Sleepless night: What happens before the radio ratings come out

Whilst he’s not really one for superstitions, lucky socks or lucky jocks, Peter Clay does like to don a ‘party shirt’ and exude a positive presence come radio ratings day.

But he’s the first to admit he doesn’t sleep well the night before.

“No, no, no,” laughs Smooth FM’s Head of Programming. “Not at all. I have things going through my mind. You wake up several times. You second guess everything.”

Roughly around this time tomorrow morning, there’ll be the usual media frenzy as GfK Survey 5 results are released. Whether it be journos jostling for the best story angle or the radio networks serving up the usual barrage of PR spin, we all know what happens afterwards.

But what happens the day before? And the morning of?

For Clay, it’s all about acknowledging the efforts of his team.

“The first thing I always do is wish them good luck,” he tells Radio Today on a sunny Saturday afternoon, just a couple of days out from Survey 5.

“We have a meeting the day before, where all the product team get together and I thank them for the work that they’ve done over the survey period, because obviously everyone works damn hard to get the best results, and you never know how it’s going to fall.”

“Most of my team have been doing radio for quite some time, so they’ve seen the ups and downs. They all know that they’ve been doing what’s required from them. They know that, because we catch up each day. We have airchecks. We follow the plan we’ve put out.”

Sometimes, says Clay, they’ll compare what other stations might have been doing or how much marketing they’ve had.

“But outside of that, I just thank them for the work they’ve done during that survey period.”

“So for me, yeah – a sleepless night. A lot of trying to get how it will pan out, trying to see what it’s been like in the years prior – see if there’s any trend from the previous books.”

This year, Smooth has continued to hold its own against the other FM heavyweights, including in Melbourne, a market still in transition, and one in which the noise around other shows is almost deafening.

Survey 4 saw Smooth retain its position as both the #1 FM station in Sydney and the most listened to station, with a 1,287,000 cume.

“And for Smooth, we don’t want to lose that top spot on the FM side of things,” says Clay. “We’d love the top spot in Melbourne, or we’d like to retain second spot (among the FM stations),” says Clay.

Having this year clocked up 33 years on air at Melbourne’s Gold 104.3, Craig Huggins has certainly experienced his fair share of ratings days.

For the past five years, Huggy has has been #1 FM in Mornings. But two surveys ago, he got pipped.

“So, I reassessed what I needed to do to fix that and made a few adjustments that I hope will pay off on survey day,” Huggy tells Radio Today.

The lead up to survey day can be a very unsettling time for a radio announcer, as Huggy can attest.

“I used to worry terribly about ratings and get quite anxious before them,” he says. “But over the years, particularly the last ten or so, I’ve come to realise that the only control I have over them is during them.”

As for how tomorrow pans out, Huggy says “My big hope is for the Christian O’Connell Show to do well. If it does, it certainly helps the rest of the station’s figures.”

Huggy says in the lead up to ratings day – at the weekly jocks meeting – Content Director Sue Carter lets the team know how she thinks the station is tracking and whether its carryover numbers look encouraging.

“But either way, she enforces how proud she is of us.”

“She is super positive. Sue tells us how much big money the other stations have spent compared to our budget, (which is generally pretty small). We talk about the one-percenters we’ve done, the way the whole station embraces the often silly things the breakfast show does.”

“We don’t speak about any other stations specifically, even our stablemate KIIS.”

“We have a genuine team at Gold104.3. We ride the bumps together.”

“Sue always finishes the pre-survey chat with where we should go on survey day, may that be to lunch, to an activity, or just a few drinks in the office.”

Sometimes, this industry journo needs look no further than her own loungeroom (and her own husband) for ratings day wisdom.

Kevin Hillier has experienced the good, the bad and the ugly of survey books, from incredible #1 successes to shows which rated marginally above an asterisk.

The former top rating Triple M D Generation and Fox FM breakfast host says “I reckon I felt more personal pressure and anxiety when the show was #1.”

“In the breakfast days, it was tough to sleep the night before the ratings came out. On survey morning, the hour or so from the end of the brekky show to the announcement seemed to stretch out forever.”

“It was actually worse when I was doing mornings and you could see the staff head to the boardroom.”

But he had a message he always tried to impress upon any team he worked with, and I’ll leave those words here for anyone who needs to hear them today:

“Never equate your value and worth with a number someone puts on a piece of paper. They are numbers, YOU are a person and tomorrow it all starts again.”