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  • Conversing With Listeners: Three Things to Talk Over Now

    • 07/30/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country music, country radio
    No Comments

    Tastes, opinions and alternatives are anything but static. So if you haven’t had a conversation with your listeners recently, you should.  Here are three fertile and actionable talking points for your next listener panel or focus group: Music Satisfaction.  “Playing the best music” is always a top reason for picking one country station over another. How

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  • Effective Morning Show Billboards: Two Examples

    • 07/22/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: Uncategorized
    No Comments

    Planning on using billboards to promote your morning show? Here’s a quick checklist for your campaign. Effective billboards are short, clean, targeted, attention-getting, and clever. They create desire, ask for action directly or indirectly, and leave an impression. Here are two morning show boards that deliver on all these counts. The Power 105 board is up now, the

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  • Alpha Boomers: What Their Country Station Might Sound Like

    • 07/16/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country music, country radio
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    With “Alpha Boomer” now one of Arbitron’s standard Tapscan demos, I revisited Albright & O’Malley’s Roadmap 2011 (our annual online perceptual of 10,000+ country listeners) to see how the appeal of the various Music Clusters broke out across 25-54 and the 55-64 leading edge Alpha Boomer demo. The bars below represent the percent of ‘Like

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  • Get Shorty: Communicating More Concisely

    • 07/05/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country radio, DJs
    No Comments

    This blog is intentionally under 500 characters; that’s the threshold for the new messaging service Shortmail. Its mission? Improve your relationship with email by eliminating time wasters. Shortmail forces senders to acknowledge that attention spans are short and no one wants their time wasted. Emails are under 500 characters or they can’t be sent. Whether or

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  • Being In The Moment

    • 07/01/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country radio
    No Comments

    Here’s a great example of being in the moment and scooping the marketplace. Congratulations to all involved for being in sync with listeners’ mindsets on the Friday before the 4th of July weekend! As Max Media Norfolk Market Manager Dave Paulus says, “Everything matters.”

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  • Celebrating the Fourth: How Listening Changes During the 4th of July Week

    • 06/30/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country radio
    No Comments

    The Mill Pond “river walk” gets a makeover around Halloween for fright walks. Santa can be counted on to ride through every street in the borough on a fire truck just before Christmas. And there’s a town-wide garage sale each spring. But the 4th of July in Milltown is something else altogether with no less than

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  • Making Fans “Off the Field”

    • 06/25/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: branding, country radio, DJs
    No Comments

    The big crowd at Yankee Stadium showed that they remembered him with something just short of a standing ovation as he walked to the plate. JasonGiambi paused just outside the batter’s box to acknowledge us by touching his hand to the brim of his batting helmet.  Then he promptly hit a rifle-shot home run to

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  • When News Breaks Out…

    • 06/18/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country radio
    No Comments

    Gord Eno, Program Director of 93.7 JR-FM (CJJR-FM) pens an excellent, weekly memo to his staff. I received this week’s missive from Gord the day after having just completed a listener panel which included some discussion on where listeners go first for news (it wasn’t radio).  Gord graciously allowed me to post his memo here. Some

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  • Crossing Paths: Country’s Millennial vs. Boom Era Music

    • 06/11/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country music, country radio, radio programming
    2 Comments

    Albright & O’Malley‘s Roadmap 2011 (our 5th annual online perceptual) continues to provide valuable insights into where country radio is at the moment and where it is headed. One part of each study is devoted to music, more specifically, trending the listener appeal of various music clusters.  At CRS 2011  we revealed some top line data* that showed

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  • Your New Favorite Filter?

    • 06/03/2011
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country radio, radio programming
    1 Comment

    Here’s a filter to get a fast read on value of something: ask, “Does Anybody Care?”  One PD and I use this filter all the time. For the most part, items that pass the filter get on the air. Things that get a “Nobody cares,” don’t. In our filter, “Nobody cares” is defined as unremarkable,

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