James.Cridland.net

James Cridland's blog

Where radio and new platforms collide. With beer.

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Breaking news…

Posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:54am. #

This breaking news from The Onion is a salutary tale to anyone programming a radio station this Christmas.

Brilliant. And a good piece by Jacobs Media in Radio & Records recently includes this gem… “Saying things like ‘Green Day is next’ or ‘We’ll be right back’ is the kind of crap that is just not going to cut it.” Amen to you, Jacobs Media!

The Onion’s video news is consistently excellent too, by the way: it has a home on my iPod. Great parodies of cable news and hideous GMTV-style breakfast shows. It’s on Joost, too, if anyone still uses that.

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Not so brilliant has been a mystery tummy bug which has laid me low over Christmas, meaning a distinct lack of beer. I think I’m on the mend. Thanks for asking.

Being house-bound, I’ve been “pleasure-coding” for a project which is now almost ready for alpha-release; however, what’s not so pleasurable is an apparent 72GB of usage of my broadband connection in the last 30 days (I blame, among other things, Miro) which has made Demon Internet throttle my connection back, without the warning they promise on their website. Yeuch. Still, better that than being cut off, I suppose… but the web’s an awfully slow place at 128k.

Photo: Darwin Bell. Used under licence.

3 comments

James Martin said at December 27th, 2007 at 5:47pm

…now downloading Miro.

“Travel next….”

steve martin said at December 27th, 2007 at 8:04pm

Really pleased you’re bouncing back from this week’s bug James.

What the Jacobs Media approach to media planning fails to recognise is that there is a huge difference between the subjective emotional response “loyalty” and the empirical measure of “hours”. Yes you can make station events feel bigger by promoting further out and at higher frequency but for most stations total reach or “cover” drops off pretty fast after three days and anything but the most complicated promotional message will cut through with a fairly low OTH.

Unless the promotion itself is there to disguise lazy programming in other segments you risk annoying your most loyal listeners by doing what Jacobs suggests.

Another approach is simply to run better station events.

Callum said at December 30th, 2007 at 7:58pm

I think I could cope with links like that on local radio in the UK, if the playlists were that interesting…

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