It’s football season!

With Americans dealing with the pandemic these last six months, the initial lock down and the recent openings, you’d think that the opening of the NFL season would be a time of celebration.

Instead, the talk is about players kneeling (or not), teams refusing to come out of their locker room for the National Anthem, fans booing a players’ gesture of solidarity, and decline in viewership of 13% year to year. Social media posts are just as likely to be about the protests as they are about the game itself.

Let’s be blunt. The NFL has lost control of its brand, either inadvertently, or due to factors outside their control, or lack of leadership.

This Frost Advisory is not about freedom of speech, the merits of the protesters, or taking sides. It is about what our radio stations can learn from the NFL’s loss of its brand values.

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“They’re only talking about nuts and bolts,” my friend Shawn (not-his-real-name) said to me. “Don’t they know there is more to programming than clocks and music rotations?”

“Perhaps not,” I reply. I know that all too well because I was once that kind of PD. Clocks. Rotations. Sweepers and liners. Games and gimmicks.

Then I learned a totally new way of thinking.

Over the years I’ve learned that there are basically three different levels of discussions about programming.

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Have you ever missed something that was right before you? A changing traffic light? A quickly moving thunderstorm? A Labor Day sale at the 24-hour dental floss store?

“Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn’t have when you’re actually living it. It’s as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you’ll never know the meaning of your experiences until you’ve had enough of them to provide reference.”

Donald Miller

524 weeks ago I penned Frost Advisory #1, a fairly presumptuous title considering I had no idea if I could come up with #2, much less 524 of them.

In case you missed it, writing every week for 52 weeks over the span of 10 years is 520. This is Frost Advisory #524.

For years my pal and mentor Alan Mason had insisted that I start writing. I’m not sure whether he thought I had something worth saying or he figured that would keep me quiet for a few hours. Frankly, after reading Alan’s stuff for years I was just flat out intimidated. It felt like Robert Frost telling me, “You should write poetry!,” or Donald Trump saying, “You should tweet!”

The process of writing every week for over ten years has challenged me to think through strategic concepts, consider new ideas, and to look for real life applications. It has forced me to challenge my own biases and experiences, and to attempt to communicate, whether to the novice or the expert, how these ideas can transform a radio station.

In other words, it has forced me to think about what I really think.

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize

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There’s a pandemic going on. Perhaps you’ve heard about it.

It’s affected almost every area of our lives, from what we wear and where we go, to our work, to school, to church, to getting together with Fred and Ethel for a game of Pinocle, to attending sporting events.

While it’s true that the pandemic has forced the major league baseball season to be played in front of NO living, breathing fans that does NOT mean there are no fans.

“Every medium carries within itself inherent limitations, and every artist also comes with limitations. True creativity is not the outflow of a world without boundaries. The creative act is the genius of unleashing untapped potential and unseen beauty with the constraints and boundaries of the medium from which we choose to create. Creativity not only happens within boundaries and limitations, but in fact it is dependent on those limitations.”

Erwin McManus, “The Artisan Soul”

If you watch a major league game, you’ll see the stands littered with cardboard cutouts. There are season ticket holders, there are celebrities, and at Petco Park in San Diego, true to their brand identity, there is a section of cardboard cutouts made up of strictly pets.

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Wow!

That’s how most people react when I show them this photo. Particularly women.

So, you may ask, what does this have to do with a moving company?

Well, nothing… if that moving company sees itself as only a bunch of sweaty guys who lug people’s stuff from here to there… if it sees itself as nothing more than having a functional relationship with its customers.

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