Radio by Warren Steve

Author:Warren, Steve
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-136-03513-5
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

HEY LISTENERS! ALL ABOARD!

How announcers are instructed regarding how to keep the listener listening is the most valuable direction they can get. All other programming elements should be addressed to that purpose, whether it is music, humor, information, or contests. It’s helpful for announcers to understand the importance of this end result, but they are often lacking in management direction. Explain AQH to the air staff. It’s helpful to know what it is. Staff members are responsible for the execution of quarter hour building promotions. Excellent quarter hour building promotions such as the following are the sort, of promotions that extend listenership:

• The amount of money in the jackpot is increased by a certain amount each hour

• Adding a new word to the mystery phrase

• Giving an additional clue to today’s question

• Listen for an upcoming song

• Call when you hear …

All of these generate continued interest and continued listening, which extends quarter hours. If the air staff understands this, then they are motivated to be interesting and clever in convincing the audience to stick around. As far as a radio station’s air staff is concerned, generating cume and quarter hours and knowing the types of promotions that do each are important pieces of information.

The other term we talked about earlier, that comes into play with respect to the air staff is TSL (time spent listening), a term that is self-descriptive. The TSL tables from Arbitron can tell the interpreter of the data how long specific listeners stay with the station during the total listening day or during each specific daypart. TSL is a product of extended quarter hours. Stations that achieve substantial quarter hours with their listeners generally have long TSL, too.

As we mentioned in the last chapter, ironically, some of the stations with the highest TSL end up with the lowest ratings because these are stations that program a very specialized type of radio program and have a very small cume. Religious stations, ethnic, foreign language, or other special interests tend to generate high TSL because their audience generally listens to no other station. Even though the cume is small, it has enormous quarter hours. The combination of the two do not generate a high rating for the station, but you can see that on a national level, these stations have very high TSL ratios. So it’s deceptive. A good TSL for any station is really only significant when accompanied by substantial cume.

Sometimes, it can be helpful to a program director (in reviewing ratings) to see how TSL may vary from one daypart to another. These statistics may be helpful in determining whether air talent is effective. The overall staff may perform well on the TSL, but certain times of the day or certain personalities may have a TSL that is noticeably less. This could be considered warning signals, and some additional direction may be necessary to take corrective measures. Otherwise, TSL is a secondary function to cume and average quarter hours. Those are the big three in Arbitron terms needing interpretation to the air staff.

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