Spread The Word

The joke we told thirty years ago was that it had to be illegal for any talk radio conference to post an agenda that didn't include at least one panel about whether the talk radio format belonged on FM. "Will Talk Move to FM?" "Can Talk Make It On FM?" "Whither FM Talk?" Every. Single. Convention. Same panelists, same hemming and hawing, same indecision. Never mind that talk on FM already existed and was successful in some markets. Years after WWDB and New Jersey 101.5 and Real Radio 104.1, after public radio had already made significant inroads, talk radio conventions were wondering about the pros and cons of moving talk -- any kind of spoken word programming -- to FM.

It's 2020, and there are, of course, some more news, talk, and sports stations on FM. WTOP is a dominator. KQED and WAMU are among the public talkers with huge numbers on FM. Sports stations are common on FM. Small market AM talkers are scrambling to get FM translators so people in a five-block radius can hear them on FM. (I kid. Mostly.) And, this week, finally, KYW got its FM simulcast, albeit on a Class A signal that doesn't solve the problem of the AM's deficient signal where I used to live in Bucks County (I don't live there anymore, so whatever). And there hasn't been a "Will Talk Move to FM?" panel at talk radio conferences in years, at least at the one I attend. So, we're good, right?

Good but a little late. Thirty years ago, the idea was that AM was increasingly becoming a medium for a shrinking older population, that the younger audience was spending all of its time on FM, that you couldn't force anyone under 35 to check out AM unless it involved sports. You have to put your content where the audience is living, the pro-FM forces said. Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been, to borrow Wayne Gretzky's overused clichÈ.

The younger audience indeed moved to FM, and you -- assuming you're a spoken word audio creator or programmer generating live content -- still need to be there. But the puck's moving again, to digital delivery both streaming and on-demand, and you need to be there, because...

What? You're already there? Your station's been streaming for twenty years? You have a whole slate of podcasts? You're plenty digital?

Great. And so have countless other stations and shows. So, what's with the marketing, or lack thereof, of that stuff?

Take a potential listener who's, oh, let's say, 21 years old. They're not likely to ever find anything on AM. But they're also less likely to be spending a lot of time on FM these days, either. (I know, 93%... er, 92%... what? It's 91% reach now? That's a lot of reach, but how's that time spent listening working out?) You still have to be on FM and pick up that audience and that reach, but 18-34 year old listeners are living online. Their audio choices include streamers like Spotify and Pandora, podcasts, and, sure, maybe some AM/FM streams, too. But radio's marketing of its streams -- not the aggregation apps like iHeartRadio or Radio.com, but the actual digital content of individual local stations -- has been at best inconsistent and at worst nonexistent.

A couple of notes: One, maybe radio-style branding doesn't work as well for streaming. People know what Pandora and Spotify are, and how to get to them. Radio? Okay, say you want to listen to your local talk station. Where will you find it on your phone, or digital dash, or Alexa device? Is it on iHeartRadio or Radio.com or TuneIn or something else? If you ask Alexa or Siri for News Radio 1310, will you get Madison or Twin Falls or Joplin or a confused response? Are call letters appealing or archaic to a 21-year-old (recognizing that your core audience may be older and used to call letters)? Perhaps the solution is to either update your branding or use different branding for your stream; I wonder if, say, KXX means anything to people who use smart speakers for their listening, or maybe call the stream (Name of City) Talk Radio or even something wildly different ("Alexa, play Banana Chat." No, maybe not that).

And that aggregation situation may not yet be a problem, but it really makes local content harder to find. Adding a step to the process of listening -- I want KXX, but I don't remember which app it's on -- is maddening. I know that the big radio operators who have those aggregator apps are aggressively moving towards nationalizing programming, but there'll still be some local content. Making it harder to find online seems like, I don't know, a mistake. Maybe not, but those are valuable products, it's valuable content, and burying it in the cacophony of an aggregator app puts those valuable brands in the same position as podcasts trying to gain traction in a sea of hundreds of thousands of other shows. Radio brands had a leg up on that noise but radio seems to be hell-bent on squandering the value of those brands. And if, as I mentioned earlier, those brands aren't right for the digital audience, aggregation buries the newer, better brands, too. Maybe the idea is that if you want talk or sports, you'll only need to know "iHeartRadio" or "Radio.com," but, again, that's an additional step and, I gotta say, navigating to what you want within those apps is not as intuitive as the app developers probably told the companies it would be.

Another thing is that whatever you brand your radio content online, you need to spread the word more than just mentioning your website URL in the legal ID. "KXX KXX-HD1 West Jibip and online at kxxradio.com" once an hour isn't marketing, it's an obligation. Think about how a Spotify or a top podcast gets the word out -- social media and word of mouth. Can't radio do the same?

Anyway, I have more ideas, but nobody's paying me for them, so I'll just say that there are opportunities, and the radio industry is already largely there where the audience is moving, but it's critical for the industry to realize that marketing is one of the things it can do that will give it an advantage -- and that just being there isn't enough. In the meantime, as someone who was doing FM talk thirty years ago, I'm just happy that we have as many FM spoken word stations as we do, and that podcasting and streaming have expanded spoken word entertainment well beyond the limits of the radio dial. Gotta take the Ws wherever they are.

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Wherever spoken word entertainment is headed, hosts will find plenty of material at All Access' show prep column Talk Topics -- Click here and/or follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. Also, there's a supernatural "10 Questions With..." Sandra Champlain, who hosts the "Shades of the Afterlife" podcast for the Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network and if you have some preconceptions about the topic and the host, leave them behind and read the interview for some surprises.

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Wait a minute, did I get through an entire column without mentioning the topics that dominated the news and everyday life all week (and all month, and all year)? Yes, I did. I'll take that W, too.

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