Yabba Dabba Who?

They're closing Bedrock. That's Flintstones Bedrock City, to be precise, a small theme park and RV camp near the Grand Canyon, there since 1972. I saw reports about the closing and there was a line about a Phoenix TV station calling it a "must stop for kids" as recently as 2016.

Here's something to consider: Kids today are unlikely to have ever seen "The Flintstones."

If you're over 50, you remember "The Flintstones," because after its initial prime-time ABC run, it was in syndication for decades. You grew up watching it every afternoon on one local TV station or another. You couldn't avoid it. But the show hasn't been on local stations since 1997, when it left syndication, and it ended up eventually only on Boomerang, a channel that didn't have a lot of viewers and is now a subscription service. Kids haven't grown up with Fred and Barney for many years. And those live-action movies? 23 and 19 years ago. Really. Time flew when you weren't paying attention. A 25 year old probably doesn't even remember those movies.

So many household names, names we thought would live forever, are fading away. Even people who were universally recognized not that long ago -- Bob Hope, anyone? -- will draw blanks from people who aren't eligible for AARP. It's not their fault, either; while you CAN find old movies and TV shows and news accounts more easily than ever, you aren't going to seek them out if you don't have a specific reason to do so. A 30 year old isn't likely to have any curiosity about Gary Cooper or Barbara Stanwyck. Times change.

This isn't news. That annoying Beloit College "mindset list" -- you know, "students in the Class of 2022 will never fly TWA" -- is all about that. But the idea that mindsets are different among generations, an obvious but sometimes ignored fact, has some lessons for radio:

1. The angst that accompanies heritage stations changing or dropping their call letters or being sold to EMF often forgets the fact that the heritage is meaningless if it doesn't resonate with a salable target audience. The call letters WPLJ don't mean to a 20-something what they mean to a 50-something. They could mean album rock, they could mean top 40, they could mean former morning man Scott Shannon, they could mean Hot AC. It hasn't been one single thing. (Only radio geeks know about "White Port and Lemon Juice," so don't even go there.) Heritage doesn't mean a lot, unless it's to establish a specific and dominant position in the market, like the news position or the at-work default or the station that has the most popular local sports franchise. You evolve the brand to continue to be relevant to your target (and not necessarily the audience that's aged out of the demo). That's why Oldies is now Classic Hits and plays more recent music. Talk radio? Still waiting for its Classic Hits moment.

2. Speaking of which, if you're a host, you'd better be aware if your references mark you as not being relatable to your audience. Remember that some of the things you might think are universal knowledge might not be universal. 1990 was 29 years ago. There are/ adults who don't have any knowledge of the '90s.

3. If your station could be transported back to 1990 and not sound revolutionary or at all out of place, you might want to review whether you need to do things differently. A lot of radio sounds exactly as it did in the '80s. Does that resonate with younger listeners? Oh, but you say younger listeners don't matter, that we just have to serve who we already have? That is not a recipe for growth. Why didn't non-radio companies step up to bid on those Cumulus stations that EMF grabbed? They don't see growth. And you won't grow by standing still.

All of this is yet another plea for the radio industry to embrace change, which I write about way too much, because there's a fairly narrow range of things you can write about when it comes to radio. And it's narrow because it doesn't change enough. If you're not interested in updating what you're doing for business reasons, do it because it'll give me more to write about. That would be a win-win.

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You know what else needs to change? Topics. You need fresh topics every day. And you'll get them at Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports. Find it for free by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

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I'll be at the Barrett Sports Media Summit in downtown L.A. next week -- Thursday and Friday, February 21 and 22. Look for reports in Net News, and maybe here. (You can grab last minute tickets here if you want to join me in the back of the room.) Also, Thursday is my wife Fran's birthday, so Happy Birthday, Fran. (She probably won't see this, but you never know.)

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
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