If Steve Jobs were a Program Director

If Steve Jobs were a Program Director, you can bet that he would pay attention to every detail of his radio station. Every sweeper, every segue, every break would be meticulously designed. He would hire interesting and unusual people that actually had something to say. Not mindless drones that recite contest times and bark for the website, but real communicators who would have a story to tell.

If Steve Jobs were a Program Director, he would protect the product and fight against adding units just to hit budget. He would limit spot loads to a reasonable and tolerable level. And when NBC wants to buy a “jock chatter” break over a song intro forcing the jock to talk about some lame TV show as part of their spot buy, Steve would say no – because  he knows it’s terrible radio and not authentic.

If Steve Jobs were a Program Director, he would take risks on songs that he really believed in, while paying careful attention to giving the audience what they want… even if they didn’t know that they wanted it until he made it available to them. He would balance art and science to his liking. And his ratings would be amazing because he wouldn’t stop until he succeeded in building a massive brand.

If Steve Jobs were a Program Director, his SVP of Programming would be constantly pissed that he’s not “following the corporate initiatives”. And his Sales Manager would be constantly complaining about him to the GM that he’s “too difficult to work with”.

If Steve Jobs were a Program Director, his GM – after hearing all of the complaints from the sales manager – and after talking with the SVPP behind closed doors – would fire him, even though the ratings were really good.

If Steve Jobs were a Program Director, he would be quickly fed up with the radio industry because of all of this, and take his genius to new media where it will actually be appreciated.

In other words… if Steve Jobs were a Program Director, radio would quickly do what it has done to so many other creative types… push him out….

 

 

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.