It's Not About the Mugs

Really!

I was listening to my local public radio station this morning as they kick off their fund drive. The announcer says, "I'm going to talk directly to the listeners now." He then went into a two minute pitch about coffee mugs.

Who, exactly, was he talking to before? 

Radio a personal medium. Listeners develop loyalties to radio stations based on the content and how well that content speaks to their personal values and fits in with their lifestyle. Radio stations that resonate with listeners become companions.

In the 60's Marshall McCluhan talked about radio,  “Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber.”(Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man,Marshall McLuhan)  

Telling Stories

And, that is why storytelling is so important. McCluhan points out in Understanding Media, If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures. They become richer, [...]. All those gestural qualities [...] come back in the dark, and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and “closure” of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.” (264) 

The same holds true for Public Radio. The platforms are changing. Radio is no longer considered the disruptive media, Social Media is. Perhaps radio has lost some of its edge because of the homogenization of the medium by large corporations like iheartmedia. Through Social Media there are many more venues for the content. But, the core values...the reasons for listening and loyalty...are the same.  

The station I was listening to is an NPR news stations. According to PRPD's Core Values Project, "In news, we met listeners who are deeply engaged in contemporary public life and culture; whose vigilant curiosity about the world brings them to public radio for depth and context. They see the world as part of an interconnected web of causal relationships and want us to help them connect the dots by focusing on the "why", not just the "what" of issues and events. They believe in the power to find solutions for the problems of their community, their nation and their world."

Understand Your Audience

I used to be employed in Public Radio. I still have my PRPD 20th Anniversary mug. Inside the mug, toward the the rim, it says, "Think Audience." That maxim came out of the Radio Research Consortium (RRC) in the late 70's.  Tom Church, the founder of the RRC championed working with Arbitron data as a way to measure response to our programming. John Sutton puts it well. "Church didn't say "Think Share Points" or "Think Cume." His words were "Think Audience" and their purpose was to get public radio programmers to focus on how listeners respond to a station's programming."

There is so much information about what makes radio, and public radio appealing. There is so much that public radio is doing right by telling stories that put issues and ideas into context. There's nothing in there about mugs. So, why is that the fall-back position for fundraising?