Years ago, I had the unique opportunity to coach both young teen football and baseball for several seasons. I was mentored by my brother, who had lots of coaching years under his belt, to help me learn. One of the things he taught me was how to “chart” a game – each play in football and each pitch in baseball.
It turned out to be an excellent form of evaluation for our team and served as great preparation for the next game.
In my early years of programming, I decided to give this “charting” technique a try for our radio station and include a market competitor as I attempted to evaluate our station and the market. Doing it in my office turned out to be a huge distraction, so I guess you can say, for this process, I was an early work-from-home pioneer (although I won’t take any credit for that).
I decided to “walk away” and do some uninterrupted listening. With the idea of leaving the station for a day, I was fortunate to have the support of my GM at the time (and, luckily, each through the years). I learned so much from this process about our station and its competitor that I wound up making this a regular, quarterly exercise for most of my career.
The process took some patience, which, for those who know me, has never been one of my strong points. The ground rules were to listen to both stations simultaneously and record every element from each, starting at 6a and going non-stop until 6p. I was still doing this as recently as four years ago in my final programming position. Of course, I could have just checked out the station’s hourly music mix on Mediabase and/or listened to some talk breaks on Media Monitors, but I wanted the real-time experience, and that turned out to be the key.
(Again, make sure you are in a place where you won’t be disturbed. The two radios going drove my wife and daughter crazy enough for them to escape the house for the entire time!)
As I listened, I learned, but as I reviewed each chart, I learned even more. I could see the imbalance of certain imaging, or how little we promoted our biggest on-air giveaway, or how little we really did sound “local” at times. With our competitor, I could hear, and then see, where they had key elements and music placement and where they dropped the ball in spots.
On top of that, I would have each station’s socials open throughout the day to see how each was connecting off-air and complementing on-air. I wrapped this up into an organized report for the GM, sales, and air staffs with a plan of action to address what small adjustments we could make with all this information in hand. Through the years, we’ve changed spot placement and music rotations and brainstormed some interesting imaging to counter what we heard across the street.
Since I was “walking away” from the radio station for a day, they were called, cleverly, “walkaway days”. I made it a point NOT to let the air staff know until after the fact. Only my GM would know. I wanted to make this process as pure as possible.
Every programming consultant has always suggested getting out of the station to listen, but I believe this takes it to another level where you get it all on paper and can act decisively and quickly. Chart away!!
NOTE: If you’d like a sample of the chart, email me at [email protected]
