Ok, so I’ve been looking over the latest PPM results for my market for Holiday 09 ( I image an AC station and really want to program some day soon), The station that won did so with an unbelievable 7.something (we had a 6.3), and we launched our Christmas programming about 20 minutes after they did. Now, here’s the caveat, we only had 138 titles in rotation, and the comp had at least 300 if not more. Did that make a difference? Probably, does playing Christmas music on November 1 make a difference? You betcha, my wife ( a HUGE P1 of BOTH stations, was extremely annoyed that her favorite stations had flipped way too early, she turned them off and listened to either her Ipod or CD’s or another station until SHE was ready for Christmas music.
Perceptual indications told us that P1′s and P2′s were not going to be ready for Christmas music until AFTER Thanksgiving, but we didn’t “listen” to our primary demo, we followed the lemmings over the cliff and flipped when they did. In my opinion, I would have not followed the suits in corporates knee jerk response, I would have told them, “No, we’re gonna wait..”, let the chips fall where they may, so what the comp flipped to Christmas,, all my P1′s and P2′s that are just not ready have my regular programming to get them through their busy workdays, we’ll go when THEY want us to go, perceptually, after Thanksgiving.
Now, that being said, perhaps the way to program this is to trickle it in, like they did in the “old” days of radio, you know, the day after Halloween, you sneak in a classic holiday tune ONCE a daypart and then the next week a couple more and so on. Christmas music early in a market with more than one Soft AC can be a blessing or a curse, in our case (the station I work for) a curse. I would hope that next year, things will definitely be different, perhaps that instead of a knee jerk jump to Christmas on Nov 1, we’ll wait and let the LISTENER let us know when they are ready for Christmas Music, they’ll stay longer and that means an increase in the TSL, and the Cume will always be up in those 52 glorious days from Nov 1 to Dec 25th , plus the audio they’ll give you will be fabulous!. That’s my opinion, and I hope that it helps you make a great decision next year
Tags: AC Music Programming, Christmas Music, PPM
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