Here’s my question to you… and me.  Do weekend special programs make any sense?  Does changing the station’s value for an hour each day make sense?

You work so hard to give the listener a sense of who you are, what your audio source offers and what you stand for on a day-to-day basis and then you go and change it?  For example if you were a tube of Neosporin would you suddenly start squirting out rubbing alcohol?  Owwwwwwww!   That stings!

Special weekend programming and hour long features probably made more sense in radio’s yesteryears when all there was were radio, TV and your cd walkman.  But the choice terrain has changed!  If I suddenly want all 90’s music then I’ll simply go to one of the many 90’s channels on the web or arrange all the music on my iTunes by era.  DING, I can do that any time I want instead of waiting for 12 Noon or until Friday at 5PM.

Overall changing who you are is not a good idea.  This will become even more apparent when the people meter comes to your town (if it does) .  Early indications show that specialty programs and off message weekends do not fare particularly well with PPM. 

Even programs that get reasonable results in the diary method fall apart in PPM.  This is because the concept of a specialty program may resonate with the listener and be written down in the diary process but in reality when you apply PPM (actual listening) to the specialty offering, listening goes to Hell in a hand basket.

In a nutshell:

Know who you are.  Show people what you stand for.  Constantly reinforce that thing that you do.  And, most importantly stay on message!  Within the constraints of who you are there are plenty facets and applications that can keep you on message.  Just sit down and think it through.

Just remember a saw is never a screwdriver and a station van is never a submarine.  OK, the station van can be a submarine if you have a death wish and the station has suitable liability insurance.  Either way, be prepared to sink… glug glug glug.