Frost Advisory #399 – Know Your Tribe: A Programming Lesson From The Super Bowl

We can view our format one of two ways.

It’s either a bunch of songs that people don’t know by artists they’ve never heard of…

Or…

…it’s songs and stories about the most important things in our lives. 

Examples of the former litter the landscape but they aren’t very memorable.

As for the latter, there are fewer of them but they are hard to forget.  In fact, they’re famous.

Seth Godin says…

“One way the tribe identifies is through the observance of a holiday, of a group custom, of the thing we all do together that proves we are in sync.  People thrive on mass celebration, but as our culture has fragmented, these universal observances are harder to find…

Halloween and the Super Bowl are the new secular holidays, the group-mania events that prove we’re able to stay in sync…

(It’s a) chance for all of us to talk about the same thing at the same time.  This is part of what it means to belong.

If program directors understood the significance of being a leader of a group talking about the same thing at the same time, our format could be transformed.

“Your customers and your employees want to feel what it feels to do what other people are doing.  Not everyone, just the people they identify with… because hanging out with people you care about (even if it’s just to eat junk food and talk about how bad the commercials are) is almost always worth doing.”


John Frost

John has been a successful major market DJ and Program Director for such companies as CBS, Gannett, Cap Cities, Westinghouse, Multimedia, and Sandusky and publishes the Frost Advisory.

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