Prodigal Son

A lot’s happened since I last posted here. My apologies for not keeping it current, but then I am busy beyond belief. I’ve just recently decided that if I’m going to have a blog, I need to post on it at least once a week, or people will all drift away and forget it’s here. So…here’s my first renewed effort.

I recently spoke at Dan O’Day’s LAST International Production Summit. I’m guessing it really was the last one at this point. I kept expecting to have him say he changed his mind, but that expectation has proven to be a non-starter. It’s hard to believe, but this most informative weekend is kaput. Those who kept saying, “I’ll go next year,” have run out of next years. Did we all get suddenly so well versed in production and writing that we don’t need a summit? I think not. I know that as many times as I went to speak in Los Angeles, I always came back with a lot more than I took. I’m sure there will be other confabs and summits down the road, but they won’t be hosted by the inimitable Dan O’Day. It’s the end of an era, I think. I’m truly sad to see it go away. Of course, Dan is still doing all the other things he does, he didn’t retire or anything. I fully expect I’ll run into him over and over again at future radio events.

As I write this, I’m preparing to head out to Las Vegas to do the backstage announcing for the iHeart Radio Music Festival. I love the fact that it’s in Vegas. I hate the fact that a substantial amount of my gambling budget for the year will stay in Vegas. (Insert your own “stays in Vegas” joke here. LOL)

It’s really a big event; great venue, good lineup, an excellent vehicle to promote the iHeart Radio app, and it marks a big first for Clear Channel Radio. Fact is, I can’t recall any radio company that has put on an event of this size. I sincerely hope the payoff lives up to the hype. All indications are, it will. It should be a pretty cool deal and I’m thrilled to be there.

One of the downsides of this promotion is the need to utilize on-air promos voiced and produced by other people. I know it might seem weird to complain about getting my work handed to me already done, but honestly…it just doesn’t sound like Z100 production. I’m not saying it’s bad production, it just doesn’t sound like Z100. There are those in this business who believe all the parts are all interchangeable. A good promo is a good promo, right? Umm…in a word, no. That doesn’t work any better than taking Z100′s playlist, jocks and formats and plunking them down in the middle of Chicago or Dallas and expecting to get the same rating results. It’s been done, over and over again, always with the same results: sketchy, at best. While it’s true there are certain universal truths about a radio station and its’ market, you really have to take into account a city’s personality to get the ultimate radio performance. Look at CBS and they’re astounding success in Houston. They took the exact same “Hot 95-5 beating the living snot out of KRBE” formulas from Houston and plugged them in Los Angeles and New York, without taking into account the city’s personalities. While the LA experiment netted some success (nothing on the scale of Houston), the New York experiment has yet to gain any traction at all.

Mind you, it’s just promos we’re talking about here. I don’t think it’s killing the ratings here at all. Everything else is chugging along just the way it should, so it’s not like a whole new radio station. On the other hand, the personality of these promos is different from what New Yorkers expect to hear on their station. I wish I could do some kind of live, auditorium audience test to see what the exact impact is, but I sense that these promos sound just like any other concert spot and the station’s personality is having to take a back seat to whatever else is going on.

{sigh} I guess I can’t complain too much because it’s all over this weekend, but I worry that somehow we lost most of our summer to a promotion that has a negligible impact on our audience. And, to be honest, I hate like hell giving up the on-air promotion to anyone else, no matter how talented they are.

Just for fun this week, I wanted to post a promo I did promoting the return of Z100 Pays Your Bills. It uses workparts from a couple of different sweepers produced by the very talented crew at Production Vault.

Z100 Pays Your Bills Promo 09/19/11

Have a great week everybody! I’ll be back Tuesday.

-Dave