"If you do what you've always done, you get what you've always gotten." Johnny Martin

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." Thomas A. Edison

"Creating without claiming, Doing without taking credit, Guiding without interfering, This is primal virtue." Lau-tzu

Formats done right win. The play's the thing: The summer books are rolling out for radio. Kudos to the Z100 gang in the city. #1 12+, #1 18-34 and #2 25-54. Proof positive there is nothing wrong with the format. It's alive and well when done right. Vinnie & crew should be getting more credit, the little owner that could is getting it done - WBLS puts up a #1 25-54 (#3 AMD and #1 PMD). Same story with "oldies" - done right it's a winner. One year ago KRTH posted a 2.6, now, programming ace Jhani Kaye delivers a 3.6. Brian Thomas' WCBS-FM put up a 2.2 one year ago with Jack, now, he delivers a 3.7 with a solid CBS-FM reinvention.

The wayback machine: The last time Z100 posted #1 12+ was 1989. The last time WLTW was not #1 12+ was 2001.

In all of art, it's the singer not the song: The words of PJ are relevant here. It's not the format (song), it's the singer (the execution). Please allow me to disabuse you of another clearly stupid notion. Formats do not get stations into trouble, management get formats (and stations) into trouble. Cohort replacement is a very important variable. As Sheila O'Connor once said to me decades ago..."In 2010 Born To Run by Bruce will be elevator music." The notion that one could put on a format and then freeze dry the safe list, the approach, the strategy and tactics was, in point of fact, never valid. Yes, it could and did produce results for years. It is less than wise to expect the same results to continue forever. As Dwight Case said "Content is not programming." The winners mentioned in this post are programming their stations in real time. They are working in a living performance art. One of the oldest and last "live" performance arts. They understand. It's about going to work every single day totally obsessed with one goal - to commit great radio. All that's important is what comes out of the speakers, what's on the screens. Everything else is a footnote. Let me also remind you - as has been written here for some years now - it's not about radio, it's about audio. Period. Paragraph. The secret to success remains clear...you must create proprietary intangibles (innovation!).

Ask the one who knows they know: The rule of thumb for outdoor is "No more than seven words and two things to look at, clear reads and recall in 1.5 second exposures at 750 feet." That good counsel is the result of decades of research. Here's a free trade secret for those with the courage to act. Involved in an out of home campaign. In addition to all of the cool agency creative that played great in the conference room we added one other creative. The one we asked the art director of the outdoor company to create using two goals: 1) people will see it 2) people will remember it. The art director delivered a creative the station people, without exception, hated. The colors were all wrong, the design, the look totally sucked, they said. Not our image, they said. In the focus groups the art director's design won by a huge landslide. The lesson here is simple. The guy who does hundreds, maybe thousands, of outdoor executions a year knows what works and what does not. Ask her to assist. P.S. - the client green lighted (not with the research winner) the #2 focus group choice. The agency creative that played "ok"(#3) in the conference room won the day. They passed on the creative only the target voted best of show. The takeaway - compromise is the enemy of greatness. Ask the right people for help. Refuse to settle. Take the leap, go for greatness.

Congrats & cheers: Dave Van Dyke joins ABC Radio Networks as VP, Affiliate Relations.

Photo: Ron Fell

Great image.

Thanks Ron!

"...change has changed. No longer is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-first century, change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious...for the first time in history we can work backward from our imagination rather than forward from our past." Gary Hamel

Two topics, two outcomes leading off.

Programming and sales.

Ratings and revenue.

Enjoyed a terrific conversation with Bob Griffith yesterday. Prior to his current post with Google, Bob served with distinction in a variety of executive positions. A storied broadcaster, Bob is now playing at the top of his game helping broadcasters to understand and play in the brave new world of digital.

Bob related a recent conversation with Dwight Case. Dwight said radio was missing an opportunity by being focused on content. Radio should instead be focused on programming. He said there's a material difference between content and programming. He's right. The dynamic Dwight, a person I'm blessed to call a mentor, once said radio was a simple business. "Get the ratings, sell the advertising." The Bob Griffith take away is "Play the hits. Sell the spots." Wiser than a tree full of owls those two. Lest my friends and colleagues working in TV sense an affront, let me add the difference between radio and TV really comes down to the cost of separating the commercials and little else.

On to some related loose ends. Topics previously lost in the press of daily affairs.

Two popular myths: American youth are no longer listening to radio. US radio is failing to create programming for young people, almost every station is targeted 25-54. These generalizations may not be patently false, however, they are not entirely correct. I remain a glass is half-full guy.

One need only look to Milwaukee and the results of the Winter book. No question, the youth of Milwaukee have a favorite station and it's clearly WXSS, 103.7 KISS FM. Brian Kelly and team have done it again. 18-34 pers total week, KISS is #1 delivering a 14.4, second place posted an 8.8; 18-34 women total week, KISS is #1 scoring a 19.9, second place putting up an 8.6; every daypart is #1 in the station's target demo (18-34 women): AMD 17.8, MID 19.0, PMD 21.8, EVE 24.4; let me add, his KISS team is also #5 25-54 women total week. Brian's other station, 99WMYX, also delivered exceptional numbers finishing #4 25-54 women total week. No need to post KISS' incredible teen numbers. Want to learn how he's doing it? Brian is holding a clinic on the air this Friday evening beginning at 6pm central. Don't miss it if you can, listen live online.

Please keep in mind, hits are not the norm. Hits are anomalies. Brian Kelly and team are a wonderful anomaly!

The complete job description for PDs can be reduced to six words. Deliver numbers to the sales department.

Back to the countdown. Are these same youth also failing to watch TV? No shortage of folks fronting that case. But, again, let's look at the facts. Idol, the #1 TV show again. On the last day of voting this season - 74 million votes. Cumulative voting total is now 609 million. Something tells me Bob Sillerman is going to be eating better than you and me this weekend.

It's a shame these pesky details get in the way of all the elegant arguments about the death spiral of TV. Of course none of this is meant to suggest things are not changing. As Dr. Hamel has suggested, it's much bigger than that - change has changed. The velocity of change today is practically impossible to grasp. The facts are youth targeted broadcast is getting fewer at bats. Seems to me that's a front office problem.

Let's keep the myth ball rolling: The oldies format is dead. My thought is one, all or some combination of the following players are at work. The unproductive sales department, the incompetent PD, the timorous GM and the group guy not invested with average intelligence. These are the principals in format euthanasia. Occasionally the voluble consultant or research genius is also culpable. Listeners don't kill formats managers do. As PJ says "In all of art it's the singer not the song." The oldies format is dead where it is being done badly. Execution is the issue.

While it is true that listeners can stay away in droves, management is still responsible when listeners fail to show up. Sometimes new formats just don't work no matter what the research suggests. Getting listeners into the tent is a station job. First, one must have a credible show on offer. Spending money to promote a poor or me-too product (i.e., a bad show), is simply wrong headed and yet it happens.

How many times have you watched a TV show debut, walked out at the end of a movie or spent thirty minutes listening to a new format and said "What were they thinking?" or "What was that?" The audience will find a good show; the show itself is the best possible promotion. Investing resources to advertise a show before it's ready is an error of strategic significance. Too often the hype, promos and creative driving the ad campaign is actually better than the show. The trailer that is better, more entertaining and interesting than the feature may get you a killer opening, word of mouth will rule and punish on merit thereafter. Raising expectations and inducing trial too early can be fatal. The recent case study would be Couric.

Good advertising makes a bad product fail faster as the brilliant Bill Bernbach famously said.

Getting folks to give your show a second chance, another trial, is almost an impossible mission. You only have one chance to make a first impression; initial perceptions and the related associations can be lasting. People value, trust and defend their own data.

Fast forward, a sneak preview: Get Sharpton into the bullpen. It's coming and our pal Al is the perfect guy to pitch this one. How the people meter killed Urban (if not ethnic) radio. Hearing this one on a daily basis now. Short my Radio One.

What we need is effective leadership. Wanted: The intrepid PD, the indefatigable DOS and GSM, the courageous GM, the supportive group executive that understands their job is serving the field. Required: Intense, industrious, dedicated, pathologically competitive warriors.

Are you as tired as I am of hearing conference calls loaded with graduate level dog ate my homework? Excuses, we don't need no stinkin excuses. The considerable acumen of Nancy Havens-Hasty is not needed to understand radio remains in decline. Man up or stop doing the calls (they are not required you know). Congrats and kudos to Jeff Smulyan. His last call was brutal but he gets major points for veracity. "These are challenging times" he said and later "You always learn the great lessons in adversity." My money is on Jeff and Emmis. They may not win them all but Jeff, Rick and their team are in it to win it.

Which brings me to today's favorite station pinata - the sales department.

In my experience we are expecting too much from our sellers. We have changed process and best practice in every department except sales. We expect sellers to function at the expert or master level of multiple complex disciplines. Transactional. Retail direct. NTR. Online. Non-spot. Event marketing. We too often demand that they produce or they're out without providing the proper prudent investments in training and support.

While it is true, as the great Goldsmith always taught, "If they're not helping you, they're hurting you," leadership has an obligation to improve every sellers' chances for success.

Fred Jacobs wrote this week about the common sport of station folks handicapping how many days their new sellers will last. My opinion is every new hire deserves better. We can start by hiring the right people. Used to be the most under-appreciated person on staff was the traffic director, today that title goes to every new seller and any other seller not making their number.

Before someone emails me about body counts, 25 - 45% seller turnovers and no one being out there please talk to a retailer. Turnover at US retail is running at 75+ percent annually. Retailers never have a good day, I know, I live with one. The job is not hire and fire, the job is hire and develop. That's a very different and much harder job.

Our sellers also deserve a product that can be sold with a straight face. A product they can be proud of representing. Sending sellers into the world to monetize a 1.2 share is what it is. Stop expecting miracles when your ratings suck. You don't need a better sales manager to make your month when your dayparts are in fractions you need David Copperfield. Making your month without numbers is an illusion. In these situations we need to give sellers and sales leadership a better performance, better product and better ratings. Ever notice that the great sellers seem to almost always work at highly rated stations. WLTW has one helluva fine sales organization so does WTMX. Programming has put a good looking, desirable apple on the shelf. Programming has created a market of value. Sales now has something to sell.

Here then, the secret. The code has been cracked. Should you not be winning, should you not be having the best year ever. Look for what's missing and my experience tells me...

What's missing is the fun.

Programming fails when performers aren't having fun on the air.

Sales fails when sellers aren't having fun on the street and returning to a club house that is less than positive, totally supportive and always encouraging. Did we somehow forget? Sales is dealing with rejection. We need to help them through the fire. Daily.

Once everyone understands there are only two departments - sales and sales support, the mission becomes clear.

The team obsessed with driving the top lines of ratings and revenue wins. When they're working harder than they've ever worked before their food tastes better, they get a good night's sleep and they come to play.

Programming and sales.

Ratings and revenue.

The fundamentals: All that's important is what's on the screen(s), what's coming out of the speakers. Everything else is a footnote. Everything.

It starts with fun. Dial yours up to eleven and get into the game. Before COB today, catch somebody doing something right.

Go for greatness!

Bonus: Charlie Munger - The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, a lecture at Harvard Law

Bonus 2: Steven Wright, may or may not be the real Steven. No matter, Twitter on dude! What is another word for Thesaurus? Well worth the jump.

Looking for a really good read? Please permit me to highly recommend: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Thanks for reading. Your comments always welcome. I'm out for the holiday, back next week. Have a fun, safe holiday.

"If you're building brands, go work for Procter & Gamble." Bob Lefsetz

Tom Teuber sent me an article from ENCORE Magazine. A writing by Bob Lefsetz titled Branding?!?. Today's quotation is taken from that writing. Here's more...

"Have you ever heard someone wax rhapsodic about TIDE? THAT'S a brand. The Beatles were a BAND! It's not about the peripheral chozzerai, but the MUSIC ITSELF!

The music is its OWN brand. The music should be able to speak IRRELEVANT of what the players look like, irrelevant of the sell.

The old executives knew this They searched for excellence. Look at A&M, they didn't sign the same vapid pop crap again and again just a wide variety of stuff that SOUNDED GOOD! Same deal with Bob Krasnow's Elektra."

You may read the entire article here. My thanks to Tom for sharing the article. Bravos to Bob for his writing and for raising an important issue. Seems to me that we have a leadership problem combined with a massive failure of imagination. The brilliant David Mamet said it best when he suggested everyone working in Hollywood is a bit of a fraud, they were all making it up, no one really knows how to make a hit, no one honestly understands the secret to box office gold. The truth be told there is only one rule in the performing arts - there are no rules. There is no magic formula. American Idol, CSI, Lost and Desperate Housewives each got on the air by mistake. Each was a surprise hit. Turns out few besides the viewers liked those shows until they became hits. The folks leading the TV industry go to work everyday and make it up. The same holds true in the music business, the publishing business, the radio business, any and all of the hit driven enterprises. 146 MP3 players on the market yet only one captures significant share. Hundreds of search engines yet only one is consistently favored. Lots of browsers are available to you yet the odds are you are reading this using some release of IE. The market is beautifully irrational.

We need more Clive Davis, less six sigma.

Clive Davis has the golden ear. He is the legendary gentleman with a rare gift. He understands potential, he is sensitive to the possible. "The plays the thing" said Shakespeare and Clive Davis gets that. He gets that it's in the grooves or not. It's binary. It's off or it's on. You need to first have a show before you can have a show business. This is more art than science. What drives the accountants mad is the inability to reduce hit making to a science. Their goal is to structure hit making in a way that is economically efficient removing the mess, waste and chaos from the process. Entire industries suit up daily and spend millions to crack the code. The soup of the day is branding. The popular wisdom holds that one can use the tenets and disciplines of successful package goods marketing to sell anything including music. What gets lost in this approach is the obvious. Before you can sell something you have to create something. Investing focus and resources on building demand sounds reasonable, using the fast moving consumer goods playbook seems logical. Thinking one can just manufacture buzz is kinda cool. Only the facts get in the way of this elegant simple logic. The reality is P&G fails. Not every sku is a winner. They're making it up.

A great product creates its own demand.

The silver bullet is the silver bullet itself not some process. The "process" of music happens in your head. In his excellent book This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel Levitin writes...

"...as in visual art, music plays on not just what notes are sounded, but which ones are not. Miles Davis famously described his improvisational technique as parallel to the way that Picasso described his use of a canvas: The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between the objects. In Miles's case, he described the most important part of his solos as the empty space between the notes, the 'air' that he placed between one note and the next. Knowing precisely when to hit the next note, and allowing the listener time to anticipate it, is a hallmark of Davis's genius."

Want to watch an MBA meltdown? Tell them the secret sauce is what you don't put in. Brandon Tartakoff knew how to watch for what was not on and, in a manner similar, Kevin Weatherly, Jack Swanson and Brian Kelly understand how to listen for what's not there. One can certainly argue that what makes Tide successful is what they leave out, what is not in the soap, what is not a part of the look, feel and smell of the soap itself and what is not found on the package. You can say that Tide buyers are emotional about the product, you can go so far as to say that some love Tide more than any other soap. However as Bob Lefsetz has said Tide is an inanimate object. Music, entertainment, the performing arts involve our emotions at levels higher than package goods. I will stipulate that emotions are involved in the purchase of soap but in the majority of cases the relative intensity of those emotions involved in music are far greater, deeper, more complex. This is not to suggest that selling soap is easy, it's not. My thought is hit making is exceedingly difficult. Understanding why one track is a hit and another is not remains elusive. Why the majority of new stuff fails to connect, fails to become a popular hit is still a mystery. Don't tell the accountants but we really are making this stuff up, all of us. Honest.

At the beginning and the end of the day the best marketing is the product itself. We live in a cool new world of permanent beta. Before you believe that accountants and bankers have all the answers you may wish to remember those are the same folks who extended loans to guys with guns in South America. Guys that said "covenants, we don't need no stinking covenants." The bankers wrote off hundreds of millions. Same can be said for the bankers and their VC pals on another big occasion. They actually bought into the now clearly goofy and silly notions of NASDAQ 5,000...all the way to the bank (OPM, some of mine and perhaps some of yours). Bankers and the various players in the professional investment communities should not be viewed as being especially smart. One need only to look at their record.

I am reminded of something Dwight Case once told the RKO program directors. We were all geeking out on music research during one of our annual meetings and Dwight stood before us and said "Every once in a while I want you guys to tell me that you put a song on the radio just because it sounds great. I want you to remember that the turntable is one of your best research tools." Of course, Dwight was right. To succeed sooner one must learn and appreciate how to fail faster. The plays the thing not the marketing, not the branding.

Bonus: Zany Brit fresh from sxsw goes off. Our A-list blogger who draws cartoons on the back of business cards (mine included) has taken to full rant. A wonderful thing to behold. Highly recommended. Check out Hugh here. Closed circuit to Hugh - bravo! More sugar!