Content by Anthony Dockrill
If you work in radio programming, you are to some degree a slave to data. When ratings come out, you look at how your station performed and work your way down to the bottom of what the numbers can tell you. “What’s the cume?” As valuable as these numbers are, they’re really just a glimpse of how you went, and what they tell you while valuable is also imprecise and, to some degree, disconnected from the editorial decisions you often made weeks or even months ago.
This is actually a good thing.
Radio is a medium that is rich in data and also a medium where the best fly by the seat of their pants. Kyle and Jackie O‘s ratings are undeniable (in Sydney), but good luck taking all that data and making a successful breakfast show. Radio is still a black art, and a large part of what we do can’t be summed up by the numbers. The ratings are important, but they exist to help put dollars at the end of what stations do or to tell a station when to hit the reset button.
So if data has hard limits, does that mean radio will always remain at some level about the gut of the Programme Director and the broadcasters? No, I don’t think so, but I think it should.
Social media is algorithmic in how it’s driven, but to think of it in terms of ratings is a mistake.
The algorithm is not just a form of ratings but a driver of editorial output and editorial decisions. Ratings are by their nature partially disconnected from editorial decisions, as mentioned above.
Programmers and broadcasters can make those connections, but looking at numbers for breakfast doesn’t drive how your audience finds your show. The algorithm, in comparison, takes your content and puts it in front of the audience, or in front of no one if you don’t meet its requirements and needs. Radio, in comparison, has traditionally worked through organic reach and talent finding their audience through the quality of their work…and yes, the ads on the back of buses help as well.
Algorithmic content finds its audience through a complicated dance of engagements and weighting built into the algorithm. Why am I writing about this? Because humans are currently drowning in algorithmic content, and we haven’t evolved to handle this level of fast feedback.
Where we’re seeing the algorithm hit audio is in podcasting. Podcasting gets a level of algorithmic feedback radio thankfully doesn’t have. If you interview a guest on breakfast radio, you may get some feedback on how the interview went on the text line, but largely you and your producers are still using your gut and your experience to judge your work. The ratings won’t tell you directly how the interview went as ratings are just a summation of a large block of time. In podcasting, you can get direct and, compared to radio, fast feedback on how the interview went, especially with YouTube and Spotify becoming more important venues for your work. Add in social media data and you’re in a turbo-charged environment of data telling you how to generate success.
This may sound great, and yes it can be, but let’s take a step back as you’re now a world away from radio broadcasters using their gut and relying on years of experience to guide them.
Depending on where you get your numbers, the largest podcast in the world is currently The Joe Rogan Experience. He recently did an almost three-hour interview with Darryl Cooper, whose biggest claim to fame is the proposition that the real villain of World War II was Winston Churchill and Hitler’s hands were forced. Joe was fascinated and didn’t push back on many of his arguments. I would like to think that radio professionals would see a problem here and push back, but those now
living in the algorithmic world would lean in as surely this is just more content that’s good for engagement.
Making audio driven by an algorithm can certainly provide you with an audience, but I come to this from a perspective of radio, which is built on data but facilitated through human judgement. But also, radio is broadcasting. In comparison, an algorithm in this context is about raw numbers, but also, because of the online world, it’s normally not geographically limited, so it is one that is tribal and narrow. It’s not broad.
Want a podcast where Hitler wasn’t the bad guy? I have a podcast for you. The audience for that can run into the millions, and the algorithm can see this engagement and drive even more traffic. But, try broadcasting that into Melbourne or Sydney and let me know how it goes.
Anthony Dockrill is a Digital Producer at Pod Jam and the former Program Director of 2SER FM Sydney.