I’m not a huge golf fan, but if you happened to tune in for the last day of the Masters, it did not disappoint. If you didn’t watch, Rory McIlroy won the prestigious tournament in dramatic fashion, missing an opportunity to win outright and having to compete in a sudden-death playoff.
The victory finally completed a rare career Grand Slam, meaning he has won all four major Golf Championships. A feat only five other players have accomplished.
Despite the exciting final round and playoff ending with the feel-good story, there has been some criticism of both McIlroy and the tournament. What makes that interesting for our world is that golf faces some of the same challenges as Classic Rock and Classic Hits stations.
According to an article on Front Office Sports, Golf has the oldest TV audience of any major sport at around 64 years old on average. As the PGA faces the challenge of trying to attract younger viewers, it also has new competition from LIV Golf, and the man who’s been the biggest draw for the last 30 years, Tiger Woods, is closing in on retiring.
Classic Rock and Hits stations have some of the oldest audiences of the major formats. We face new competition from streaming services and other digital outlets, and many of our top-drawing acts are close to, if not already, retired.
So, let’s take a couple of golf lessons.
Lesson One: Make Your Station Easy to Use
A post by Drew Lerner on Awful Announcing goes into incredible detail about how difficult it was for true golf fans to watch early round coverage of the sport’s most prestigious event. He points out that on the first day, viewers had to wait over seven hours after the first golfers teed off to get any cohesive coverage.
Lerner details how difficult it is to use the fragmented options available on various platforms, “for golf’s most prestigious tournament of the year, when the most eyeballs are on the sport, fans are left struggling to figure out how to actually follow the action.”
He says this impacts hardcore golf nuts but might be worse for casual fans, “How do we expect them to know how to navigate such a fragmented broadcast experience? It’s certainly no way to ‘grow the game.’”
Radio stations are often no better. When it comes to our biggest personalities, major contests, or important concerts, it’s important to reach potential listeners everywhere with a coherent, easy-to-follow message.
Too often, a station’s email newsletter, website and social media accounts offer conflicting or unclear messages. Never assume that everyone knows how your contest mechanics work or when a popular feature runs.
Being able to clearly, consistently, and concisely reiterate the compelling parts of your brand across all the available platforms – on-air, digital, and social – is the only way to be sure you are engaging as many hardcore fans and casual listeners as possible.
Lesson Two: Make Your People Accessible
In the Front Office Sports column mentioned above, writer Michael McCarthy talks about how golfers are the latest group of athletes to avoid questions from the press. After a horrible round on Thursday at the Masters, McIlroy blew off the media, going straight to the practice area without doing any interviews.
He’s not the first golfer to do this. The PGA does not require media appearances, so several golfers have taken the attitude that they don’t owe anyone, including the media, anything.
In the article, McCarthy quotes Eamon Lynch from the Golf Channel, who says that whether they had a good or a difficult day on the course, golfers who skip doing interviews are hurting themselves and the sport. “They ought to be their own marketers. They should look on that as customer service in a way.”
The idea of being a marketer for the radio station by interacting with listeners is powerful. I host a lot of focus groups where respondents proudly tell stories about meeting the station’s hosts and what it meant to them. It humanizes the radio station and builds loyalty in a way that top-of-the-hour keywords in a $1000 giveaway never will.
It’s important not to take this idea for granted. It’s possible they don’t understand the value of individual connections and how meeting just a few people every time the station is out can result in a meaningful impact on ratings.
Coach your personalities, as well as any part-time staff or interns, on how to approach listeners and why it matters. If they are uncomfortable, help by creating games or other activities they can do on site to help break the ice.
I realize that it’s a tough time with staffing cut to the bone at so many stations. That’s exactly why these two lessons are important. Building an internal system to create consistent, easy-to-follow messaging that appears across all your platforms to help people engage with the station will help offset the lack of staff.
With fewer people to send out on the street and, therefore, fewer chances to shake hands, maximizing every opportunity to meet the public is crucial.
Now let’s hope your ratings don’t end up under par.
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Mike Stern is a Classic Rock columnist and Features writer for Barrett Media. He has been with Jacobs Media consulting stations in the Classic Rock, Rock, Alternative and AAA world for more than a decade. Prior to that he programmed stations in Chicago, Detroit, Denver Las Vegas and other markets. He also worked as News/Talk Editor for Radio and Records, wrote about Top 40 Radio for Billboard Magazine and had his own radio talent coaching business called Talent Mechanic.
