Christmas Radio Imaging: Order in October

By Jason Kidd
Programmer, Talent, President/CEO

Every year, somewhere around the second week of November, a program director calls and asks how fast we can turn around a holiday imaging package. The honest answer is that we can turn it around fast. The answer nobody wants is that fast costs more, sounds thinner, and arrives after the station already lost two weeks of the season running last year's cuts with the wrong year in them.

Seasonal imaging is the one part of a station's sound that has a hard deadline attached, and it is the part most often ordered last. So here is the calendar I give stations, what actually belongs on a holiday order, how an all-Christmas flip changes the math entirely, and the parts of the year beyond December where event imaging earns its money.

When should a station order its Christmas radio imaging?

The date that matters is not December 25. It is whenever your market's first station flips to holiday music, because the moment that happens your audience is in the season whether you are or not. In most markets that is early November, and in some it is the day after Halloween. If your seasonal imaging shows up after the competition already sounds like Christmas, you spent the money and missed the point.

Work backward from there. Your imaging needs to be loaded, scheduled and tested before the first flip, so it has to be delivered a week earlier than that. Production needs three to four weeks to do it properly. Add your own approval round, which always takes longer than anyone plans because the general manager is out and the positioning line is suddenly up for debate. October is not early. October is on time.

There is a cheaper version of this that also works: order in September with the rest of your annual radio imaging refresh and take delivery in October. Production is not busy in September. You will get more attention, more cuts for the same budget, and a producer who is not cutting your sweepers between two other stations' holiday sessions.

Why does the production calendar fill up before the season does?

This is the part of the business stations do not see, so it reads like a sales tactic when we bring it up. It is not. Imaging voices are individuals with calendars. The one your station chose because they sound like your market is the same voice a dozen other stations chose for the same reason, and none of you are the only one who wants holiday reads this year.

Session singers are worse, because a sung holiday package needs several people in a room at the same time. If your order includes sung cuts, and holiday packages often should, you are not booking a voice. You are booking a session. Those get scheduled weeks out and they do not move because a station decided late.

The knock on effect is the part that actually costs you. When the calendar is tight, the first thing that gets cut is not the audio quality. It is the conversation. A producer with time asks what your morning show is doing in December, what your big promotion is, whether you want the sleigh bells or hate them. A producer working through a backlog cuts what you ordered and ships it. The difference between those two packages is enormous and none of it is technical.

What should be on a holiday imaging order?

The most common mistake I see is a station ordering six seasonal sweepers and calling it done. Six sweepers means that for one hour out of every day your station sounds like Christmas and for the other twenty three it sounds like an ordinary station playing holiday music. The audio between elements is what carries a season, and most of your audio between elements is not sweepers. It is stopset bumpers and promo beds nobody thinks about because they run on autopilot.

Build the order off your existing cut list rather than off a seasonal wish list. Pull up what is in your imaging folder right now, go down it line by line, and mark every cut that would sound wrong sitting next to a Christmas record. That list is your order. It is longer than you expected and it is the right length. I went through what a full package contains in a breakdown of everything inside a radio imaging package, and the seasonal version follows the same shape.

Two items get forgotten every single year. The first is the week between Christmas and New Year, when holiday music is over but the station is still in a holiday posture and the ordinary imaging sounds abrupt. A handful of cuts covers it. The second is the New Year's transition itself, which is a separate moment with its own energy and deserves three or four cuts of its own rather than being absorbed into the Christmas set.

Does an all-Christmas flip need different imaging than a normal station?

The flip is the biggest programming decision a station makes all year and it gets treated like a music scheduling change. For six weeks you are not your regular station with festive sweepers on top. You are a soft holiday station competing against every other soft holiday station in the market, and the audience you are chasing is largely not your regular audience.

That means the imaging has to change tone, not just content. Regular format imaging is usually built to punch. Holiday format imaging is usually built to warm. The production values that make your normal sound work will fight the music if you carry them straight across, and stations that get this wrong end up sounding aggressive over a record that is trying to be gentle.

You also need to plan the exit before you plan the entrance. Stations flip on a date they announce and unflip on a date nobody thinks about, and the first week back is often a mess of holiday cuts still in rotation because nobody built the un-wind. Order the return to format cuts at the same time as the flip cuts. It is a small addition to the session and it saves an embarrassing week in January.

If your flip involves a temporary positioning line, that is a sung cut question as much as a voiced one. A station running six weeks under a different name and a different promise probably wants a short sung logo for it, which puts radio jingles on the order alongside the imaging. Build both in one session while the singers are booked.

What about event imaging the rest of the year?

Christmas gets the attention because it is the biggest, but a station's calendar has five or six other moments that deserve their own audio and usually do not get it. A remote broadcast that gets one generic liner sounds like an obligation. The same remote with a proper open, a set of liners built for the location and a close that actually tells people what happened sounds like an event the station cared about.

Ratings periods are the underrated one. If your market still runs diary sweeps, the weeks around them are when your imaging is doing the most work it will do all year, and it is worth having something purpose built rather than leaning on the everyday set. What that imaging should actually accomplish is a longer conversation, and I made the case for it in why most station imaging fails to sell anything.

Event imaging also has to land in the clock correctly, which is a scheduling problem more than a production one. New elements that nobody assigned a position to end up firing in the wrong place or not at all. When you order event cuts, decide at the same time where they live, and if the answer is unclear, that is a sign the clock needs a look before the event does.

How much holiday imaging can you reuse next year?

Stations reorder seasonal imaging every year out of habit, and a lot of that spend is unnecessary. A sweeper that says your call letters and sounds like December does not expire. A sweeper that says the year, or names a morning show host who has since left, expires the moment either of those changes. The trick is deciding which bucket each cut belongs in while you are writing the order rather than discovering it next November.

When we write a holiday package, we separate it deliberately. The evergreen set is the bulk of it and is written to be true in any December. The annual set is small and holds anything dated: this year's contest, this year's concert, the year itself if you insist on using it. Next season you rebuy the annual set for a fraction of the original cost and keep everything else.

The one thing that genuinely does age is production style, the same way it ages a sung package. After four or five seasons the holiday set starts to sound like a different era of the station even though the words are still correct. That is a rebuild, and it is worth doing on purpose in a September session rather than being forced into it in November when you notice.

When should a station skip seasonal imaging entirely?

Not every station should buy this, and I would rather say so than sell a package that sits unused. If you play no holiday music and your programming does not shift, seasonal imaging is decoration. A handful of cuts acknowledging the holidays is fine and human. A full seasonal suite is money that belongs in your everyday sound.

The harder case is the station whose regular imaging is already tired. Every year somebody orders a holiday package hoping it will make the station feel new again, and it does, for about six weeks, after which the old problem is still there and the budget is gone. If your base package is the weak link, fix the base package. December is not a solution to a year round problem.

There is also a timing version of the same call. If it is the last week of November and you have nothing ordered, the right move is usually a small, focused set of eight or ten cuts that covers the highest rotation positions, not a rushed full package. Do it properly next year in October. A tight partial set that sounds right beats a full set that sounds hurried.

If you are working out which of those you are, send us your current imaging and your holiday plan and we will tell you plainly what is worth producing and what is not. Get a free demo and we will cut a sample against your actual sound rather than a template, and we will do it while the October calendar still has room in it.