What’s your obsession?

My first article outlined the 5 Radio Brand Essentials.

#3 focussed on how content is the strategy, and #4 on how you need “right-brain” intuition and thinking to create the content. Or at least to “facilitate” creativity, to quote Brad in “Secrets of Great Content Directors”. That’s not to say the “left-brain” aspects of managing radio, like EBITDA, revenue targets, operating budgets, research, survey analysis etc are unimportant. They’re critical to the successful functioning of the enterprise.

BUT, it’s a big mistake to drag a Content Director and the product team into a constant obsession with number-crunching. To the point of destructively affecting their ability to create the great content, that drives the numbers in the first place.

Resulting in stale, undifferentiated, commoditised content that damages both the brand, and radio in general, when we most need to prove radio’s creative strengths against the onslaught of new media.

So what’s it to be for the Content Director? Watch the scoreboard or the game?

vs.

Every minute of the day the Content Director and the team spend on the game, obsessing with content, grows the business.

It’s the job of the GM, Group execs and consultants, to “clear the path”, deal with the scoreboard, and free up the Content Director’s pressured time for listening, crafting content and managing talent.

Headline the essential stats, digest, form the content action plan, and quickly move on.

Unless you really, truly want your content team to think like accountants, and have your radio station sound like it, throw out the phone-book of PowerPoint ratings graphs, nagging lectures to the breakfast team about survey trends, and endless, chicken-entrails survey prognostications.