This Week: Worldwide Radio Summit 2018

Mark Twain famously said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Being concise is hard. Really hard, as we at NuVoodoo are learning as we prepare for our session this Thursday (May 3) at Worldwide Radio Summit in Hollywood. We’ve committed to presenting “Fifteen Things (In 15 Minutes) That You Can Do to Boost Ratings.”

We’re reaching deep into the most recent of our eleven Ratings Prospects Studies and opening up our best-practices playbook to set up tactics that can be brought to bear to build lift in Nielsen. We promised actionable ideas with fewer charts and graphs. We’ve also promised to skip the obvious and unlikely (slash commercial inventory, get a killer morning show, buy a ton of marketing) and present ideas attendees can take back to their stations and implement right away. It wasn’t an easy task to begin with and getting it done in a single quarter hour is a challenge.

We’ll share one of the items here: Bringing back shout-outs for the 21^st Century. Dale Carnegie said, “A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” If you believe Carnegie, then you’re already sold on the power of getting listener names on the air. If you’re not convinced, then look at the results from our latest Ratings Prospects Study concerning shout-outs.

While a few say they’ve listened less because they think a station might say their name, better than half of all the meter-friendly respondents here say they’ve listened more. The trouble with putting listener names on the air has long been the simple fact that the honoree may miss the shout-out. In 2018, however, it’s easy to record the bit and send it to the honored listener. A short, but well-shot piece of video with the DJ doing the break is likely to get shared by the listener on Social Media. If you can put a little creativity into the process to make it more memorable, it may even get re-shared by the listener’s friends.

To get the other fourteen ideas we’re presenting, you’ll need to come to our session at Worldwide Radio Summit on Thursday. But, if you’re not able to attend, fear not. We’re launching final webinar in our Spring series for those who can’t make it to Hollywood: Fifteen Things (In 15 Minutes) That You Can Do to Boost Ratings, The Webinar. You can register for the Monday, May 7 session at 2 PM Eastern by following this link.

Last week the we presented our NuVoodoo Complete Guide to Digital Marketing for Radio Ratings Success webinar. We appreciate the time, attention and great questions from those who attended. If you couldn’t make it, you can watch a recording of one of the sessions here.