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The One Word That Most Radio Talent Fear

By David Kidd, BPR

And that word is …………. Aircheck.

In a competitive market, with each music format filled with multiple stations, often the only USP a station has is the talent.

Some program directors find working with talent daunting and overwhelming; talent can find the aircheck session threatening and disheartening. And the worst end-result is for talent to fear air-checking and for program directors to avoid it.

From the talent’s perspective, some of them may be gun shy of the aircheck due to a series of bad coaches in the past.  To gain the talent’s trust, the program director must be respected; the talent must value the program director’s advice.  Talent shouldn’t leave an aircheck session with the thought “well, that’s just your opinion…what would you know”.

However, sometimes that is just what they think.

So how do you, the program director, avoid that happening?

Easy…. put the aircheck into the listeners’ hands!

That is why BPR developed Talent Check.

Talent Check graphically captures the listeners’ points of engagement and disengagement instantly and demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of content using an online “worm”.

Talent Check can be used to test the appeal (or lack of) shows, individual presenters and programming elements such as contesting, features and benchmarks.

The graphic display means talent can see what content is working and what isn’t from the listeners’ perspective.

While talent may disagree with the program director’s opinion, it’s hard for them to disagree with the opinions of a couple of hundred listeners!

Here’s a link demonstrating how Talent Check works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2cUIclaH4c

Now remember, Talent Check is the start of the process; it pinpoints what the audience likes and doesn’t like. It’s the program director’s job to then show the talent where improvements could be made. Coach, direct and nurture them.

If you have any questions…. please contact us.