Taipei Times: Late last month you over-hauled ICRT's programming from a talk-intensive station to a more music-oriented one. What has the public's response been and how is that multi-stage plan shaping up?
Doc Casey: The overhaul is still in progress, at least the preliminary stage. We expect this part will be finished in the next couple of weeks. Then we will be fine-tuning the rotation of songs to improve the flow. Our listeners should be noticing an improvement in the sound of the station now, but it's going to get a lot better in terms of programming quality and consistency before we're done. The reaction to what we've done so far has been very encouraging -- the responses have been almost unanimously positive.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
TT: The government recently has placed new importance on improving English skills in Taiwan. What plans does ICRT have to take its market advantage of being Taiwan's only English-language radio station to the bank with advertisers?
Casey: We held our first ICRT English Expo just recently and we plan to do that again in the fall. We're looking to align ourselves with existing English services and products even more aggressively and also develop some products of our own. These non-traditional revenue sources hold a lot of promise.
TT: After checking out the new ICRT programming for several weeks, the current music format appears to be a combination of hit songs, love ballads and oldies. While at times the flow of music is good, it quickly becomes obvious that DJ tastes play a big role in the continuity of the station's "feel." What is the "feel" you are trying to create and is your team united behind that plan?
Casey: What we are shooting for is almost pure Adult Contemporary. When I say "almost pure" I mean that we will be making some minor accommodations for local market preferences. What that means [specifically] is the best music from the 60s through the present that appeals to an audience 25 years old and above during the daytime and a younger audience at night. "Good" music means established hits, both in Taiwan and around the world. DJs will have less and less freedom to deviate from the playlist over the next few weeks as we get the music identification and rotation adjustments finalized and as a result you will hear much more consistency. The "feel" we will achieve is one of comfortable familiarity. We don't want to intrude on your day as much as we want to help you get through it.
Who's the audience
TT: Recent ACNielsen Taiwan ratings appear to show your organization may have slipped a little in the last quarter. How would you interpret the new numbers and are you concerned?
Casey: The radio market is shaking itself out and it is a natural evolutionary process. I think the TV stations went through the same thing when all of the cable channels came online. Some of the most dominant stations have suffered losses much worse than ours in the ratings. But everybody is trending down as the radio audience, which has not grown significantly since the launch of all of the new frequencies, finds stations that better serve their individual or community needs. Niche programming and marketing is here now and it's here to stay. That's one of the reasons that I feel ICRT has the greatest potential to succeed.
We've been doing niche programming since our inception in 1979. As I've said previously, our position as the only English-language station in Taiwan is our greatest strength.
TT: Lets talk about audience demographics. Who are they? What do they want and how did you come to those conclusions?
Casey: Since we have always been a niche-oriented radio station, we have had to work harder toward understanding and defining our audience. Before ACNielsen came on the scene several years ago, there was almost no demographic information available aside from the general population figures provided by the government. We were among the first, if not the first, to do marketing and programming research. We learned a lot about our listeners.
First, let's dispel the myth that only foreigners listen to ICRT. The foreign community, which has been shrinking, makes up less than 5 percent of our listening audience. Conversely, probably 95 percent of the foreign community listens to ICRT at one time or another. This segment runs the gamut from junior high school students to retired business people. We know these folks do not register in the ratings.
The larger audience segment, however, shares many common traits. They are primarily Taiwanese or Chinese. They tend to be better educated, have higher income levels and maintain a greater curiosity about things international than the average radio listener. Just the fact that they work so hard to improve their English would lead you to that conclusion. But our research supports it as well. The majority of our listeners are the young, upwardly mobile professionals -- the yuppies of Taiwan.
What do they want? Our research shows that people listen to us because of the music we play and the fact that we broadcast in English. What they want beyond that is really not that much different from what people in that group want anywhere else. They want news about what is going on in the world. They want to be entertained. And they want music that makes them feel good, music that is familiar and comfortable.
TT: With a good number of your foreign DJs and programming staff starting to gray -- not only at the hairline but also in their musical tastes -- how do you assure they stay in touch with the above mentioned target audience?
Casey: They say that radio is theater of the mind. I think one of the reasons most of us got into radio to begin with was because it allowed us to exceed our physical parameters. The old saying, "He's got a face for radio" comes to mind. When I started in broadcasting, I was only 16 years old. I wanted to be older than I was. Radio allowed me to do that. Now that I'm almost 40 -- lie detector goes off the scale here -- I don't feel old. It really proves the axiom that you're only as old as you feel. Our DJ staff is actually quite diverse. We've got a couple of 20-somethings, a couple of 30-somethings and a couple beyond that. Ron Stuart is almost 40, too -- lie detector meltdown -- but you can't tell by listening.
Richie Walker does sound more mature but we use that to our advantage by putting him in the morning where we are trying to reach an older, more mature audience. Another tactic that we use is getting out into the community as much as possible, through events and activities that cross the demographic spectrum, to know who our listeners are and maintain our understanding of their needs.
How golden are those oldies?
TT: Several of your DJs are still playing plenty of oldies that many in your target audience of 24- to 50-year olds probably have never heard. While Air Supply, the Carpenters and Lobo still sell in Taiwan, David Maurice -- a local music industry veteran -- learned the hard way several years ago doing music programming at the Broadcasting Corporation of China that oldies don't go over well in Taiwan. Has ICRT learned any lessons from that market experiment?
Casey: First of all, David Maurice was a musician, not necessarily a music programmer. But in his defense, he did an excellent job in laying the groundwork for what is today Wave radio. You are right that we are playing more "oldies" than we should be playing. But it is not our intent to become an oldies station. Remember, I said our objective is to play the best music. I believe there is some music that for some reason gets labeled in our minds as old. Some music seems to transcend that label.
We will be playing some of the best music of the 60s. But the percentage of 60s music will probably not constitute more than 5 percent of our playlist. Music from that decade will be hand-picked by me and Tony Taylor because it still works. Music from the 70s will be there as well. Again, it will constitute a smaller percentage of our whole playlist, but there is a lot of music from that decade that would still be considered by most people to be good music even though they may not have been born yet.
I myself, am a big fan of Frank Sinatra and the whole Big Band era. We probably won't be playing any music from the 40s or 50s, but there is some music even from those years that would still work.As we get into the 80s and early 90s the percentage will begin to rise, because it is more contemporary. And then more recent and even new music will be there, especially at night for the younger audience. This latter category has also gotten a higher rotation during the daytime over the last couple of years than it should. But that is all a matter of what we call "the mix."
The mix is the art of organizing music so that the overall program sound has a good flow and creates a certain mood. This is really the art of radio programming and about the only way to develop this artistic skill is through experience and exposure to others in the industry before us who had the talent to do it well. So the number of what you might define as oldies will decrease as we begin to fine-tune the mix. But some of it will still be there, elegantly blended like a mighty fine wine.
TT: Your past selling points have been English-language and professional radio personalities, yet you're billing yourself as "more music, less talk." Where do you draw the line between some English conversation and meaningless babble, and how do you rein in renegade DJs?
Casey: We've reined in the DJs initially by imposing a time limit of 30 seconds for any talk segment. This is forcing them to edit, edit, edit. It is also forcing them to better plan what they are going to say. I call it program management. Each DJ is now responsible for the performance of their program in the ratings. It's just like big-market radio anywhere else. We will evaluate each program each rating period to see if the responsible DJ is managing their program in a way that reaches our target audience effectively. This means the DJ must think about who they are suppose to be talking to and providing content that attracts that demographic segment.
It's not rocket science, but you'd be surprised how challenging it can be. Getting on the radio and talking to hundreds of thousands of people is not easy to start with. Trying to attract and hold a group of listeners requires a lot of work and attention to what you are doing. The second emphasis is to focus on information. We want the DJs to use the time they do have to talk to either educate the audience about the music they're about to play or impart some other bit of entertainment news.
I know that a professional DJ can stay within these guidelines and still have all the artistic expression they need. I know because I've been exposed to many professional DJs who live or die each ratings period by these same guidelines.
We've eliminated eliminated most of our on-air phone calls which was another source of unnecessary clutter. When a DJ puts someone on the air and starts out with, "Hi, what's your name? Where are you from? How do you like Taiwan?" over and over again, you know you're in trouble. For the most part, the only two people who care about a phone call with a listener are the DJ and the caller. It's a real tune out factor unless you have the skill and experience to make it funny or interesting. We weren't achieving either, so we eliminated it.
I've received e-mails thanking me for that one change alone more than anything else -- except for the improvements in music.
Why another chance?
TT: In the past many ICRT listeners -- especially the international community in Taiwan -- broke ranks with ICRT after tuning into to hear cheesy Mandarin-pop, mindless bilingual chatter, bad karaoke and screaming contests. Are those days over and why should the expat community give ICRT another chance?
Casey: I think those days are over for the most part. None of these changes mean we're going to stop having fun -- if you stop having fun in this business, you're dead. The foreign community should give us another chance not because it is still our primary mission to serve them and not because of any other reason than just the simple fact that we are still going to be one of the best games in town and it would be a shame if you missed it.
TT: With the economy still in a rut, advertising dollars are hard to come by in any industry. Is ICRT currently operating in the black and what tricks do you have up your sleeve in the next two quarters to attract the big money advertisers to English-language radio?
Casey: We managed to break even last year while many other big stations were suffering. This year is still a question mark. Our primary focus is to bring up our numbers in the ratings. In addition, we are developing strategic alliances with companies that can help us create substantial added value for advertisers.
On the sales side, we will be launching our eighth annual "100 Days of Summer" campaign in about five weeks. This is a series of on-air promotional activities and outside events that begins on the weekend of the Dragon Boat Festival and ends with the Full Moon Festival in September. We're planning a launch in Kaohsiung in June and the big Full Moon Party in Taipei to wrap it up. On the programming side, we just launched our "Weekends Start Early" approach to weekend programming.
Casey Kasem is back with the American Top 40 at 3pm on Friday afternoons, courtesy of Standard Chartered Bank. The show is called FlashBack and Casey recaps some of the best shows from American Top 40 through the years. Rick Dees kicks off our Saturday night lineup at 5pm with his countdown show of current music. Blockbuster snapped this one up and its going to be a great show. We'll be giving away some DVD players and memberships to Blockbuster. And on Sunday mornings from 10am to noon we have a new oldies countdown which takes you back not only through the music, but through the sounds of the times. These programs are full of artist interviews and information.
TT: You were recently quoted in the media as saying you planned to take the station to No. 3 in the market. What kind of timetable have you set to achieve that goal and do you have the staff and resources to make the plan a reality?
Casey: Our goal is to achieve this by the end of the year. Now that we have Tony Taylor as the programming director in place, I have much more confidence that we can achieve this. It is still very much a team effort, however, and the team is committed to making it happen.
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