To start off, let me welcome all the new readers from the world of music radio to Barrett Media. I think you’ll find that Jason has put together a fantastic home for news, insight, and learning. If you’re new to the site, let me know what you think about what you read in my column.
I was in a Costco last week and while throwing too many interesting things into my cart (yes, I’m a Costco fanatic even though the nearest one is 55 miles from my home), I noticed that kids’ Halloween costumes were available. I checked both my phone and my watch to determine the date and both answered July 10. And yes, Halloween is still on October 31st each year.
I’m sure the merchandisers at Costco took care of ordering Halloween costumes months ago and have figured out that shoppers want to avoid last minute shopping for their tikes’ trick or treating. For me, this was a trigger to write about Christmas.
For music stations that go all Christmas, you should get ready now as well. As this is a research column, I’m not going to suggest song titles, rotations, etc.. However, if you’re in a PPM market, I’d suggest looking at how All Christmas stations have done in previous years. Sure, the Holiday monthly looked great from a healthy dose of ho-ho-ho, but did it really?
In one of my earlier columns, I explained how to use PPM Analysis Tool (AT) to look at individual days. That information really helps when it comes to Christmas music. Sure, the jingle bell stuff blows all the other stations away in the days around the holiday. The days just before and into Thanksgiving weekend are generally strong as well, but what about all the other days?
When I was with Cumulus, I did a deep dive for a couple of the company’s stations that went all-Christmas each year. If your market runs true to form, you’ll (Yule!) probably find that starting ahead of Thanksgiving week doesn’t perform very well. In fact, you may have less audience than playing your standard tunes. This matters because the December monthly ends on December 4th this year and that’s one third of your fourth quarter. Do you really want to have a weaker December monthly just so that you can be the first in your market with Christmas music even if the audience isn’t ready to hear it? After Thanksgiving week, you’ll likely see a decline in your numbers until you get close to the holiday itself.
I know this will be heresy including disagreeing with one of my favorite people and one of the most respected programmers out there, Mike McVay, but I would not go all-Christmas until Monday or Tuesday of Thanksgiving week unless the data says otherwise. If a competitor goes earlier, let them. However, I’d consider “sprinkling in” some of the best testing Christmas tunes starting around November 15th until the full changeover.
Heresy #2: You may want to consider playing some of your regular music in the first half of December amid the Christmas deluge. It’s different, but if the audience is tiring of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” for the umpteenth time, hearing a current hit may not be a bad thing.
Deciding what to do is straightforward because you have years of old data to review. Go back and find the day that your station made the switch in previous years. Next, go to AT and run day-by-day estimates for every day until you switched back to your standard fare, which will be just two monthlies. Check the important numbers, AQH persons, AQH share, and daily cume persons and rating. If you like, you can average the days across a few years and you’ll have a very interesting trend of good and not-so-good days for wall-to-wall holiday tunes.
You know how your station performs in key demos, whether on persons or share. Was the share for all-Christmas better or worse than is typical for each day? If my experience is right, you should see positive spikes during Thanksgiving week and especially near Christmas, perhaps starting around December 20th. However, if you changed on say, November 10th or earlier, how did the station do heading into Thanksgiving? I’ll bet it wasn’t so hot. How about the first half of December?
AT offers you the opportunity to see how well all-Christmas performs for your station. If you go early in November on a low-rated rimshot, that’s fine because the ratings were probably poor in the first place. But if you have a top three or top five AC and switching over early is hurting, you may want to think twice. Regardless, you’ll feel much better about having data to back up whatever decision you make, which is why it makes sense to think about Christmas in July.
Let’s meet again next week.
