You can't do four or five hours of radio a day live with no safety net five days a week without eventually saying something that you wish it didn't say. And I take pride in the fact I never suspended anybody in my entire career for something they said on the air. Never. I, I didn't believe in it. Welcome to BRANDwidth On Demand, your Guide to Rebooting Radio. Well, I just want to clarify one thing. I was never Howard Stern's boss.
I don't know that anybody's ever been Howard Stern's boss, at least not in the last 40 years. So the lesson that I really learned from being with Howard Stern is that the First Amendment is. Unconditional. It has to be unconditional and you, you have to unconditionally support your people
BRANDwidth On Demand. Rebooting radio with a different take on all radio can be now your guides through the metamorphosis. David Martin and author of the book, bandwidth. Media branding coach Kipper McGee.
Our guest this time around is best known as the program director who took Howard Stern from a kind of a local one station guy to a network guy. He did the first howard Stern Radio simulcast in Philadelphia, and then later LA, spawning Howard's National Radio Show, and you know, that's turned out pretty well. He's also programmed legendary radio stations, including WIP, WPHT, and WYSP in Philly, KLSX, Los Angeles, and WCCO Minneapolis.
He served as vice president of programming for Emison International Greater Media, and Coleman Research. And now he is president of Andy Bloom Communications where he specializes in media training and political communications. And his writings have appeared in just about every trade possible, all the ones that matter, including a weekly column now appearing in Barett News Media BRANDwidth On Demand is proud to welcome Andy Bloom.
Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for having me.
So, Andy, I know you do a lot of stuff from then to now and next, but. Let's start with some good old fashioned radio stuff. What was it like being a boss or working with Howard Stern, and what are some of the biggest lessons you took away from having that experience?
Well, I just want to clarify one thing. I was never Howard Stern's boss. I don't know that anybody's ever been Howard Stern's boss, at least not in the last 40 years, so, okay. So the lesson that I really learned from being with Howard Stern is, one, the most important thing I learned from Howard Stern, aside from being a good lack, he's essential to getting Howard Stern to to help you out, is that the First Amendment is unconditional. It has to be unconditional.
And number number two or number three, you, you have to unconditionally support your people. And I think that's one thing. If you talk to somebody like Angelo Cataldi and Angelo by the way, if he'll do this, would be a great subject. Angelo next to Howard is probably the most talented radio personality I've ever worked with. Unbelievably smart. And the thing that I think an Angela really rocky start because of a really stupid incident that happened because of the Philadelphia Eagles.
But Angelo and I, I, I think we found our piece because of two things that I learned working with Howard Stern. Number one is give them what they need, be there, lackey. My line to Angelo was, what do you need? And really what I learned from Howard Stern, Howard, what do you need? What do you need? What do you need? And there's a really funny bet that you can probably still find on the internet where Howard is coming out to la.
And they're doing a phony phone call, and it's Howard just running down his list of demands and it's, you know, they want m and ms and they want all the brown ones taken out, and he wants kung fu movies in his room. And, you know, they, they want, it's just a ridiculous list of demands. But if you listen to it, I'm just taking notes and going, Uhhuh, Uhhuh. And I never break. I never break stride. And at some point they just crack up because they can't believe I'm saying Uhhuh, Uhhuh.
But my job with Howard was, okay, Howard, if you want Kung fu movies in your room and a box of tissues on every flat surface, I'll get it for you. No problem. I'll take care of it. And that's what I did with Angelo. Angelo, you tell me what you need and I'll figure out how to get it for you. And it was always my job to get the, the big name personalities, the things they wanted so they could do their job. And I would go fight those battles with management.
My job was to insulate them from management and get them what they wanted, and I, I think they appreciated it. The second part of my job was to protect them when they said something stupid. And you can't do four or five hours of radio a day live with no safety net five days a week without eventually saying something that you wish it didn't say. Mm-hmm. And I take pride in the fact I never suspended anybody in my entire career for something they said on the air. Never I, I didn't believe in it.
If what they said was truly so outrageous and bad, well, maybe they needed to be fired for it, but they didn't need to be suspended. Maybe they need to be taken. I mean, look, I've had to fire people for things they said on the air usually. Sure. It was. It was letting an F-bomb slide or something when they, they should have hit delay or shouldn't have said it. Or, uh, or in one case, being drunk on the air. Uh, but I never suspended somebody for, for offending somebody.
Uh, I just didn't believe in it. Okay. You offended somebody. Uh, it ha it happens. You're, you're doing live radio. You weren't trying to offend somebody. It, it, it just happens. So I didn't suspend people for that, and a lot of times, I took the heat instead of letting the air talent take the heat for whatever happened, and I would argue with management that it wasn't really that bad or that the whatever group was protesting was overreacting, and so on and so forth.
Um, so those defense attorney, uh, yeah, yeah, I played defense attorney a lot. That's right.
Loo for the defense. Great
stuff. Those are the big things that I learned. And, you know, one of the benefits of having Howard Stern and not being there and, and maybe Mark Chernoff wasn't equally as lucky and in New York was. You know, having him come down the phone line and not having to see him on a day-to-day basis or deal with whatever problems he was having in the studio with whatever equipment didn't work was, was most of the time. I just got to enjoy it.
I just got to sleep in a little later and didn't have to be there every day when he was in the middle of whatever crisis, and I could just laugh at the show and enjoy it and become a true fan, and, and I was, I think I was the ultimate Howard Stern fan.
So this is personal for you. Without naming names, unless you want to, uh, tell us about some of the best and worst situations you've worked in, and what characteristics or traits made him feel that way.
Well, the worst situation I had was the last one at W C C O, and I'm not afraid to name names. Uh, and what made it the worst situation was I was hired to make change. Mm-hmm. And they knew I, I had a, a book, I'm just looking over to see if I can see it. I had a notebook labeled the playbook. It was three inches thick and it went into explicit details with what I wanted to change. They knew what I wanted to change from, from top to bottom.
And once I, I got here, it, it was like, it was a surprise to them that I, that I wanted to make the changes. So I, I wasn't allowed to make any of the changes and I found myself shifting papers from one pile to the other, wondering what I was doing here. The best situations that I've had are the ones where I've had a great general manager and there've been a lot of them working for Mark Rayfield. The w i p was pleasure, Ken Stevens. Uh, at, at W Y S P was, was a pleasure.
And that's not to say every day was was a dream day. There was always tough days, but, but working for Ken and Mark was, was always good because they, they supported the mission. They did their best to get resources. It's always been tough to get resources and radio. Look, I loved working for Mel at Infinity. Uh, Mel was tough, but he was fair. Uh, I loved working for Dan Mason. He was programmer. I've worked for some really great people. I liked work.
I loved working for Charlie Banta at Greater Media. I have worked for some truly great companies and truly great people. And if I had to tell you who was the best out of all of them, it has to be Jeff Somalian and Rick Cummings at ms. Absolutely the best people to work for. Anyone who has worked for Jeff and Rick knows that they've been blessed.
Absolutely. I totally agree with that, Amy. You know, sometimes the best way to look at our industry is to back up and look at another industry. You recently had some interesting thoughts on the shakeup at cnn, which has always been radio. With pictures, you offered some thoughts on how you'd fix it. Can radio people learn from that case study evolving in real
time right now? Well, a lot of it just goes back to the positioning book and the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. You have to pick something, you have to be a leader in something. And CNN's problem is I, I don't know what they are. They are the second place liberal network, the third place Cable News Network. They don't lead in anything. They are a follower. They aren't really committed. If you wanna be the liberal network, MSNBC is a much better liberal network.
Their premise is that they are the Cable news network, but they stopped being a news network. About the same time MTV stopped being a music television network. Yeah. When
Turner left
started did news. Yeah. If tomorrow I went into cnn, I would try to make it an honest news network that followed journalism standards the way we knew them when we were growing up. Is there an audience for it? I don't know. I haven't done the research to find out, but at least anecdotally talking to people that I know, people are longing for news without opinion.
Now people think that the news that they get is, is news, but it's really news filtered through their own common core beliefs, and I think that there is an appetite for actual news that is unfiltered with with opinion. I might be wrong. I haven't done the research to know it, but from my radio experience, I certainly see that successful news stations at least make an effort to separate news and opinion, and that's what made C N N. Great.
I certainly know if there's a natural disaster or if war breaks out, I certainly know that the ratings skyrocket. Then, whether that's enough to sustain on a daily basis, I'm not positive. I'd love to do the research and find out. But, but CNN is lost right now. They're, they're nothing. And I recently wrote a column, an open letter to, to the CEO of Warner Discovery, David Zaslav, saying, you know, Hey, hire me. I, and certainly I couldn't do any worse.
But, but the, the, the incident that I, that I picked on was, was the Trump Town Hall. The, the Trump Town Hall really proved to everybody that c n N was nothing. The people who are currently watching C N N, the 600, 700,000 on any given night, watched that Trump Town Hall with disgust and said, I can't trust you. You would put this guy who lies on I, I can't trust your network.
The Trump people who actually tuned in and gave them 3.3 million viewers for the first time in over two years, watched that town hall and said, You are as bad as I thought you were. I'm certainly not coming back to your network anytime soon. And to everybody else. What it really showed was that the people who are in charge of C N N are the anchors to have your anchor go on and say, I wouldn't blame you if you never watched this network again. I, yeah.
You know, Fox just showed C N N that nobody's bigger than the network. If they're willing to fire Tucker Carlson, for whatever reason, they fired him. Chris Lick should have called Anderson Cooper and Jay Tapper in the next day and fired them with cause. Yeah, they have no business on that network. They hurt the network more than they help the network.
I. Wow. So David Zoff, if you see this or anybody sees this, who knows him, have em call me, have em hire me cuz I can't do any worse with C Nnn than they have done for the past five years.
That's true. And I think we can also see it with, uh, long-term news radio stations, like 10, 10 wins in the New York, or TLP in dc BBM in Chicago, I mean, If they stick to the real news, they do pretty well,
and, and, and, and that, that just is my point. I mean, those radio stations really don't present news with a bias. They try to present it right down the middle. And they consistently have great ratings. And certainly t o p has been what the ratings leader now, I mean the revenue leader among all radio stations. Mm-hmm. Nationally, absolutely. For five or six years in a row.
Yeah. So, so there is an appetite, at least in radio, and I, I can't tell you that I've done any work doing research for cable television, but I have to believe there is an appetite for cable news that just reports the facts. As I call it the Joe Friday approach. Just the facts, ma'am. Indeed.
Switching gears, you've also noticed some evidence that the device called the radio might be disappearing. We see it in Edison's infinite dial. We see it in the Jacobs Tech survey and other sources. So the question for you is, What do you see as the best options right now to keep branded audio content
relevant? Yeah, we, we, we see it anecdotally and the Jacobs Tech surveys have shown it that the number of people who own a device called the radio, our radio at home has now slipped under 80% and with millennials, uh, and Gen Z, it's under 70%. It's in the 60% range. As the radio disappears and people continue to consume audio or content on smartphones, smart speakers, streaming audio radio is losing listenership.
Now, I'm not suggesting that you can fight the tides and that we can actually get people to continue to use a device known as the radio. And I'm certainly not suggesting that you shouldn't. Uh, radio shouldn't. Continue to try to get people to listen on mobile apps and smart speakers and and on digital devices, but where radio needs to fight its last stand is on the car dashboard. Don't give in. The radio industry needs to fight cohesively to keep its space on the car. Dashboard losing there.
Is really is the end. That's when we'll see this huge precipitous drop. That will be unbelievable. That will be cataclysmic. In the meantime, my prescription for radio that has limited resources is stop making your people. Do ridiculous amounts of extra work to create content for podcasts and everything else, and focus your resources on building better apps, building better smart speaker apps, and getting people to use them as best you can as an industry or as an individual station.
We've gotta convert more people there and stop doing stupid things. We keep getting rid of, whether through attrition, through retirement, through buyouts, through workforce reductions. We keep getting rid of our most brilliant personalities, our most brilliant programmers. We keep. Adding commercial units for a dollar. If someone will give us a dollar, we'll add another minute of commercials, no problem.
And then we wonder why the people who are choosing other options that they know they have on their smartphones and smart speakers are listening to other sources of audio entertainment that don't make the same stupid mistakes. We're shooting ourselves in the foot repeatedly while people have better options. Andy,
how
would you suggest we approach the youth of, uh, this country in terms of the youngest consumers? Is there a, an idea you've got for how to reach them, doing a better job of reaching
them? Well, at some point the industry's going to have to make it a point to target that audience, and I don't think there's many radio stations that are targeting younger audiences. But besides that, Gen Z and millennials have grown up their entire lives with, with iPhones, smartphones, and with other options that they can listen to for audio content.
If we're not providing superior options, and by the way, our brands mean less to them than they did to Gen X and baby boomers, if we have brands that inherently mean less competing against brands that now mean more, and we're providing lousier content options because we insist on running 18 minutes of commercials. We don't invest in new personalities and we're getting rid of older personalities. What do you think's gonna happen?
We need to do all the things that we know how to do for generations and apply it to younger targets. How many radio stations are actually doing their own research anymore on a regular basis? How many radio stations are actually marketing beyond some guerrilla marketing? How many radio stations have full promotion teams anymore and do regular promotions, not national contests? Yep. These are the.
Basic building blocks of how to create audiences, and they're not done anymore because we're trying to figure out how to make the next quarter. Well, we might make the next quarter, and if you're lucky, you'll make this year. And I know there's a lot of people counting the days till their retirement and saying The next generation can worry about it, but there won't be anything left to worry about if we're not investing properly in the basic building blocks of creating audiences.
Wow. Some great stuff. Music researcher and major market PD turned sports and news talk leader, political operative for a while, and now writing for Barretts. Among other things, our guest, Andy Bloom,
somebody you'd like to hear from. We'd love to hear from you. Email your suggestions to show at brand with on demand.com.
And coming
up, Andy shares some opportunities. He finds hiding in plain sight.
Hi, this is Dave Tyler from Music Master with the world's leading authority on music scheduling. Keith Ill, you know, music Master has some real secret sauce. First, I set up my rules. So that every song scheduled obeys those unbreakable rules, but the goal rules in Music Master make it so much better. They are so correctly and intelligently crafted that I know I get higher ratings with longer time spent listening and longer time spent exposed on the stations that I work with.
Music Master is a big. Part of my rating successes. Discover how to perfect your music. Visit music master.com today.
Hi, it's Fred Jacobs from Jacobs Media. If you're on the air on a commercial radio station, I'd like to invite you to take our AQ five survey. It's radio's first research study. Dedicated to better understanding air talent. It's the fifth year for these studies in partnership with Morning Show Bootcamp, and the cool thing is Don Anthony lets me kick off the entire conference with the AQ results. We cast a wide net for these AQ studies.
Big markets, small towns, mega companies, mom and pops, morning talent, part-timers, music stations, and talkers. The survey is totally confidential. It takes just about 12 minutes to complete, and our cutoff date this year is Wednesday, July 19th, so I hope you take the opportunity to share your opinion. Here's the link, Jacob's. media.com/aq five participate. That's jacobs media.com/aq five. The number five, participate. If you're on the air, take the survey yourself.
If you aren't, please share the link with radio talent. You know, and thanks so much for doing this. I can't wait to show you the results. Jacobs media.com/aq. The number five hyphen participate. Thanks.
Opportunities
hidden on
demand.
We are with the gifted, talented one and only Andy Bloom today. Hey Andy, what's the one opportunity for radio that you see clearly kinda hiding in plain sight?
Uh, this is for music program directors. All right. One of the things that we did, especially in the diary era, was we stacked up commercials out of one hour so we could get a commercial free hour, hour and a half for certain number of songs. And I think there's a lot of radio stations that are playing music that still do that, and it's something that you should look into now.
And the piece of advice that I would give, especially regarding drive time, especially in afternoon drive where where you're probably doing it is what is the average commute in your city? I'm in Minneapolis right now. The average commute in Minneapolis is 24.4 minutes. I can tell you there's a number of stations here who have, by the time they're done with their traffic and weather sponsorships and spot breaks, and spots that have breaks that are. Over 10 minutes long.
Wow. What do you think a 10 minute break sounds like to somebody on a 24 minute commute? And that's the average commute. So there's a lot of people who, from the time they get in their car to the time they get out of their car, have never heard anything but a disc jockey talking. Or a station promotion, the weather, the traffic, the sponsorships and commercials. I, I just, I'll roll off a couple others. In Kansas City, it's 20 minutes in, uh, Seattle, 28 minutes in St. Louis. It's 22 minutes.
You want the longer commutes. Chicago is 36 minutes Washington. 32 minutes. New York is 39 minutes. Los Angeles, 32 minutes. Know what your average commute time is in your market and build your stop sets and your breaks with those in mind. And I would rather do shorter breaks now and not have those 60 or 90 minute commercial free sweeps where then somebody who gets in the car at the wrong time has their entire ride home. That is a commercial break. Wow. He is terrific, isn't he? Kiper? Oh heck
yeah. That's Andy Bloom. We've got links to his latest writings and other cool stuff. Just scroll down your phone. As always, we wanna thank our executive producer, Cindy Hu. We're for getting us all straight and putting us together. And associate Producer Hannah B for booking and coming up next,
Hey, it's Steve Allen
from the Research Director Incorporated, and on the next Bandwidth On Demand, we are going to look deep inside the ratings game and figure it all out and
give you a few tips. That's a wrap kicker. The more you listen, the more you can learn. The next one minute Martinizing is about listening. Find it at brand with on demand com. I'm Dave Martin.
And I'm
Kiper
McGee. May all.