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Kevin Metheny Hired as OM for KGO/KSFO

Things Will Change

Pig Virus has a habit of cleaning house.
 
Ah! Then it should have been stated as .... "I wonder if he'll get caught having sales people "prime the pumps" on the phones like he did at WGN"
 
Keeping Metheny's Record Straight

Let's make sure we're all on the same memo.
We ARE talking about Keven Metheny, right? Then... it "Pig Vomit." Not "virus." He was nick-named "Pig Vomit" by a disc jockey, who wanted to make sure the world got it right so he created a movie in 1997," Private Parts, explaining it all.
But, here's an even easier way to remember:
A virus has the primitive intelligence to reproduce itself. Vomit has no intel at all.
Either does Metheny.
 
The question is, can Metheny's contrived, kick 'em in the nuts act play in San Francisco, a market which boasts one of the highest numbers of people having advanced college degrees per capita. He and Randall Bloomquist have wrecked their fair share of stations.

Next?!
 
This station is already wrecked. Not much left for Pig Virus to do.

And those people with advanced college degrees are listening to KQED, which has two and a half times the share and about twice the cume of KGO.
 
Element9 said:
The question is, can Metheny's contrived, kick 'em in the nuts act play in San Francisco, a market which boasts one of the highest numbers of people having advanced college degrees per capita.
Click to expand...

I think it is a fair assumption that folks with Ph.D.'s and Masters degrees will be unlikely to carry a PPM around so probably it does not make a whit of difference how many advanced degree holders there are in the Bay Area as they won't be part of the PPM sample. Realizing the limitations of a ratings system is a key element in programming.

KGO's problems began under Mickey Lukoff. The station was immensely successful in the diary, although by the year 2000 it became very apparent that the audience was aging and not being replaced by Gen X listeners. When the 2002-2004 Philadelphia PPM tests revealed to anyone who would listen to the conference calls or read the documentation that lower cume higher TSL stations from the diary world were in for a world of hurt in the PPM, KGO seemingly did nothing to prepare for the new methodology.

The PPM hit around 2008 and rapidly decimated KGO. It went from #1 in 12+ in the diary (Spring 2008) to below 10th within about a year or two. The key issue seems to be that, like many other news talk stations, listeners lazily wrote in broad periods of listening; the PPM showed actual listening to be full of interruptions and much briefer in duration.

The move of KGO to Citadel from Disney / ABC certainly hurt, too. And then when Cumulus took over the bankrupt Citadel, they changed format to one already well served on both AM and FM by CBS.

The issue in San Francisco was not KQED, which was often tying it in the diary, but the way KGO did not protect itself against aging. In the last diary book, Spring of 2008, KQED had a 5.4 in the demo, while KGO had a 2.7. KQED was #1 and KGO was #10. The damage had been done, through lack of planning. In 2000, KGO was #1 in 25-54. A little less than a decade and two owners later, it was 10th.

And this is not strictly an AM problem. San Francisco is not a good market for FM. The terrain is not favorable, and the market extends from Santa Rosa to the north to Campbell to the south. No FM covers it all. But several AMs do, and that is why the radio market was defined as a very narrow oval running from NNW to SSE... identical to the KGO pattern and similar to that of KCBS and well within the reach of KNBR. And two other contenders, KSFO and KFRC, also had major listenership to the north and south when the San Francisco MSA was configured long ago... it's an AM based geography where KGO covers vastly more than KQED.

The problem now is that KGO means "old" to Gen X listeners. Can they get them to come?
 
Say what you will about the people in San Francisco and AM Radio. If you give them what they want, they'll listen. Put the Giants on KNBR, and they listen. Give them all news on KCBS, and they listen. The last two years, KGO was trying to offer an alternative to KCBS, and they found people didn't need that. So now what? That's the challenge. If they try to peck at KNBR, that'll just cannibalize one of their own. Not a popular idea. But they have two very experienced people working on it. If they fail, it won't be because they didn't spend money trying.
 
mohawk82 said:
He IS Pig Vomit.
Click to expand...

From... http://tenwatts.blogspot.com/2010/06/pig-virus-kevin-metheny.html

The article is snarky, but interesting.


Pig Virus Kevin Metheny
People don't hire Kevin Metheny because he's charming. The hire him because he's kind of an *******. He's an ax man. You could have had the morning slot for 40 years. He'll fire you and your co-host. He'd fire your mom, he'd probably fire his own mom. He is so merciless, and operates with such impunity that he's really in a class of his own.
 
These two stations could use a real change. They've been adrift for two years. Getting the numbers they're getting is no picnic for anyone. If he cleans house, very few will notice.
 
LKellerIII said:
Is he related to Pig Vomit? I believe that was the character played by Paul Giammatti in Private Parts, with Howard Stern.
Click to expand...

Howard always called him "Pig Virus" on the air. He called him "Pig Virus" in the book, "Private Parts." For some reason, probably involving lawyers, it was changed to "Pig Vomit" in the movie and other facts about him were changed to make the character fictional. The character's name was made "Kenny" instead of "Kevin" and the ending showed him no longer in radio.

But, in all fairness and however it happened, Howard did his best work at W-NNNNNNN-B-C.
 
Perhaps I should have used the [/rhetorical] tag. Next time.

Given the market, KQED's place in it as well as KNBR, the nature of the topography, the demographic turning its back on the nature of AM talk... the question remains, Where To Now St. Peter?

Market Mavens?
 
FredLeonard said:
Howard always called him "Pig Virus" on the air. He called him "Pig Virus" in the book, "Private Parts." For some reason, probably involving lawyers, it was changed to "Pig Vomit" in the movie and other facts about him were changed to make the character fictional. The character's name was made "Kenny" instead of "Kevin" and the ending showed him no longer in radio.

But, in all fairness and however it happened, Howard did his best work at W-NNNNNNN-B-C.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. Was the insistence on emphasizing one call letter an NBC thing/ In the Bay Area, NBC had an FM station - K-Y-YOUUU-U.
 
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