How to Win the Ratings – The Breakfast Show Blueprint – Part 7

Greg Smith is a Director of Radio Today.

In this series of articles I wanted to explore the key ingredients of a top rating breakfast show.

I’ve enlisted the help of prominent programmers & researchers, people much smarter than me, to tell you how to win the ratings in radio’s most important daypart.

You can read part 1 with Jon Coleman, part 2 with Todd Wallace, part 3 with Randy Lane, part 4 with Brad March, part 5 with Rad Messick and part 6 with Dave Charles.

Today we get career advice for on air talent from Mark Ramsey (right), the President of Mark Ramsey Media LLC.

There are three kinds of radio air talents:

1. The kind who owns the audience
2. The kind who works for a radio station that owns the audience
3. The kind who shares ownership of the audience with the radio station

Most air talents think they are kinds 1 or 3, that they either own the audience or share ownership.

And most are wrong.

In fact, the vast majority of air talents are either kinds 1 or 2: They either own the audience or they do not at all.

Here’s how you know:

If you switch from one station to another across town and carry most of your audience with you, you own that audience. If you carry a significant fraction of that audience with you, you share ownership of the audience.

And if you carry little of the audience with you, it’s the station’s audience and you just talk to it.

Needless to say, the leverage any air talent possesses is directly related to how much or how little they “own” the audience. Indeed, this is why many radio managers want to keep you from owning the audience.

Note that this is not about experience or technical prowess. It is not about live or recorded. It is not about local or national. It’s only about one thing: Who owns the audience?

Read more here.