going to rescue something that has bad programming decisions behind it.
In a recent batch of work we did, we put it this way to the Programmer:
“Before getting too far down the road of creating a new imaging package, it’s important to get a solid brand definition (stationality), and set of rules with which to create a package that really connects with the listener. Any station can say the words explaining what they are, but if the station isn’t oozing the stationality from it’s every pore, then the listener connections aren’t going to be made.
Anyone can get a new voice and put some fancy sound effects around it to make a station sound cool. The real trick is to identify and create exclusive content that really connects with the listener, once we’ve defined the rules.”
And that’s exactly it. You can’t image your station out of bad ratings without first getting the programming concepts right.
