In the recent NAB webcast “Radio’s Future in the Car: Best Practices for the Digital Dash,” the second panelist, Greg Strassell, senior VP programming for Hubbard Radio, presented a case study of how his company has started to manage their visual branding.
He began by emphasizing that the review at Hubbard was a top to bottom team effort. “There needs to be a commitment from ownership to invest both the capital and time of key players to make this happen.” That being done, Strassell said, the first step was to conduct an audit of company clusters in each market, in much the same way as Fred Jacobs had described. “In each market, we located a vehicle that displayed Artist Experience. The PD and engineer or IT person sat in the car and took notes as they made a video of the displays from every station in the cluster.” He added that the video was then compiled into a self-guided report, and each market shared its report.
From these video reports, Strassell noted, areas for improvement were identified. “There were many missed opportunities for station logo and positioning, technical issues with displays became more apparent and more artwork of station personalities is needed. Also, more attention needs to be paid to what’s on the screen during syndicated programming.” After all of the company’s videos were reviewed and analyzed, a global presentation was made to all Hubbard Radio program directors and engineers.
The good news, Strassell said, is that once these major problems are fixed, ongoing maintenance of display content takes relatively little time. “It might be a good practice to designate one person in each cluster to cover this and regularly monitor the visual content.”
