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  • “Twas Two Months Before Christmas and all Through the Station…”

    • 10/23/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: Christmas, country radio, holiday programming
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    Getting a jump on Christmas and the holidays, A&O&B attended Tuesday’s (10/17/17) Nielsen Audio webinar “The 12 Myths of Holiday Radio Programming” which combined sales, streaming, social and PPM data in a half hour presentation that shed light on the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of Holiday Music consumption. For country, the news varied from good suggestions

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  • Country Radio’s Summer Love Affair

    • 09/28/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: Audience Research, Country ratings
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      While the calendar officially marked the beginning fall last week, Country radio’s summer love affair is going to linger a bit longer. While summer 2017 wasn’t the best summer the format has had recently – that was 2014 – Country still put together a combination of growth in 6-plus and some stability 25-54. First, Country’s

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  • Station Websites Abandoned In Favor of Facebook? A Four Station Comparison

    • 09/18/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: homepages, radio programming, social media
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    We invest precious air time directing listeners to our station websites. “Sign up at…” and “Find out more at…” and so on. But a pre-storm look at four South Florida stations’ websites in cities impacted by Irma points to Facebook rather than our websites as the platform that’s getting the most attention. Checking on these

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  • Get Your Geek On: Three “Doodle Charts” to Power Up Your Next Meeting

    • 08/23/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country radio programming, management, radio programming
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    Graphs and charts can help you make a point, particularly if you want to show the relationship between things. They can help simplify complex data and ideas, reduce noise, add interest, and can help the receiver focus on your message. There plenty of software tools that produce great visuals: Excel, Numbers, Venngage, Google Sheets, Plot.ly

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  • NINE STATION AND TALENT TAKE-AWAYS FROM MLB’s 2017 ALL STAR GAME

    • 07/17/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: Uncategorized
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    The Major League Baseball season resumed this weekend after its annual All Star break festivities. (Doesn’t it seem like there’s hasn’t been baseball for two weeks not just two days? Just me? OK) Never being one to miss finding a baseball analogy for any life situation, I was thinking about how the MLB All Star

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  • Country Radio Hall of Fame 2017 Inductees: Passion, Peers, Perspectives

    • 06/23/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: country radio
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    It’s official. The class of 2017 has been inducted into the Country Radio Hall of Fame: Mike Dungan (President’s Award), Martina McBride (Career Achievement Award), Tim Closson (Radio), Joe Wade Formicola (On-Air Personality), Mel Owens (Radio), Jim Mantel (On-Air Personality), Charlie Ochs (Radio), Good Morning Guys (On-Air Personality) and Linda Lee (On-Air Personality). It’s easy

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  • Your 5 Step Plan for Making New Friends this Summer

    • 05/26/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: marketing, radio
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    From fairs to concerts and beyond, summers offer stations increased opportunities for interacting with listeners and potential listeners. So an appropriate question for this weekend is, “What is your plan for the summer?” A great plan isn’t just about where you’ll be and when, but what you’ll accomplish while you’re there. Especially when it comes

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  • How Songwriters Can Help You Tell Better Stories

    • 05/18/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: air talent, coaching, radio programming, storytelling
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    Listen to songwriters talk about their craft and you’re highly likely to come away with something profoundly valuable for your life or profession – or both. One such nugget came via this year’s Key West Songwriters Festival. In fact, I heard it several times over the weekend from writers including Luke Combs and Old Dominion’s

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  • “Will Radio Be Pushed Out Of The Car?” Is The Wrong Question

    • 05/05/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: connected car, country radio, radio programming
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    A recent A&O&B Facebook post from Jaye got quite a bit of attention. It concerned a story by the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Todd Prince speculating about whether or not television would remove radio from the car in the same way it did in the living room – only this time using tablets. The article also

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  • Expecting the Unexpected: Preparing Now to Manage a Future Crisis

    • 04/12/2017
    • Posted by: Mike O'Malley
    • Category: crisis management, radio, social media
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    The past few weeks have provided strong reminders that PR disasters happen. Simply opening Facebook these days should provide you sufficient encouragement to have a plan for how you would handle a worst-case scenario. Radio is far from immune from things suddenly going very wrong: from something that aired that wasn’t supposed to, to a

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