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Author:	Dave Cruse
Published:	August, 200

 

When I was a kid, summer lasted forever! School ended at the end of May and until September, we were FREE! Now, stores are already having back to school sales, my kids have that morose "it's almost over" look and my wife is almost giddy. Summer can't be ending; I'm not ready!  Oh, but it's true. Summer will soon be over and with the end of summer comes the middle of baseball season, the beginning of football season and the all-important Fall Book. If you haven't started getting ready for it, it's nearly too late. The truth is, doing well in the Fall Book depends as much on what you're already doing as it does on what you can do. Getting ready for the Fall Book is much like pre-season for the NFL. It should be a time when you brush up on your techniques and fundamentals. Take a look at where you are and see what needs work, but If you don't already have the skills and the talent, you won't make the cut. There are things you can do to "Buy the Book". You can do huge contests with giant prizes that require massive amounts of listening, but in the end, it's like selling the family cow for a handful of magic beans. If you haven't been doing what it takes to KEEP the ratings, what do you do when the Book comes out and you have a big beanstalk with a hungry giant at the top of it? How will you feed the monster? More big contests and prizes? That only feeds the beast. You build an expectation that you have to top next time. Don Knotts told a story once about an early episode of the Andy Griffith show that called for Barney to pass out. Don wouldn't do it. He knew that if he did, it would be funny, but next time he'd have to find a way to make it funnier, and then funnier and funnier each time. Driving ratings with contests is the same way. Steve Martin used to do a bit where he promised to tell you how to be a millionaire and never pay taxes. He had a great two step program. 1. Get a million dollars. 2. When they ask why you haven't paid your taxes, simply say "I forgot".   In some ways, an article on ratings success is like Steve's program. It leaves out the hard part. How do you get the million dollars? Hard work. How do you get ratings success? Same way. So what CAN you do? First, go back and read Sheila Richards' article on making lifetime listeners. That's where ratings success begins. Once you master that, ratings will come. It's not just about the Fall Book, it's a year round thing. Now preparing for the book becomes more like NFL Pre-season, a chance to strengthen what you already have and find ways to make it better. Here are 5 ways to do that. Brush up on the basics Are you identifying the station often? How tight is your board work? Are you getting all the elements for your show slotted into the right places? Are you identifying the station often? Are you thinking about what people are doing as they listen? Are you identifying the station often? Are you including enough relevant information like traffic and weather? What about identifying the station? Prepare more Make sure that you don't coast, even for a day. Prepare your contests and know where you'll place them and how you'll stage them. Tease what's coming up. Drive the listener forward and make sure that what you tease is compelling enough to make them feel like they will lose out on something if they turn off the radio. My goal has always been to make people late for work because they were sitting in the parking lot unable to turn the radio off. Create water cooler talk This is something you should be doing everyday. Do something that surprises the listener. Have one of your Morning team members leave the studio and suddenly turn up at the mall on a pay phone because they just had to get some shopping done before the kids went back to school. Do your entire show from a fishing boat. Put somebody in front of a tollbooth and have them hand out those new dollar coins to every car that stops for an hour and tell them your morning show is paying their toll. Anything that makes people say, "Did you hear what the morning team on WXXX did this morning?" Get out and meet the people Take every opportunity to shake hands with the audience. Become a real person instead of a voice that comes out of the radio/alarm clock or car stereo. Show up in a parking lot and give out bumper stickers, bring breakfast to a listener's house and broadcast the whole thing. This year, my partner and I actually had people invite us to breakfast at their house. (Their treat.) Make extensive use of your promos If you're doing the types of things that create that water cooler talk, you should also be rolling tape on all of it. Don't waste those highlights. Turn those moments into promos. Crank 'em out same day. Use those to create the feeling that if people miss the show one day, they'll regret it. A well done promo will not only do that, it'll make people say things like, "I never know what you guys are going to do next." Guess what, they'll not only listen to find out, they'll get their friends to. So there you have it, 5 "easy" ways to rating success. Now, get out your prep sheets and show grids and start planning. Your lifetime listeners are waiting.

 

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