Moneyball: 2025 & On-Air Talent
• There’ll be lots of pressure in 2025 to rely on voice tracking, networked shows, and AI voices as owners and managers look for ways to operate with the slim budgets they agreed to at the end of 2024. And there will be more ad campaigns relying on station promotions and on-location appearances as sales departments work every angle for local sales. To stay in the game, on-air talent will need to be masters of meeting clients and listeners. Many of us got into the business because we loved working in the studio, but it’ll be working in public that keeps on-air talent employed.
Helping hard-working on-air talent generate the best possible ratings results means busy program directors will need to spend time working with these performers. Coaching is a critical element of these relationships. And, while managers often know which direction talent needs to go, they sometimes have trouble convincing a performer.
For years NuVoodoo has been executing content studies to help clients with talent, promos, and other imaging using an online version of the rheostat tests that used to be conducted in hotel meeting rooms and focus group facilities. In those settings, respondents were given handheld devices with a knob they could turn up or down to register their feelings about what they were hearing. These days respondents use a virtual slider on their smartphone screen or computer screen.
The data is so clear cut, the results can be so useful in talent coaching and making decisions about station imaging that we decided it was time to make these studies more widely available. We’re calling it “The NuVoodoo Media Pulse Predictor.” A sample tracing of an actual morning show bit that ran just over a minute long is shown below. You can see the lines for this total sample of adults, along with blue lines for the men and red lines for the women. But the real magic is watching the lines trace out on the screen while listening to the audio. You see what connected more quickly for the women — and eventually drew in the men. You see where they react with pleasure or disinterest.
A tracing from a NuVoodoo Media Pulse Predictor Study for a client station shows an example of YouTube Syndrome. In the chart below you can see the reactions of a screened panel of in-demo station listeners hearing a benchmark morning show feature from that station running just over two minutes long. The name of the feature tested well with their listeners and listeners even mentioned the feature unaided as a reason they enjoy the show. Yet the first minute of the segment doesn’t test well with listeners, giving them ample time to consider switching stations.
In the tracing above you can see the initial pop when the feature name is mentioned just a few seconds in, but the line then sags while the hosts enjoy themselves performing the feature’s theme song. The line starts to head to greater enjoyment as the theme song comes to its end, near the end of the first minute of the segment. Once the game is underway, interest stays high for the remainder of the game and peaks as the winner is named at the end.
It’s an eye-opener for talent and almost always supports the efforts programmers and consultants have been making. It helps answer the question of whether your morning show has a pulse. It can help tune up the choices your imaging folks are making in presenting the pieces you’re relying on to sell your station to listeners. As a client put it, “It’ll make you better.”
We’re selling Media Pulse Predictor studies with 100 screened respondents and up to ten segments as long as two minutes and thirty seconds (2:30) for $4800. We should probably be charging more, but we think this is a tool the radio business needs to be using more often. Need a bigger sample? Longer audio segments? Hit up me (leigh@nuvoodoo.com) or Carolyn (cg@nuvoodoo.com) and we’ll tailor something that fits your exact needs.
