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Station content values

What should your station be outputting in terms of content, and how does it affect your audience?

Why do music radio stations have speech content? With the exception of news, which is discussed in that section, surely a station could simply play the music and then announce what it had just played.

There are stations which, not surprisingly, do that. But they tend to do it during the day period. There is normally increased speech content at breakfast and after 4pm into the late evening.

There is only one real reason why stations do it. How many times are you with your friends and say "I heard this thing on the radio today.."? How many times are you talking about the music? The answers are probably quite often and not at all. The distinction probably is greater when you ask "I heard this thing on AnytownFM today...".

The crucial reason is that word-of-mouth recommendation is still the most cost-effective method of promoting your station, and non-music content is the best way of generating discussion about it.

So when you next hear your local commercial station talking about the latest movies, or telling you the latest celeb goss, they are not doing that just to entertain you. They are doing it because in one form or another you will associate it with the station and then mention it to your friends, or failing that, recall it and tune back.

Content that causes controversy will do no-end of good to getting a stations message out. The most obvious way of doing this is through a promotion. When Virgin Cola launched in Australia, one station was given the task of promoting it, it ran a competition that was going to give the first 105 Virgins to line up on the beach at a given time a free holiday. I don't know how many virgins did enter the competition (or indeed, how you actually test!) but it was the talk of the town.

Closer to home, BRMB in Birmingham caused a national outcry when it ran a blind-wedding competition. Not to be beaten, a student station in Leeds gained nationwide coverage when it announced that it was running a Blind-Date style competition, the only difference was that the winning couple had to have sex. Of course, they never did the competition, but they had lots of people tuning in to find out how to enter. And for the first week of their RSL licence they became the "talk of the town" which included items on rival stations. How much would you have to pay for that kind of coverage?

These are all high profile examples of how content works. At the height of it's popularity, you would regularly hear people repeating phrases they'd heard on Mark'n'Lard's show on Radio 1.

So every piece of content you deliver has to have the "pub-door" factor to it. Would it be something your listeners would take to the pub and mention?

Listen to any commercial or BBC radio and you'll find that features are geared to not only being noticed, but being talked about.

I remember once listening to a community radio station where a presenter read out the entire cinema listings for all the county's cinemas. Apparently he did this everyday. Apart from being absolutely incredibly dull to listen to, it served no purpose. Would you listen to five minutes worth of listings read out or what you do what most conventional people do and consult the local free-sheet or the web? The radio is a linear medium, once the information is gone you can't retrieve it again; whereas text allows you to see the information time and time again, so for giving out information such as cinema listings papers win hands down.

Having five minutes to spend on film, I'd use it to talk about the various films on offer. Why? Because that night when you are with your boy/girlfriend and deciding what to do, he or she says "there was a bloke on the radio that said that Film X was fantastic…lets go and see it." Consider for a minute how you make your choice of what film to go and see, and part of that is personal recommendation. As I've said earlier, I'm trying to avoid the theories of presenter/listener relationship but a presenter giving an opinion on something can often sway people certain ways - it's a lot more personal than printed film reviews.

Obviously it's really important to ensure that you talk about things your listeners are likely to talk about. Talking about a performance of the English National Opera on your average commercial hit station isn't going to be particularly effective. It's for the opposite reason that Radio 4 doesn't contain lots of sport. Cricket is the exception that proves the rule.

If you want to do a talk-link, and don't have anything like a promotion or review to talk about, what do you talk about then? Well, the second best thing to say is something your listeners don't know already, but the best thing to mention is something they do know but haven't really thought about. It doesn't actually have to be a particularly big issue, in fact quite often the reverse is true.

Some examples to think about:

- Where they're building that extension on the prison, there's one of those Building board things and it says "Building for You". Well I hope not.

- Why is it that they print really stupid things on medicines, like the sleeping tablets that say 'may cause drowsiness' or Snickers bars that say 'may contain nuts'.

- You know those 0800 customer-care lines, does anyone actually phone them and what do they ask… like the shampoo care-line. What do you ask? How to use the product…

Yes they are not particularly inspiring and no they are probably not going to win awards, but they demonstrate that these are the kind of things people will be sat in front of the telly, in the pub, in the common room at school or canteen at work and mention. And yes, they are not always going to mention the station, but in their heads they'll be reminded of it and it may well be the case that someone else says "Yer, they were talking about that on the radio this afternoon."

One element of a voiced link that is always in dispute is that of comedy. Many first-time DJ's have a tendency to think that they have to be funny, but that's not the case. You need to be entertaining, which is different.

Worse than not being funny is trying to be funny, but not succeeding. And rather than being able to throw tomatoes at an unfunny radio presenter, most listeners will hit the off switch. So unless you are actually funny in real life, and can keep an audience with a succession of skits and jokes, then it's probably not a great idea to base your show purely on your comic abilities.