Drake Donovan, Creative Services Director, WZPT/WDSY, Pittsburgh, PA
By Jerry Vigil
How do you image a HOT AC station whose target is a 35-year old mother of two? You get a 26-year old single guy with no kids. Well… not just any 26-year old single guy. You get Drake Donovan. WZPT is Pittsburgh’s HOT AC station, one of four stations in the Infinity cluster in the country’s #23 ranked market. Drake handles the imaging for WZPT as well as sister station Y108, and Drake recently launched his own creative services company. A listen to WZPT or to Drake’s demo on this month’s RAP CD illustrates why Drake was the winner of the recent 2004 Pittsburgh AIR Award for Best Creative Services Director. This month’s RAP Interview picks Donovan’s brain for some of his HOT AC imaging tricks, and we get a glimpse at imaging where keeping it entertaining, local, and fresh still counts.
JV: How did you get your start in radio, and how did you wind up where you are?
Drake: I’m actually working at the company that I interned for ten years ago. I was at school at Penn State and went to the Pittsburgh radio organization job fair. I was standing in line to talk to my favorite radio station in town. I started talking to the Promotions Director, telling her all about myself. She said, “So, you’re going to be a senior?” I said, “No, I’m a sophomore, going to be a junior.” Right there the lady starts scratching out my name. “Come see us next year.” So I went and disappointedly stood in the line for the Top 40 station, which I was not too excited about because that was the chick’s station — the girls all liked that one. I didn’t want to be a part of that. But the Promotions Director there was all excited. She was like, “Get your resume in. We’re hiring in January.” So I was excited then.
I ended up getting an interview and getting an internship with the former B94, which led to two summers of internship. I was able to make an aircheck in the studio there, and that got me a job in State College, where I went to school at Penn State, at a 5000-watt modern rocker. The PD happened to be from the Pittsburgh area and saw B94 on my resume. He hired me on the spot. He listened to my tape after the fact and said, “Oh yeah, your tape is pretty good too.” So that was my foray into the business, my first job. I was on the air on the weekends in State College at this Alternative station. This was about 1995 or ‘96 so it was right at that peak of the Alternative boom. I worked my way up from part-time weekend guy, and since I had experience in the Pittsburgh market, I did promotions and a little bit of production. I started working my way up the ranks and the hats started piling on — Production Director, Promotions Director, Assistant Program Director, Music Director. Finally I worked my way up to the PD slot.
From there I got a tip from a record rep that they were looking for jocks out in Wheeling at WOMP-FM. I ended up getting the afternoon drive job out there. And right about the same time, David Edgar, who was the PD at the time at B94, gave me a call and asked for a tape of what I had been doing in State College. I sent him a tape and he found a space for me doing weekend overnights. So I was on the air in Pittsburgh, and I was on the air in Wheeling. The signals just barely crossed, and I was able to get permission to work at both stations at the same time. That was crazy. I was working seven days a week because I would do afternoon drive and production in Wheeling Monday through Friday, and then crash on the boss’ couch in Wheeling. Then I’d get up, drive back to Pittsburgh at around 10:00 to 11:00 at night and do the midnight to six show Friday night on B94. Then I’d go back to Wheeling on Saturday morning to do ten to two and then go back home. Then it was back to Pittsburgh to do midnight to five, and then I’d sleep all day Sunday.
So after doing that for a while I kind of got sick of it and a traffic position opened up in Pittsburgh. The traffic reporter for B94 and our sister station, WZPT — which is who I now work for — left after years of being on the air. So they ended up getting me in at Metro Traffic, and I was doing the traffic for a bunch of stations in town and still working part-time at B94. But working two jobs, two paychecks, split shifts… it was wearing on me. I went to our Vice President of Programming and I said, “I really appreciate all the opportunities. You’ve really helped me out, but my goal within the next twelve months is to be full-time in this building.” And he said, “Well, everybody at B94 is pretty stable, not going anywhere, but we have a night position open on our sister station, WZPT. But it involves some imaging stuff too.” I told him I was Imaging Director at WOMP, got him a tape, and got the gig doing nights and imaging for what was then the Point. A few months later it flipped to hot AC as Star 100.7. So I’ve been with Star since the beginning. This station is my baby. I helped sign it on, so I’m very, very protective of it and very proud of what we’ve been able to do over the last four or five years.
JV: What are your responsibilities now?
Drake: I’m still imaging Star 100.7, and recently our Production and Creative Services Director left WDSY, which is our Country station, Y108. They basically took his job and split it up and gave the commercial stuff to our Commercial Production Director and gave me the imaging stuff. So I’m Creative Services Director for both WZPT and WDSY. Our other two stations, KDKA and WRKZ are separate from us.
JV: After having held several positions in radio, how did you decide that production was where you wanted to be?
Drake: I always thought I would be making the move into the production studio and off the air at some point in my career. I got into radio right around the communications act of 1996. So I was watching all these stations get gobbled up by all these big conglomerates, and more and more people on the air were losing their jobs. I got to thinking, on-air talent may not always have a job, but there is always going to be content; and I thought if I could make myself good at creating the content, then no matter what comes our way, whether it’s satellite or cable television, whatever the medium is, they are always going to need good creative content, and if I can make a niche there, I will.
At the time that I made the move into the production studio I had been doing mornings. We had a syndicated show on STAR 100.7, and the plan was to put a live local morning show on 100.7. When we did that, the APD at the time moved up to the morning show slot and requested that I come and produce his show, and since I did traffic he also had me doing the traffic reports as well as imaging the show. So I gave up nights and imaging and moved to mornings. The guy that replaced me at nights was then doing the imaging, and I guess he was really new at it. He couldn’t keep up with the demand. The station was changing. We moved the APD afternoon drive guy to mornings, we got a new APD afternoon drive guy, and we moved the night guy up to mornings, so we needed a new night guy. Everything was in flux including the identity of the radio station. I think we were “‘80s and more” at the time and then we became “‘80s, ‘90s and today.” So things were changing. The guy couldn’t really keep up, so they were constantly asking, “Drake, can you help out? Could you help tweak this promo?” So my days instead of being five to one, were more like five to five. I lived about a half hour to forty five minutes away from the station. Everyday I’m doing the sleep dip on the ride home, so I’d go to the APD and say, “Can you find somebody? Have you found somebody?” And finally on a Friday afternoon they said, “Yeah, we found somebody. Go to the boss’ office.” So I walked in to talk to Keith Clark and he’s like, “You know, we have searched high and low to find another Drake and we can’t find him. You’re it. We need you in imaging.” I was kind of crushed. Here I was, doing mornings in my hometown. My family could listen to me everyday. I was having the time of life working with a great team, and I was just absolutely crushed. And then JR, the APD, said something to me. He said, “You know buddy, don’t take this hard. This is a step up for you. You can make your personality shine through a piece of production so much better than anybody could do it on the air.” I had never thought about it that way before. That was a Friday afternoon, and Monday morning I came in to start doing imaging, and about a week later I was thinking I would never go back to mornings. That production room was where I was meant to be. Always.
JV: What’s your approach to a good promo?
Drake: I always believe good writing is the foundation, and a lot of people see it that way. If you don’t have good writing, no matter what kind of production library you’re using, how many drops you try to stick in the thing, it just ain’t going to work. It starts with writing. My promos and sweepers, they all have a theme, like the bikes on American Chopper. I love all these shows that are on the Discovery channel and TLC like American Chopper, American Hotrod, shows about overhauling. I’m a big car guy, and I just love the way they do these things. There’s always a deadline. There’s always a series of things to do, and that’s the way I feel about any project. If I’m re-imaging the station or doing a feature, you’ve got to do the ID, the back to music drops, the bumpers, the sweepers, the jingles. There are all these different pieces and they all have deadlines. And on American Chopper, Paul Teutels Jr. always has a theme for his bikes. For example, he’s going to build one for Snap On Tools. So he wants to have a tool theme to it. How does he do it? Well he finds a bunch of different tools and finds a way to take a wrench and make it into a rearview mirror.
That’s kind of how I approach my imaging. My sweepers always have a theme. One example is shopping; there’s that music you hear in the grocery store. “There is music you shop to… and then there’s Pittsburgh best variety….” So it’s a way to kind of paint a picture in somebody’s head. I work in sound the way Pauly Jr. works in metal. You find a theme, and that’s a way of expressing your station’s positioning statement it in a new and interesting way every time.
JV: Where do you get the ideas for these themes?
Drake: All over the place. They always tell you to write what you know, so there are so many times that things come up that are things that my grandparents said, my parents, my brother, aunts and uncles, things you find in your life. For example, I did a morning show legal ID, and one of my objectives was to brand the morning show. What better way to do it than actually have the morning show in their imaging with the station voice people? So I used our female co-host on the morning show. You hear the alarm clock going off and somebody snoring, and she comes on and says, “What are you going to do, sleep all day?” That’s something my grandmother used to tell my dad and my uncles when they were kids on summer vacation.
JV: Who are the station voices?
Drake: We kind of went with an unorthodox approach when we signed Star on. We wanted to be very friendly, very accessible, down to earth. So the two voice people that we chose when we signed on were Ann DeWig and John Beach. John Beach at the time was a commercial actor right around the actor strike of 2000, so he couldn’t make his living doing commercials. He was one of the first voices for Viagra. So he kind of got into promo work and we were one of the first stations to hire him. He is a fantastic voice; he is so versatile. There are times when I start writing and I write specifically for his voice. He does all kinds of characters and is very versatile, plus he sounds friendly, down to earth, and has a very natural, nice likeable read. And he and Ann DeWig paired together sound like a married couple. I would often do promos where they would be talking back and forth to each other.
Then about two or three years into our run on Star the boss decided he wanted to change the voices, so we swapped voices with our sister station B94. We gave them Annie and we got Jennifer Vaughn, who is also a great voice and a great compliment to John Beach because she has a little more edge to her voice. She compliments John’s level, easy going read. That’s who we have currently.
JV: How much voice work are you doing there?
Drake: I’m a supplemental voice. I will do the things that turn over quickly. For example, we do Family Fun Weekends. We do Flashback Weekends for our ‘80s retro. I’ll have a shell put together with the station voices, but then I’ll read the prize information. Things that turn over quickly I’ll throw my voice in. I also do a lot of character work for the station. One of my favorite movies of all times is Back to the Future and I do a pretty good Christopher Lloyd/Doc Brown impersonation. I did a bit with Doc Brown talking to Marty McFly and it kind of snowballed; I ended up doing three different versions of it for our Flashback ‘80s Weekend. I’ve been doing a lot more wild stuff. But the two voice people that we have are so great, and because my voice is very similar to John Beach’s, it kind of conflicts, unless one of us is doing a character. So I don’t like to use us back to back.
I’m trying to get my voiceover career going, and I’ve learned a lot from my voice people, John and Ann and Jennifer, and on our Country Station Y108 we use John Willyard and Kelly Irish — all fantastic people to learn from. All five of them have been very helpful in critiquing demos and offering tips. And the quality of work they do for me sets the example. They really bring my copy and our stations to life.
JV: What challenges do you find imaging the Hot AC format?
Drake: The biggest challenge for me when I started was being a 26/27-year-old single male with no kids, and I’m imaging a station aimed at a 35-year-old mother of two with some college education. She likes certain television shows, she has certain ideas about the world, she wants to be informed but she doesn’t have to know everything. So it was very hard for me at first to get inside her head. Then after a while I started to think about it and thought, okay, what was I doing as a child when my mother was that age? What were the things that I was observing? What were the things I was doing to tick my parents off? So when it came time to do our Family Fun Weekends, a lot of the imaging — we do a lot of sweepers and IDs to supplement the on-air giveaways – is based on either things I did or my brother did as a child to annoy our parents — you know, crayons in the washing machine and so on. I can remember my brother getting out of the bath, and before my mother could towel him off and put a diaper on, he’s running naked through the house. And there’s my mother stepping over all the toys trying to catch him. So I made that come to life in a promo.
JV: Tell us about the station’s studio.
Drake: The studio in the station is basically in a state of flux. We are in the process of installing Audio Vault, and right now I’m in the process of changing my tools as well. Currently I’m using an Orban Audicy, which I find extremely lacking when it comes to a lot of the stuff I need to do these days. However, I have on the way a hotrod of a Dell computer with Sonic Foundry Acid, Sound Forge, and Vegas. That’s also what I use in my home studio. I got turned on to Vegas by Spank who is currently at DC101. He was up here imaging B94 for a while and turned me on to Vegas. It’s a great low budget, non-linear editing system that you can run on any PC. Just get enough RAM and a good processor and you’re good to go. It’s very similar to ProTools and Cool Edit, but there’s a lot of compatibility, especially if you’re using Sound Forge and Acid, to build your own beds and stuff. The same manufacturer makes them all, so the compatibility is there and the user interfaces are very similar and easy to learn.
JV: What production libraries do you find useful for imaging Star?
Drake: I have been using all Avdeli stuff — Mars, Paradise Lost, Cold War — for all of my ‘80s imaging. I’m in the process of getting some new stuff. I got turned on to Ian Sturgeon’s Big Fish Productions. He’s got a cool deal going where you buy his CD with 99 cuts on it, and then you get a password; and for like 15-20 bucks a month you get a downloadable library that he updates every month. It’s pretty low priced, and a lot of these Internet delivered libraries are going to cost barter. This is the first one I found for just a monthly subscription fee.
I’m also looking into trying to get some more of Joe Kelly’s AVdeli stuff before they turn out the lights on the joint. And if anybody out there has a demo of some good production libraries, I’m looking for buyout stuff.
JV: You just recently started to spread your wings and enter the freelance market. What’s your plan?
Drake: I started doing free-lance in the summer of 2003. I always felt like an island unto myself here in Pittsburgh. I’ve been fortunate enough not to work more than 150 miles outside my hometown, but it’s been a blessing and a curse in that I haven’t worked in a lot of different places. I haven’t been exposed to a lot of different markets, a lot of different formats, and a lot of different people. So I don’t think a lot of people know who I am, and the freelance stuff was kind of a way to get my name and my voice and my work out there for people to hear, and a way to pad my income a little bit. I’m going to be getting married in the summer. My fiancé is a medical student, and I’ve been supporting her while she goes through school. So I’m down to one income, and I’ve got to make ends meet.
There’s a lot of stuff that I do for Star that might work for other stations. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to try that won’t work for Star or Y108 — stuff that would work for a rock station or an oldies station or an alternative station. So it’s a way for me to kind of spread my creative wings and do some stuff for some other people that won’t fly here. I always wondered why Mick Jagger always liked to work on solo projects away from the Rolling Stones. It’s just a matter of working with other writers, with other producers and getting other people’s perspective on production. And you take from that and bring it back home, and it changes what you do for your home stations.
JV: So you’re offering writing, production and voiceover services, is that correct?
Drake: Yeah. I’m kind of selling myself as that utility infielder, somebody that you would go to when you’re production department is backed up. In most production departments today, the people doing spots are also handling the imaging. There are times when you just don’t have time to sit down and take a breath, let alone think about producing promos or updating the sweepers for this week. So basically the way I’m marketing myself is, “good help is hard to find.” Let me help you in those times of stress and high volume production. Let your in-house people do your spots so your clients are happy, and let me keep your station fresh.
JV: You got into radio right about the time of all the consolidation as you mentioned, so your experience in radio has been mostly during the dust settling time. How has the job changed from your perspective since you’ve been in the business?
Drake: I think it’s gotten better, from what I’ve witnessed here. We were a two-station combo before all the consolidation. It was just WBZZ and WZPT. And then as the consolidation started to happen a lot of the jocks voices started to cross over between stations. It used to be that B94 jocks only voiced B94 commercials and Point jocks only voiced Point commercials. Then as the consolidation started to happen everybody crossed over. So this way the Production Director only had to do one spot instead of two spots. It would run on each station. Now that we have three stations, three FMs, they produce one spot that airs on all three stations, and that’s made it a lot easier.
The imaging I think has gotten a lot better because you have a lot of networks between production people where they can exchange ideas and exchange even production and elements back and forth between stations. It gives a guy like me out here all by myself in Pittsburgh an opportunity to call the guy in Detroit, send him an email and exchange ideas, or throw sound back and forth with the guy down in DC. I think that part of it is great, and synergy done well can benefit everybody.
JV: What is your production philosophy?
Drake: Great writing and a clear concise message. You want to make sure you write a great sweeper or a great promo, but obviously you don’t want the message to get lost. A lot of times I’ll write with my Assistant Program Director, and we’ll be on an idea and be so excited about it, and then we go back and look at it and say, “Gosh, our message is getting lost here. We’re getting too excited about this creative idea. We’re missing the point of the promo.” So you want to have some great writing, you want to have a clear concise message, and you want to have some good production value. You want to have good music. You want to have good effects. You want to have adequate processing and effects on your voice and your elements so they don’t sound flat and dry. There are times when I will hear a demo and I’ll be thinking, wow this is so cool, but what’s wrong with it? It just doesn’t feel right. There’s something missing. I think it might be the quality of microphone, or perhaps they’re not putting enough processing on it, or they’re not adding a little reverb or warmth to give you the sound quality that they are trying to create. For instance, a conversation in the kitchen — it doesn’t sound like a kitchen, it sounds like a very dead voice over booth. I think adding that little texture to it can also help a promo or commercial come to life. So in a nutshell, good writing, a clear message, good production value — in that order.
JV: Where do you think your greatest talents lie?
Drake: One of the things that I thought made me good for imaging and production was my ability to recall movies lines, television lines, and sound lyrics to fit any situation. You know, back in the mid to late ‘90s everything had a drop, but some people just put drops in to use drops. That’s not the way I like to use them. It’s like my high school drama director used to say. He would yell at me for keeping my hands in my pockets when I was on stage. He said, “That’s a move you want to keep in your arsenal, and you want to use it sparingly because it has great effect.” So I always think about that. I like to write around drops. The show Friends has such great reaction lines, and I wrote a drop for our Retro Café that went, “Dehydrated Japanese noodles under florescent lights… does it get any better than this?” And then the voiceover comes in, “…well, with all ‘80s it does!” The drop has to mean something and then the voiceover reacts to it. I think that’s important.
Another thing I feel is a good part of my talent makeup is my nostalgia imaging. At Star we’re very ‘80s-based. The ‘80s make up a good 50 to 60 percent of our total playlist, and we do Flashback Fridays, all ‘80s all day. We do Retro Café at noon, we do Flashback Weekends, and I try to inject not only some fun imaging to them to compliment the music, but I also throw in the nostalgia stuff. I was doing “I love the ‘80s” long before VH1. I do ‘80s timelines where I’ll take two stories for a particular year and try to supplement it with news audio or movie clips or something to represent what was going on at that time. I also do lot of fun imaging, making fun of the styles of the decade. Now we’re starting to get into the ‘90s and getting ready to do a Nothing But ‘90s Weekend, so I’m coming up with a lot of cool stuff from when I was in high school. Now I can go back to my own experience and pull some of that out.
Pittsburgh is such a rock town and we’re so far behind the curve as far as trends and styles and stuff. And we’re very rooted in the past. That’s a blessing and a curse. For people that come here from really progressive towns they’re like, “Man, this place is so yesterday,” but we thrive on that. We’re still hoping the Steelers win one for the thumb. We revere the Pirates and the Penguins of years past. Mario is going to give us one more year of hockey if they can ever get the lockout settled. So we’re very rooted in our past, and I think that plays a lot into the stuff that I’m able to do for our imaging. I’m such a student of history. I love the History Channel and I love things that came before me. I like to go back and revisit and image what that time was — and if I could time travel, you’d better believe I’d build a time machine out of a DeLorean.
JV: What’s down the road for you?
Drake: Marriage. Looking forward to that. I met a wonderful girl, of all places, through the radio station. I never expected that. I met her at a remote back in my on-air days. She’s a medical student and is going to be a doctor within a year and a half and supporting my semi-employed ass for hopefully the rest of my life. It’s fantastic because we’re such a great compliment. She is the science and math person and I’m the creative artistic type. So we’re the yin to each other’s yang. Here she is, she’s a medical student, and she thinks I’m a creative genius. I’ve got her snowed!
As for the career, I’m loving my present job with Infinity. This has been such a great place to work. I owe so much to the people that work here. Keith Clark who is our Vice President of Programming found a place for me. He saw this in me before I saw it. He gave me the shot at the imaging and the vote of confidence in adding Y108 to my workload. Keith has been a great champion and a great patron of my talents. There’s our Assistant Program Director, Johnny Hartwell, a great writing partner, a great motivator. I call him Johnny Palooza because everything he does he keeps at a tumult. He exudes a lot of energy and a lot of excitement, and it translates on the air to his broadcast, and it translates to the staff and to the promotions that we do. Ryan Mill, who is our Program Director for our rock station, who originally was the Creative Services Director for what was then B94 and the Point, was my mentor. When I was an intern, he had just gotten hired here and he asked me, “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I said, “Ryan, I want to be you!” He was doing a little air shift mid-days and doing imaging for both stations, and that’s the guy I wanted to be ten years ago.
Everybody here is great to work with. Our Promotion Directors are wonderful as are my production counterparts at WRKZ. The imaging guy there is Kevyn Howard. And down at KDKA, Matt Anthony is another great imaging and voiceover talent. Pittsburgh may get knocked around because of our steel town image and the perceptions that people have of Pittsburgh from the outside. But I’ll tell you what, it’s a great imaging town. And I’ve been disappointed when I go to other markets, especially larger markets, and I listen to the radio stations hoping to gain some ideas. For instance, my fiancé went to medical school in Philadelphia for two years, and there was only one station that I really listened to because it was a hot AC. It had some great ideas and great imaging, and then they ended up flipping formats. It was just jingles with no real meat or fun to it, at least at the time. I don’t know if things have changed.
But I feel like in Pittsburgh we’re doing some really creative and fun stuff for our listeners, and not just within the Infinity group but with some of the other companies around town as well. In fact, I recently won the Achievement in Radio Award for Best Creative Services Director and was rather surprised because of the caliber of talent that was in the category. There were some past winners as well as my counterparts here within Infinity, all of them tremendous producers and imagers.