Thirty Things You Can Do to Destroy Your Ratings

NuVoodoo has committed to presenting “Fifteen Things (in 15 Minutes) You Can Do to Boost Ratings” at Worldwide Radio Summit in Hollywood next May. We’ve promised them that we’d skip the obvious ideas, along with the ones that are outside the reach of most PD’s (slash commercial inventory, get a killer morning show, buy a ton of marketing, etc.).

We’ve already begun the process of winnowing down to the fifteen things we’ll present. One of the techniques we’ve enjoyed in brainstorming is to come up with ideas to do the opposite of our goal. We usually brainstorm ideas of how to improve something – but it’s always easier to come up with ways to make things worse. And, sometimes, useful ideas are born by thinking about the inverse of any of the ideas for failure. In any event, it’s fun.

So, we put on our thinking caps, and asked some friends as well, and came up with 30 ideas on how to destroy your ratings:

1. Turn the transmitter off
2. Play more commercials
3. Two-minute minimum for all promos
4. Run lots of dirty jokes on stations that are supposed to be family friendly
5. Incorporate political humor into all promos on your music radio station
6. Only talk about contests and promotions ever
7. Put hit songs into recurrent too quickly and untested/unfamiliar songs into power right away
8. Have AE’s write station promos
9. Bad production
10. More laser sound effects!
11. Play the same songs at the exact same times every day
12. Lots of Per Inquiry ads
13. Convince yourself that your only competitors are other radio stations
14. Lie to listeners, since they’re too dumb to see through gimmicks
15. Believe anyone will “listen all day” to win a contest
16. Turn off PPM encoding
17. Voltaire? Schmoltaire! Just wing it!
18. Never say the station name and/or call letters
19. Fire the chief engineer
20. Have the jocks say, “And a one, and a two and a one-two-three-four” before every song
21. Accept ads only from erectile dysfunction clinics
22. The Goods & Services Hour (all commercials) weekday mornings at 7
23. Test Tone Tuesday
24. White Noise Wednesday
25. Going into and between commercials, countdown the time until the music begins again
26. Make out-of-market voice-tracked talent guess at local pronunciations
27. Take advice from corporate [Note: we’re protecting our sources on this one]
28. Let the local market decide [Note: we’re protecting our sources on this one, too]
29. Don’t pay Nielsen [Yes, we’re protecting our sources on this one as well]
30. Have anyone from NuVoodoo do your morning show

We promise the ideas we present next May in Hollywood will be useful and actionable (and better than these). Next week, we’ll look at ideas for brightening 2018!