A new Radio World ebook explores “Recipes for Visual Display.” This is an excerpt.
Alan Jurison most recently worked as a senior operations engineer at iHeartMedia for 13 years. He is the chair of the National Radio Systems Committee (NRSC) IBOC Standards Development Working Group. His opinions are not necessarily those of iHeartMedia, the NRSC or Radio World.
Radio World: We’ve been hearing for some time — from NAB’s David Layer, consultant Fred Jacobs, yourself and others — that managing a station’s visual presence on the car dash is critical. Why aren’t more stations paying attention?
Alan Jurison: Actually there has been major uptake on this from the major incumbents, the largest radio groups, which collectively have thousands of stations. Their executive teams understand metadata and consider the car dashboard as a priority. But smaller broadcasters often don’t have a lot of money and understandably are guarding their expenses.
Yet I think it’s to their own long-term detriment, as well as that of the industry, not to invest in this. For one thing, as David Layer has pointed out, new cars now present a listener with a list of stations, and it becomes very apparent which stations are not managing metadata carefully or at all.
When today’s consumers open a modern audio product with a large display, they expect that it will show information about your station when they’re tuned to it. And when they’re selecting stations from a guide, they expect that your station will show up. And when was the last time you looked at a listing on a video channel or cable TV without seeing information about what you were going to watch?
Radio has never really taken this seriously, and even in large markets there are still scores of stations missing the mark. To not even have their station name and logo up there … When a listener can’t even see the name of a channel, just a number; why would they select that station?
So even if you are a smaller broadcaster, you should investigate this. And there are cost-effective ways to participate. You could start with just static information. RDS encoders aren’t that expensive, and they’ll last you 20 years — the encoders that I put into service in 2002 are still running. Getting started with HD Radio will require more of an investment. But the new connected platforms like RadioDNS and DTS AutoStage are free to participate with static information. It will cost you nothing but a little time.
So at the very least, you should be sending static information in RDS, RadioDNS and DTS AutoStage. Sign up for those platforms and publish something, so your station appears in the directory with a basic message — what your station is, why someone should listen to it and a logo. At least you’ll be present, not just a random number on the dial.
Then seriously consider taking it to the next step by participating with dynamic metadata. Learn about solutions like Xperi Rapid, Quu and RCS AudioDisplay. Find a metadata solution that works for you and your automation system.
RW: Is it reasonable for a broadcaster to expect these solutions to pay for themselves through generating revenue?
Jurison: Certainly some stations have done it. And revenue uptake is important. By the same token I look at good metadata as a cost of doing business in radio today.
It’s like having a website or participating in social media. The industry has figured out how to do those, with rare exceptions. And we’re talking about tools that provide free or inexpensive ways for stations to interact with users in the place where most people consume radio: in their car. So you want to make sure you’re present, you’re visible, that the information is accurate and compelling, and ideally that it is dynamic — always something new is being presented for the listener to follow along with.
RW: On the carmaker side there’s a lot of disparity in how metadata is presented.
Jurison: RadioDNS and DTS AutoStage do provide guidelines and suggestions for the OEMs; but automotive companies have a lot of creative license in how they take the information and display it. You’ll see a wide variety from automaker to automaker. Even within one car company, even within the same model year, there might be five or 10 ways a station will display depending on the model.
I think it would be good in the long term if automotive companies develop a more common look and feel for how stations display. And if they’re going to go develop their own user interfaces, why not use guidelines like those from DTS, which are very well researched as far as what stations are publishing and what listeners want to see?
RW: Is it your perception that broadcasters in other parts of the world are doing a better job of managing the metadata issue?
Jurison: Yes and no. In Europe the metadata is really good; but because that ecosystem is well refined, carmakers there tend to think it’s how the rest of the world works, so they make design decisions based on their experiences in Europe. If you’re a nationwide provider in Europe, you can have consistent metadata and branding across your 18 stations with a particular brand. Radio in North America and much of the rest of the world is very different. We don’t have monolithic brands with nationwide signals; we have local or regional stations, which is a big difference.
The challenge for the automotive maker is to make it look good across all these types of markets. This is another area where DTS AutoStage is helping. They’re filling in gaps for broadcasters by populating information about stations that aren’t reporting their own metadata, using live and dynamic directory lookups. Then later, if the station decides to sign up for DTS AutoStage and provides their own dynamic metadata, that new information just flows automatically to the head unit.
I’ve also seen some older OEM implementations that rely on old relational databases that may display the wrong branding or the wrong station name or logo because they were baked into the software preloaded in the car and can’t be updated. We discourage that.
RW: What would you like radio people to do differently when it comes to car displays?
Jurison: Many in our industry lack insight into how their stations appear on the dashboard because they only experience it through the prism of the cars they own. A radio manager might have one car and drive it for five or 10 years, probably without a software update; they think everyone is having the same experience.
Jeff Detweiler at Xperi encourages radio managers to make friends with their automotive clients, go to the showroom and experience how their stations look in different vehicles. Go to one of those mega car dealer locations. There are hundreds of vehicles on these lots. Even in a smaller town, you’re bound to find dealers with many different vehicles to experience.
Sales managers and general managers usually have great business relationships with local dealers, but many don’t take an extra half hour to learn these insights. They’ll visit the dealer and then hop back into their own car, which doesn’t have these features, and drive away. Yet the dealer may have delivered several vehicles that afternoon to customers — our listeners — with all these new features. It’s fascinating, but there are people who work in this industry who will buy a vehicle without using the radio and be surprised later on about what they do or do not see. My advice is to spend more time in a variety of different vehicles.
I visit car dealers in my region. I also try out various rental cars when I travel across the country. And I go to auto shows. In Syracuse we have a regional show where most of the inventory is from local and regional dealers, the actual vehicles being delivered to customers daily. I jump in every car and try to find an HD station and an RDS station. I might spend five or 10 minutes in each car. Try it. You can see what your station looks like and what your competitors look like.
Don’t forget to see how satellite and streaming products look. Look at the broader spectrum of what your listeners are seeing. The radio industry has a lot of work to do to achieve parity in the modern dashboard.
Read more on this topic in our profile of Alan Jurison, recipient of the Radio World Excellence in Engineering Award for 2024.
