The JOX Roundtable was routinely in the top 5 of the BSM Top 20. That came to an end this year when Ryan Brown, Jim Dunaway, and Lance Taylor decided to not only leave JOX 94.5 in Birmingham, but leave radio entirely. They have re-emerged as a digital powerhouse called The Next Round.
How did the show achieve the kind of success it is enjoying now? It wasn’t as simple as bringing every single listener from terrestrial radio with them. It was about making the right hires so that they could deliver the right content over and over again.
In a guest column for BSM, host Ryan Brown explains why it is more important than ever to know all you can about your audience. The show’s three hosts and producer Sean “Rockstar” Heninger deliver the content, but they have found a secret weapon that helps them build on their success every single day.
Enjoy!
Demetri Ravanos
Albert Einstein famously said, “Information is not knowledge.” Anyone who has worked in big corporate media probably has a variation of that quote. When I worked in radio, mine was: “Thank God we don’t get daily ratings like TV. I can’t imagine what crazy decisions most radio managers would make with that information.” I had the required experience to make that judgment. I worked for more than 20 years in radio and was in TV for most of those years, as well. I saw hundreds of those decisions made regularly.
For those that don’t know my background, I co-host The Next Round on a multimedia platform, a project I was part of launching last June with my co-hosts, Jim Dunaway, Lance Taylor and Sean “Rockstar” Heninger. Our daily show is available on more than a dozen different platforms. Radio isn’t one of them.
Until June 16, 2021 we were the JOX Roundtable on WJOX-FM in Birmingham. WJOX is a heritage, well-known sports radio behemoth. It was easy to know our audience on that signal. The station was time-tested and well defined.
Who is your audience? This is an extremely important question for anyone in any form of media. I have been forced to ponder the answer to that question many different times, never more than June of 2021 when we launched a venture not many have undertaken. Sure, there are the Dan Lebatards and Pat McAfees of the world, but I am not certain of any group who has completely left local radio and tried to do a show on as many limitless platforms as possible, yet still remain local. Outkick 360 initially did so, but their plan was always to build back to some terrestrial radio.
When we chose to depart WJOX, we were faced with a new version of this question: Would a show similar to what we’ve been producing for more than a decade on terrestrial radio be suited for the exact same audience if we offered it exclusively on a digital platform? The short answer we found is: not exactly.
Finding that answer was not easy but the information was invaluable. We’ve found the average consumer of our product to be much younger, less male dominant and more national than our radio audience.
Any outlet needs a way to find its audience, our solution to that is Jon Lunceford. We are show hosts, Lunceford is a number and computer whiz. In our world, you desperately need both. We went from the world of average quarter-hour shares to impressions, subscriptions, downloads and views. It was a different world, one Lunceford knew and we did not.
As an added bonus, Lunceford has a history on the air both at 97.3 The Zone and WJOX in Birmingham. It is truly invaluable having someone who understands your audience and knows what makes a quality show, as well. It is not hyperbole to say we literally could not have made the jump we did without Jon Lunceford.
Now, back to my original fear. How scary is it knowing your audience on a daily basis?
Well, now we do and I’d have it no other way. I’ve never worked in a PPM market so my best-case scenario was knowing what my average audience was one to three months after that audience actually existed. Helpful information, information we were judged heavily on, but far from perfect information. Now, thanks to Lunceford, we can know how many people are listening to any given second of the live show. We can know how many people have downloaded an hour in any given time frame. We know how many people listen and/or subscribe to any of our various distribution platforms and an incredible amount of demographic information about those people.
So, what was I so afraid of? I was fortunate enough to never work for a manager in radio that would have made rash decisions on daily or weekly ratings but I have a ton of friends in the business that do. Knowing your audience as well as you can is incredibly important. It is the only way you can give them what they truly want, which brings me to my two pieces of advice.
First, get yourself a Jon Lunceford. Anyone can look at numbers on a screen and decipher if they are rising or dropping, but why are they doing that? I am a firm believer that you can’t answer that by just knowing your talent. You have to know your audience better. Any successful form of media will only be as successful as the person that knows the analytics. Our group had a 20-year track record of massive success in radio but we would’ve never made it in our new world without Jon Lunceford.
Second, once you know your audience, give them what they want. That really shouldn’t be revelatory but for many, it will be. I’ve seen many hosts who self indulge by talking about things they love that aren’t remotely interesting to 95% of their audience. Just because you love it and have a passion for it, doesn’t mean your audience does. That won’t change no matter how passionate a host is.
I’ve heard sports radio and TV people say some variation of this: “If our audience knows we love it, they’ll listen to us talk about it.” That may not be the pinnacle of arrogance but you can certainly see the summit from there.
What we do isn’t exactly brain surgery but there is an art to it. While I agree you can’t be a prisoner to the analytics, you have to embrace them. Before you can embrace them, you have to know them. Social media loves to tell you to “find someone that looks at you the way…” If you want a show to flourish, find someone that looks at your numbers the way Jon Lunceford looks at ours.
