WHEN LOCAL RADIO REALLY DID IT RIGHT
What did you learn at your first station? Hopefully, like me, you were a sponge and soaked up every sight, sound, smell and experience you could. My baptism in local-market radio (I’ve always liked that phrase better than “small market”) came at the impressionable age of 16, near the end of my sophomore year in high school. The first thing I learned after one night on the air was that, at school, I was an instant celebrity. At the station, however, I was in an instant minority. Not simply because of my youth and inexperience—but because I didn’t sell. Everyone else did.
Let me be specific: we part-time kid announcers kept the place running at night and on weekends and holidays. The rest of the staff—everyone except the bookkeeper and the midday jock, who handled production—sold. And this was no mom-and-pop shop.
I’ll break it down:
The sign-on guy ended his show at 8:00—then went out to sell.
The news director did the morning news updates until 9:00—then hit the street to call on accounts. His journalistic integrity was never questioned and as the voice of news in the community, he had a good entree into local businesses.
The afternoon guy sold all day, then came in at 3:00 and did his show.
Then there were the station president, general manager, sales manager and one fulltime salesperson. They all sold all day long. Even the receptionist made calls from her desk to accounts in outlying areas, which bumped her income nicely. She had absolutely no sales experience. But she loved talking to people—and listening. So she did very well.
If you’ve been counting, that’s eight people, each of whom spent at least part of their day selling.
What kind of monster operation was this? A 500 watt day/250 watt night non-directional stand-alone AM in a county seat town of six thousand. With a daily newspaper. No other stations in the home county or adjacent counties, either, which helped a lot.
What did they sell? Everything that moved. Flights of spots, naturally. Also play-by-play sports, a LOT of it. Sometimes three games a night, two of them tape-delayed. Every time anything moved in town, we did a remote. If it was even vaguely newsworthy, the news director fired up the Marti from the station car and went on the air—sponsored. We also sold remotes from stores, area fairs, opening day at the local swimming pool, parades, many high school chorus Christmas concerts and basically anything else where more than two people were involved.
In short, our microphones (and signage) were everywhere they could possibly be—and almost every minute of every remote was sold. That’s doable when you have an everybody-sells policy and the whole staff buys into it.
Of course, the station’s ownership (two of whom sold, the other owned a station in a distant market–and sold) hired people with this concept plainly stated. The fulltime announcers knew that a solid part of their incomes depended on sales. Their shows were to come second, although they were good professionals and you would never know.
A selling policy like that works just like any other policy:
- You have to want to do it
- You have to decide to do it
- You have to implement it and keep it in place
- You have to get your entire staff to buy into it
I’m amazed that very few stations operate this way today. Now more than ever, it makes perfect business sense. When everyone is out in the community every day, it creates lots of astonishingly good LOCAL RADIO, too.
(My enduring thanks for a terrific two-year introduction to professional radio back then go out to my first broadcast bosses—R.K. “Red” Faust, President, and John Carl, General Manager—of Chariton Valley Broadcasting and good old KCOG-AM, Centerville, Iowa. Nice guys and thorough professionals.)
