David - congratulations (and cheerleading) on this move. Point well taken. We are on the same page there. How long did it take for you to make the critical decisions? Did you reposition all components at once? My point was that some of the PPM best procedures can be broken or altered and a station still be #1. That doesn't mean making the changes to go with the PPM plan precisely would not add more shares, listeners and revenue! Love hearing this kind of story. I am sure you had a few sleepless nights until the plan came to you!
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Westwood One adds new 24/7 Good Time Oldies format to replace Scott Shannon's TOC
- Thread starter Lori Pollitt
- Start date
This was a particularly hard decision, and came after seeing an Arbitron presentation about the new reality of short incidents and the need to create return incidents. Arbitron presented examples of stations that, despite the normal short incident listening span, got lots of return visits. It was shown how that station had "mastered PPM" and got a high average number of incidents each day. When they identified the station, it was the one I was programming. Yet it broke all the rules, and I mentioned that and got a response of "think how much upside there might be".
A few weeks later I was part of a project to define the right way to deal with PPM, and felt I had to do the "right thing". It took about 3 weeks for a notable trend to emerge, and it climbed in steps for several months and has been well inside the top 10 in that market for the last 6 months or more.
Yeah, it was scary.
Part of the record listening experience (as long as it doesn't sound like you're playing a piece of sandpaper).
Ratings are just as important in small markets because they indicate the number of people who will hear an advertiser's message. Even if ratings are not used for much of local sales, knowing whether a station has listeners will determine the eventual success or failure of the station and format. Local accounts tend to use the cash register instead of ratings... but a station with only a few "loyal" listeners will not produce sales.
I explained how money-losing station founder and flip-flop, searching for something that works. This is likely just another of the five or six thousand stations in the US that are not profitable.
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