Inside Music MediaJerry Del Colliano

If you make no other change in the year ahead, the one thing you must do is update your morning show.

Many companies know that they have a problem with changing audiences and their outdated morning shows that are essentially unchanged for years.

If you don’t act, you can be sure they will.

Some 50% of a successful stations revenue is derived from AM drive so a lot is at stake.

Here’s what you are going to have to deal with …

1. Increasingly listeners want a lead female anchor and not just a woman sidekick. iHeart pulled Ellen K off its primary Ryan Seacrest KIIS morning show in LA for a young woman sidekick and sent Ellen to another one of their stations – KOST.       Within months she was beating Seacrest and he and the KIIS show have steadily declined once a strong woman competitor hit the market. If it can happen to “Kiss” and to a name as big as Seacrest, it’s time to look at your options for promoting women in the morning. It’s complex, but we have solid input and useful suggestions.
2. What if you have a solid male morning show personality? This can be delicate but your station has some options.
3. Old features are irrelevant today even though stations need traffic and news for revenue purposes. How to strike a balance between the features radio needs to keep the billing up and new features to get the audience re-engaged.
4. This is a generalization but worth noting – in markets where humor is the chief component of radio morning shows, we’re seeing a slide.
5. Morning show listeners want more authenticity and we’re going to brainstorm some ways to make mornings more authentic before someone else in your market figures it out.
6. Contests are not a big draw but dreams are – all of us are dreamers. But here is what young in-demo audience’s think of as dreams.

Find a way to Philly next week – air, car, Amtrak (5 minutes from the station).

This kind of information is too precious to miss out on and only available in the company of other local operators who are definitely not sitting still.

Invest one day – Wednesday April 5 -- and you will come away with focused ideas and strategies on revenue building, updating your morning show and the following subjects:

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