(By Mike McVay) Over Labor Day Weekend, New York City got its first-ever “Pop-Up Radio Station,” TJ 98-7, born out of the end of Good Karma Brands’ LMA with Emmis Communications for WEPN. Over the history of radio, there have been many radio stations that employed temporary programming as a stopgap as a result of moving from one format to another or changing ownership.
The qualifier with this “Pop-Up” is that it’s the first station of its nature that’s actually self-identifying as such.
In this case, it comes as Emmis is finalizing its negotiations to sell the station. The identifier as a “Pop-Up” is most appropriate for New York as the city is known for pop-up restaurants, stores, shops, concerts, and more.
This story started when United Stations Radio Network/Gemini XIII COO Charles Steinhauer reached out to me to ask if I knew what Emmis planned to do with the station. We had all seen in the trades that the LMA was ending and Emmis Communications CEO Jeff Smulyan and their President Programming Rick Cummings shared that they planned to play music until the station could be sold.
My questions to Charles: “Why are you asking? What are you thinking?” His response was exciting. “I’d like to put our TJ Show (featuring TJ Taormina) on the station and magnify awareness.” It should be noted that the program is already approaching 100 affiliates.
From there, it became a sprint as we launched nine days later with a fully produced and programmed radio station in the number one media market in the world. Smulyan and Cummings pulled in their executives and struck an agreement with the networks Spencer Brown and Steinhauer that allows them to actively pursue their plan to sell the radio station, with Charles acting as the Market Manager and me as Program Director.
Our teams are working together and we are having fun. Serious fun. This is what radio is about when one eliminates the distractions and pressure facing many broadcasters today.
Selecting a station name was easy. TJ and his showmates – JBo, Kenny, Heather, and Josh – scrambled to serve as the street team and air talent for the station. They have made several trips to NYC for promo pics, videos, and to capture audio from listeners. They are delivering their daily nationally syndicated morning show to the station live daily. They’re providing promos, targeted breaks, and through the magic of the operating system we signed, Radio.Cloud, they can localize a significant part of the hourly content breaks. The show is truly connected to “The City.” The show also airs in afternoon drive with fresh content not aired that morning.
We signed Radio.Cloud for our operating system because we knew of its’ unique benefits. CEO Christian Brenner and Account Director Andrew Scaglione rolled up their sleeves and personally jumped all in on helping us prepare to launch the station. They uploaded and coded the music we gave them, inserted our formatics, built clocks, and set up the system to schedule the music, feed content over the air, deliver to the stream, enable commercial scheduling, and plot and manage promos, sweepers, and liners. Being a cloud-based system, I’m able to schedule and program the station from my home in Ohio.
Radio.Cloud has a minimal hardware footprint as the main and backup playout server can fit in the palm of your hand. These were shipped to New York and mounted at the transmitter, which is at the Empire State Building, where Emmis’ engineer (Alex Roman) plugged them in for transmission.” While we started the process 9 days before launch, because of Radio.Cloud, we were ready in 7 days.
The next part of the “hurry up” was to create the imaging and promotional messaging. We began to write, voice, produce, and post a series of teases leading up to the reveal and launch of the station. We hired Atlas Talent’s Steve Kamer as the primary voice and Jai Kershner as the shadow voice. Steve brings a big sound to the station and is a familiar voice from Film, TV, and CBS News. Jai counterbalances his voice with a casual yet bright delivery. Ryan Kershner and TJ Taormina are handling the production and posting of the audio pieces. USRN’s Louis Pellegrino is another set of hands. There’s a lot to be creative with around identifying as a “Pop Up Station.” The attitude is fitting for New York… “We’re here until we’re not,” was a part of the launch setup.
Music still matters. The music format of TJ 98-7 is Hot AC. We’re targeting women 25-54. The energy is up-tempo and bright. The Currents, Recurrents, and Recent Gold categories are divided into Powers and Regulars. Charles, overseeing sales, has locked in a spot load limit of 6 minutes per/hour stopping only twice an hour. That load limit is for all dayparts including morning drive. I’ve long contended that if radio could afford to lower their spot load, they’d see increased Time Spent Listening. An indicator of the noise we’re making; the station just became a Billboard reporter for the Hot 100’s Radio Songs chart.
Streaming, distribution, and digital licensing are being provided by Live 365, a SoundStack company. Distribution is OTA, on the Live 365 App, and the station’s website. OTA and the stream are encoded for Nielsen. Erica Farmer, VP/Strategic Marketing at Gemini XIII, pulled together the website and is managing marketing and press. The station is using creative social media marketing collaborations, (for example; we just activated with @newjerseyisntboring), NY Metro-targeted digital advertising, and website pop-up notifications across Gemini XIII channels.
Keeping in mind our core strategy is to expose media to The TJ Show, we’re also using The TJ Show Newsletter. It’s modest in size but has a consistent open rate of 28.7%. TJ’s social media channels are already at 105K+ followers across multiple platforms. The virality of some of his social content is getting noticed, too. The “iPhone finger” had more than 50M+ organic views. That led to interest and asks from TV networks to cover the story.
TJ 98-7 isn’t finished evolving, yet. We’re about to add a midday talent. We have additional content assets slated for evenings. Charles and his team are overflowing with concepts that we kick around and discuss. Imagine that: we’re programming a radio station with few obstacles hindering the creation of content.
How long it will last, no one knows… but we’re having fun. It reminded me that this is what radio can be like when you remove all the distractions and focus on Entertainment & Fun while Selling Services and Products for advertisers.
Radio doesn’t have to be a “Pop Up Station” to be fun.
Mike McVay is President of McVay Media and can be reached at [email protected]. Read Mike’s Radio Ink archives here.
