Nobody had ever done this before.
What if you take the leading programmers to one popular format and ask them a slew of in-depth questions about the way they program their stations, how they conduct fundraising, how they market and what they spend, how they perceive the priorities for their brands, etc?
Then what if you correlate all that data with ratings outcomes?
This gives you the ability to see what best practices – what “secrets of success” – characterize the highest-rated stations in the format.
This past week I was honored to be a featured speaker at the Christian Music Broadcaster’s Momentum conference (which, by the way, is routinely one of the very best industry events I am fortunate to attend). I was presenting a research project funded by CMB and available in its entirety only to CMB members by request.
While some of the results might be considered intuitive, some were also surprising. Very surprising, in fact.
CMB has granted me permission to share the infographic leave-behind from the presentation here:
Remember, this isn’t simply my opinion or even traditional “Perceptual Research.” This is research among station managers and programmers where we identified the drivers of ratings success for those stations which were most successful and illustrated their best practice.
If you’re a CMB member you can find out more about this research through CMB. This is proprietary research so I can’t share more than this with you.
I should note, too, that for anybody who wants to view this as simply a recipe, good luck to you. Not factored in here are a host of human factors like leadership, talent, innovation, teamwork, etc. And those matter – a lot. Perhaps the subject of a different study….
It seem to me that a project like this would benefit any group of stations sharing a format whose managers are willing to participate in a study with communal value and global best practices.
Finally, I want to sincerely thank CMB for their ongoing support and friendship and everyone in the audience for their attention, generosity, and kindness.
And being the opening act for Switchfoot certainly was swell, too!