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This week, it was revealed that the ratings for nationwide sports giant ESPN Radio were down 53% from just one year ago.
Though I never worked full-time in the radio business (part-time was just fine for me), one of the biggest lessons I learned beginning in the 1970’s and confirmed at other radio stations was that your job was to make your program interesting to the listener. Give people a reason to listen to the radio! Especially now with so many other choices available to capture their attention.
During my initial radio announcer’s job in 1974, my bosses were quite patient. They gave me enough time to learn the basics of the craft, but they also expected improvement over time. The radio station’s image was always to be guarded carefully. Poor choices made by individual announcers could be ruinous to the station’s image in the minds of its listeners.
Think back to your youth. You may remember one particular radio station which was your favorite and, perhaps, on top of the ratings for a few years. Then, at some point years later, that same radio station may have changed formats or disappeared altogether. Usually, a radio station’s ratings will fade when they cease giving listeners the kind of entertainment they were seeking.
Radio stations depend on good ratings (usually measured a few times per year) to increase sales and revenue for the radio station. A good ratings “book” is utilized by the station’s sales staff to quantify the number of people listening along with demographic information about their listeners’ age range and disposable income.
Radio stations will pitch potential advertisers to spend money for commercial air time. Advertisers usually have a good picture of who their customers are. To reach more of those customers, they will spend their marketing dollars in hopes of reaching their target market of existing and potential new customers. It’s that simple.
Commercial radio has now around for nearly a century. AM radio began in 1920, and FM radio hit the airwaves in the late 1930’s. Advertising dollars which flowed into newspapers and magazines had a new competitor in radio. By the 1950’s, commercial television came along and split the advertising pie even further. As the internet has provided another way to segment markets into even smaller niches, advertising dollars began to flow to start-ups such as Google (for searches) and Facebook (which, sadly, uses artificial intelligence to determine the best way to target each of us for personalized ads).
In 2021, the competition for advertising dollars is downright fierce. For commercial radio stations, it is more important than ever for the station’s listenership ratings to remain relatively steady. Ratings generally do vary much from cycle to cycle, but a long term decline in ratings can signal a quick end to a radio station’s current programming.
All of this brings us back to ESPN Radio and their 53% annual decline in listenership over the past year.
ESPN Radio requires their network of local radio station affiliates in cities across the country to carry the lion’s share of their daily programming line-up. The network then tells national advertisers that ESPN Radio can reach “x” % of America’s population via their nationwide network of sports affiliates.
For example, ESPN Radio can advise the ad agency handling the national advertising budget for (let’s use a phony company here) “Billy Bob’s Auto Parts” that their new commercial could be heard by (let’s say) 70 % of America’s males aged 29-54) who might be listening to the radio at that particular time of day.
In return, ESPN Radio provides the affiliates with valuable daily programming but reserves a certain number of commercial minutes every hour for their own advertising sales. The local affiliate in your city gets “free” national programming and can attempt to sell a certain number of minutes per hour to their local or regional advertising buyers.
Now that you have a better idea of how this works, let’s play like you own a local radio station in your city which is an ESPN Radio affiliate. What would you be thinking right now if you just received the news that ESPN Radio had lost more than half of your listening audience in the past year? Wowsers!
Your radio station has fixed expenses it must pay every month. However, your local sales staff (which helps determine the market price for the advertising they sell) will be crucified by competitors and local ad agencies spreading the news that your radio station has lost half of its audience in just one year.
If you sold a local radio commercial (spot) for $30 last year, you will have trouble getting $15 to $20 for it this year. This is a true crisis for ESPN’s local affiliates around the country.
Would you blame a local radio station for cancelling their contract with ESPN Radio and switching to either a different sports network (such as Fox or others) or changing the format itself? Though many local radio stations are now owned as part of a market “cluster” of several stations in your city, their management is seeking a positive return on investment for each asset owned.
Now that you have the background, it’s time to ask the big question. How did this happen to ESPN Radio?
Returning back to the beginning of our story, broadcasters must give people a reason to listen to their radio station. As you drive to work in the morning, ESPN Radio needs to provide sports listeners the latest overnight sports scores and events along with a teaser about sports events coming soon. A deeper dive on certain issues usually follows.
ESPN Radio’s Mike Golic and Trey Wingo show did a pretty good job of that most days. During the pandemic year of 2020, though, they filled-up many mornings discussing several other matters than just sports. Their daily commentary began to include taking clear positions relating to last summer’s social justice issues during their morning sports show. Many of the show’s listeners (who had tuned in to hear sports discussions) didn’t agree. With other choices available to them, they changed the dial or just tuned-out.
ESPN Radio then cancelled Golic and Wingo last summer and replaced it with a program headlined by former NFL star Keyshawn Johnson. Apparently, the new morning show’s ratings are floundering, too. Former listeners haven’t returned.
The network’s mid-morning program has been hosted for several years by Dan LeBatard. He is a Miami-based sports columnist-turned-radio personality who originated his radio show with a local hour in Florida before going national on ESPN Radio’s network of affiliates. Much of the time, LeBatard’s show purposely skewed away from the coverage of “hard” sports news. Though he and his crew were quite knowledgeable about sports matters, the emphasis of the show was not on solely sports-related topics.
An analogy might be in order. Think of a sports show like the TV show “Seinfeld”. The successful TV show was long considered by many fans to be “A show about nothing”.
While literally winking at his listeners, Dan LeBatard’s weekday show on ESPN Radio was a brief oasis from “serious” sports for a few hours on weekdays. The show was intentionally silly much of the time and occasionally downright funny, too. However, the host would shift gears to become increasingly politically polarizing in sharing his passionate left-leaning positions on many non-sports issues. ESPN Radio’s management apparently urged him to tone it down during 2020 due to complaints from listeners, affiliates, or advertisers.
Though Dan LeBatard’s studio production cast provided some quite entertaining moments, the show (though sports themed) could have come across as a type of “Bait and Switch” program for new listeners who may have tuned-in to ESPN Radio to hear the latest sports news and the host’s comments on those topics.
Instead, unhappy callers would be admonished, “You just don’t get this show”. That meant his show was intentionally not all about sports. By the end of 2020, the show’s daily discussions regarding the handling of pandemic issues and commentary regarding social issues in society may have even turned-off a significant number of former listeners who “got the joke”, too.
Like the Golic and Wingo’s morning drive program, ESPN Radio recently ended Dan LeBatard’s late morning radio program during the first week of January.
In less than six months, ESPN Radio had just dropped two of the network’s long-time and formerly popular national programs.
As a portion of ESPN Radio’s listeners tired of a decreasing emphasis on sports along with an occasional preachy attitude toward social and political issues, these were self-inflicted wounds.
One of the golden rules of radio is NEVER alienate your listeners. It is difficult to woo them back.
As ESPN Radio ‘s target audience is primarily males in their prime buying years, many of their former loyal listeners (who could care less about a sports-talk hosts’ position on anything other than sports matters) have abandoned the network in droves.
Regardless of what ESPN management wants to believe, the market has spoken.
Another contributing factor (which we explore in greater detail in an upcoming program) is the increasing amount of sports-related podcasts and podcast listeners. My own podcast (also available via Apple Podcasts) takes a few hours for me to research and write. I spend a few more hours to record the audio version, edit it to create the final product, and then post the story to my website and send it to the podcast link. Even if I come across a current sports news story which I want to comment on, I’m still at least ½ day late in publishing information about a breaking sports news event.
ESPN Radio’s true advantage over any sports podcast has been their ability to talk about sports scores, stories, and issues in “real time” with actively engaged radio listeners. In that manner, ESPN Radio can become the listeners’ primary and trusted first source for sports information.
If the daily programs of their primary air personalities do not take advantage of radio’s immediacy to focus on providing listeners with relevant current sports information in real time, then how does the network build a radio listener’s loyalty? Though most of ESPN Radio’s shows are now readily available via a recorded daily podcast for “take home” listeners, how does that benefit ESPN Radio’s local network of station affiliates?
Answer? It doesn’t.
ESPN Radio’s year-on-year 53% listenership ratings decline is simply horrible. In radio terms, that type of ratings drop is historically bad. Their sports radio network has (whether inadvertently or purposefully) alienated so many listeners over the past year that it will be quite difficult to earn their trust once again.
For ESPN Radio affiliates in cities across the country, survival just got even harder. Perhaps Mike Golic, Trey Wingo, and Dan LeBatard were lucky to get out when they did.