A Must-Read...Part II in a series of articles from Steve Rivers with Todd Wallace.

Steve Rivers: At that time, it was well before any personal computers were available. I'm guessing that all the math was crunched by hand? How long did that take each week?

Todd Wallace: You?re right, in those early day?s, computer technology was in its infancy. I was literally hand tallying the results and using a calculator the size of today?s laptops to crunch all the percentages (in order to put it into a trackable perspective.) It usually took a 10 or 12-hour day just to do the math. But even with those rudimentary calculations, the results were truly stunning, especially when it told us about the true lifecycle of a song and when a critical mass of burnout occurred. In short, we found that listeners had a much longer tolerance for songs than everyone ever presumed they did pre-callout.

Then in 1975, I launched Radio Index as a full-blown research company. My partners were Ken Greenwood and Gery Swanson (of Swanson Broadcasting). At this point, we were able to computerize the whole operation and MARS really took off. We ended up selling the concept to over 150 stations.

SR: What were the results in the ratings?

TW: There was an immediate impact. We had dramatically improved the music selection. We set several one book, turn around records back in the day (both at stations where I was the hands on programmer and stations I was consulting.) I guess that's where the nickname "One-Book" Wallace came from.

Back in those days, music changes were more perceivable by even the so-called "average" listeners (especially when your station was suddenly playing more of their favorite songs more often.) The results were sometimes very spectacular, particularly when you were competing against a station that wasn't as clued in to what I liked to call, "listener responsive" radio.

Oftentimes the reason music changes were more readily noticed, had more to do with the new angle of attack, as compared to what used to be the music policy on a station. For example, when I plugged my MARS system into KLIF Dallas in 1974, I had inherited a station with a 60-song playlist, which consisted of only upwardly mobile songs. Once a song peaked, it was "retired" to make room for another "new" song. It was a record promoter's dream! Well, we were quickly able to find out that the most popular songs in the Metroplex (songs that had supposedly already "peaked") were not being played on the radio. Suddenly, we were able to offer KLIF listeners all the songs they really loved. The comparison, even to the average listener, was night and day, black and white. If James Carville were running a campaign about what we did, he would have said "It?s the music, stupid". Duh!

More than anything, what the MARS system did was give a PD the confidence to be able to implement a very tight playlist with very hot rotations. If you put the wrong song in a 90 minute or hour-and-45-minute rotation it?ll kill your TSL. But now with callout on your side, you felt more at ease with tight rotations, which served to both build cume and strengthen TSL. You could do this because you absolutely knew that every song was a mass-accepted proven hit. Song for song, over the course of a typical listen-span, your 20 record list of winners could easily beat a competitor who had a 45 song playlist full of midchart hunches or "favors" or "mercy bookings" for the record promotion community. As you can imagine, I wasn't exactly popular with the record promoters of the day. They just couldn?t understand why I wouldn't want to add a song right out-of-the-box so I could get a Gold Record.

One of the amusing little stories I like to tell is that when I left KLIF, the record promoters threw a "Todd Wallace Going Away Party," and I wasn't invited! I still wear that as a badge of honor... having the guts and the focus to stand up for what was right regarding the stations programming. To this day, I have no Gold records hanging on my office wall, but I do have a track record full of big ratings wins in over 100 markets worldwide. I'll take that any day.

SR: Certainly, at the beginning it was a secret weapon. You were doing research, when your competitors weren't. Today, most radio stations have some form of music research available. If there is one tip you can pass along to today's programmers regarding callout, what would it be?

TW: Don't downsize it or cut it back. There's a tendency at many radio station's to chop the research budget, especially music research. It's an easy way to improve the bottom line. It's wrong to think though that it's something that can be done without or won?t be obviously missed.

Some stations that built their very images and reputations by being intensely listener responsive and doing four Oldies tests a year as well as weekly callout 45 weeks a year are now only doing half that. Still, other stations are trimming budgets by cutting their sample sizes to below acceptable levels. In some cases, sample sizes are only 40 or 50 respondents. Spreading a sample over several weeks, defeats one of the great benefits of callout research. Getting an edge on "local timing". Skimping on the number of songs tested also. To which I say, "remember, you get what you pay for".

Some of these stations are justifying these cutbacks (or total cutoffs) with both eyes open, knowing full well that they can "get away with it" because they no longer have a direct competitor (since most market matrixes are very nichy these days). But the one who really loses in this scenario is the listener. And when the listeners aren't fully satisfied, they tend to listen less, which sooner or later will affect your TSL and they'll start looking to new technology as well as other media for amusement or satisfaction (as we've seen with Teens over the past few years). The scary thing about the Teen erosion, by the way, is that this will cause a demographic echo in about 5 or 10 years that could be absolutely devastating to radio listening as we know it.

Another tip: Use some logic in what you measure. I can't tell you how many times I've come across Hot AC stations that were, say, 70% current. They prided themselves in doing two auditorium tests a year (to make sure that 30% of their music was right) but said they "couldn?t afford" weekly or biweekly callout, making 70% of their product guesswork. For the amount they spent on their library testing, they could have better than doubled their accuracy (in terms of how much of their daily music flow was tested vs. not).

Conversely, I've seen situations where a Soft AC station that was 80% Gold was doing weekly callout to get their currents and recurrents perfect, but would only test their gold every year or two. If you apply some common sense, you can avoid these traps.