Effective Ways To Compete With On-Demand Content

Millennials want to pick up the phone, get what they want and consume it —probably in a minute or less.

How does 24-hour radio compete with that?

Let’s count the ways:

Re-do the format clock to be much shorter than an hour. Actually, when I tell you how short will work best, you might be surprised or even shocked. The outcome is not in question but the way radio is currently being presented is not youth friendly. This can be fixed.
Eliminate repeating format factors. Running the same things in the same place doesn’t work in the minds of Millennials who do not like rules in writing or in their entertainment.
That goes for commercial stop sets, too. Never run them in the same place every hour. And before you make any decision on this, factor in what we’re beginning to learn about stop sets that are scheduled to maximize the best chance to win a quarter hour of listening.
Make radio stations a discovery tool for all content that listeners want to access (the way a phone is, in a way) and then play hardball and make it so compelling young audiences will turn to radio first (that’s not how it is now).
You don’t have to play every unknown song out there to show you are doing music discovery. Here’s one way – play 5 short clips of discoverable new songs and then one of those plays longer than the others.
Find your station’s new music on YouTube. Here’s an example. Miranda Sings is a huge YouTube star. She has over 7 million plays for her video “Where My Baes At”. She sold out two nights at the Nokia Theatre in LA in February. Do you know her? Her audience does. Listen and watch. YouTube is everything.
Multi-task your on-air content. Young audiences do not like music sweeps. They like walls of content from which to choose.
Mix music, info, contesting and commercials all together. The old radio model that commercials go here, the hottest hits go there and so on is outdated. Program the way Millennials respond to their digital devices not to long outdated radio ratings protocol.
Your competitor is not another radio station and it’s not an online service. Your real competitor is user-generated content. And there are ways to integrate that into the new hot clock that I am going to be proposing.
Play dirty with Millennials developing content they can’t resist about employment, college loans, themselves.