Go Big on Personality Branding

Jeff McHugh • July 19, 2021

We received positive feedback on my recent article,  Updating Your Station Brand, which included ideas like:

  • Promote your star talent  at least  as much as your music — if not more.
  • Use more personality voices in promos. Audiences like your station voice, but bond with their favorite hosts.
  • Run best-of show promos  at least  every hour, 24/7.

Thanks for the compliments. Randy and I thought we might dive even deeper on personality branding ideas.

With half of Americans now subscribing to some kind of audio service like Spotify or SiriusXM, FM stations that brand music programming alone face diminishing returns.

Content and personalities  matter more today. Go big or go home when it comes to promoting your stars. Here are some guidelines that we’ve been sharing with clients:

  • Characters over contests . I saw a TV commercial recently for a station here in Portland doing a generic cash giveaway — barely mentioned the music format, personalities not mentioned at all.  Instead:  put talent on-camera in  every  TV and social media production. 
     
  • Characters over concerts.  Which will fans react to more: “The SirusXM Summer Concert Series”, or  The Howard Stern Summer Concert Series? Rename generic station concerts and artist showcases as a party personally thrown by your hosts.
     
  • Big faces, small logos.   At a Portland Thorns soccer match recently, I saw a billboard for one of the mega radio corporation apps – a huge company logo and some text .  Audiences bond with people, not platforms.  We prefer the approach by  The Tonight Show  in this billboard  for Jimmy Fallon –large Jimmy, tiny NBC logo.
     
  • Posts from personalities . The highest social media engagement comes from posts where the audience can watch talent goof around in the hallway like this clip from  Griff and Caroline of Jack FM Halifax  and  see faces  of the people they love, like  The Men’s Room at KISW Seattle.
     
  • Promote content within a show.  In one campaign, KDWB in Minneapolis chose to focus on Dave Ryan’s quest to  get Lindsay Lohan on his show  instead of generic music position billboards.
     
  • Client meet-and-greets.  Promote your talent to clients with tours of your studios. Coordinate occasional 10-minute hellos over coffee with your personalities. We often underestimate the powerful effect of face-to-face encounters between advertisers and on-air stars.

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

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