Scott Bourne, President, 30:60 Productions, Minneapolis, MN
When we hear from someone who started in radio and eventually left to do their own production company, it's usually a process of many years in radio production before making the break. Scott Bourne made the break much sooner, and with a different angle. Instead of leaving radio to start a production house, he started a radio only advertising agency in the small market of Boise, Idaho. The agency eventually spawned 30:60 Productions, a production house, and success has followed Scott Bourne every step of the way. Whether you're at a station and want to improve your situation there, or want to leave the station and start your own business, or are already out on your own, this interview is filled with some very essential information for you. Read on!
R.A.P.: Tell us about your background in the biz.
Scott: In 1969 I went to work pushing a broom at WNAP in Indianapolis. Ever since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to do something with radio. At the time, 'NAP was an AOR station, and I wanted to be a rock and roller. I just went up there and hung around so often that they couldn't get rid of me. After begging long enough for something to do, they let me push a broom around, and I think they paid me twenty-five cents an hour.
Then one of the production assistants kind of took pity on me and started teaching me how to use the equipment, and one day a salesman came in and needed a dub, and nobody, but nobody, was at the station but me. And I knew how to make a dub. So, I dubbed one spot and saved the day, and they paid me a buck eighty-five an hour from there on. I worked there summers, part-time, and interned, then I joined the Army in 1972.
I went to work for Armed Forces Radio, and when I came out of Armed Forces Radio in 1974, I came back to Indianapolis and hung around 'NAP a little. It was clear that production was the way I wanted to go. Early on, I started trying to do as much production as I could. I free-lanced for several stations in town and then ended up going to KHCL in Paris, Arkansas. I went to work for them for a summer. This was a little, teeny, nothing town coming from Indianapolis, and I was the whole radio station. It was a little dollar-a-holler station in the middle of nowhere. The guy who owned the station basically said, "It's yours. You run it." This was Nowheresville. I think our TSA was nine, and I think the guy paid me two dollars and forty cents an hour. But it was good experience, and I learned to do a lot of things.
From there, my radio experience kind of got side tracked. I moved to Boise, Idaho in 1976 and started studying computers and engineering. Then I spent several years working at a station called KTSY, in Boise. I basically built the station. I did all the engineering for it. I ran it. I did the whole thing.
Then I did some volunteer work and put together this low power station, a Christian station called KRNP. In the middle of all this, it kind of dawned on me, based on what people were telling me, that I was pretty creative, and I got very interested in the concept of selling radio. But I didn't want to sell one radio station, so I started an advertising agency in 1979 called Visionary Advertising. Our primary focus was radio, and we represented all the stations in Boise, Idaho.
I did that for over ten years, and that's when 30:60 Productions got started in 1991. Visionary Advertising needed someone to produce radio commercials for them. So, I started 30:60 Productions, and its primary client was the ad agency. Instead of us going to some outside source for our ad agency, we decided to make it an in-house source. But because we didn't see enough business to justify the equipment, we wanted to make it a creative services kind of thing and make it available to the market.
They both had separate business licenses and were both owned by me, but they ran as separate companies. And other ad agencies actually hired me, in addition to my own ad agency hiring me. It was kind of a way to funnel the business to myself. We had a lot of clients in towns like Nampa and Caldwell and Boise, Idaho. We're talking extremely small market. Caldwell, Idaho has twenty thousand people. Nampa, Idaho has twenty-nine thousand people, and Boise has one hundred and twenty thousand people. You've got about two hundred thousand in the TSA.
It was really a small market, and the big challenge, of course, was trying to make a living when you're going up to a guy like Howard Schmitz of Schmitz Shoe Service. He's been in business thirty-one years, and you say, "Howard, you ought to be doing some advertising on the radio!" And he looks up and says, "Why? I've been here thirty-one years without advertising nickel one. What do I need to advertise for?" "Well, maybe you'd make three times the money!" So it was a rough go, but we paid for ourselves.
R.A.P.: Apparently, it paid well enough to do it for ten plus years!
Scott: Yes, especially by focusing more on the radio production side. My wife, Jana, really had a lot to do with that. I didn't know that it would work. I didn't know that we could get the loan. We had to go into debt to buy the equipment to start the production studio. I didn't know that we could pay off the loan, and she kept pushing me. She thought I was good enough, so I've got to give her a lot of the credit.
Then, in 1992, the whole focus started shifting towards 30:60 Productions to be the sole bread-winning company for us. We got really lucky and got a couple of big accounts. We did some stuff for Cellular One and Hewlett Packard, and that gave us a little bit of a name.
R.A.P.: How did you land such large accounts in a small market?
Scott: I met the Regional Marketing Manager for Cellular One in Boise. He happened to be in charge of the entire northwest, and he mentioned that McCall Cellular, who owned it at the time--Cellular One has since been sold to AT&T -was using a big brokerage firm out of Portland to do all their radio stuff nationwide. He felt they were being ripped off, and, of course, they were. And he didn't like their ideas. So, he basically said if I could give him three solid ideas, and if he liked them, he thought he was in a position to get me the biz. Of course, it didn't hurt that at the time I was like the number one Cellular One client on the planet. I was spending a lot of money on my cellular phone bill.
So, myself and a couple of guys who subcontracted with me, sat down and wrote some scripts. We pitched it to them and they flat out loved it. And even though we were a small company, we had a pretty impressive layout. We had nice offices, so we looked professional. We had the whole bottom floor of this downtown office building, about ten rooms. Anyway, I guess it was enough to impress them to trust us with the account. So we did the production and got great results for them. During the year we worked with them, they had a thirty-six percent increase in sales. Then we started doing a lot of jingles and music, and we got a break. We did a project for Hewlett Packard. We did all the original music for some of their training videos that they made out of their Boise, Idaho office. Their laser printer and disk drive division is in Boise. That got us a name. We were doing a little bit of national work and a lot of mom and pop work. I think you ran some spots on The Cassette for some little things I won a couple of awards for, and I got a runner-up award at the Boise Ad Federation for a spot for the Mason Jar Restaurant. It wasn't major stuff, but it was better than anyone was doing in local radio. You have to keep in mind that a top of the line production facility in a Boise radio station is a 4-track. Most of those guys are doing production on old 2-track reel-to-reel machines. If they want a phase effect, they kind of put their thumb on the reel. They're cutting and splicing tape. So, we had better equipment than most of them.
R.A.P.: What made you decide to pull up roots after all those years in Boise and move to Minneapolis?
Scott: My wife's a writer, and she got a job offer here in Minneapolis. I was trying to focus more on the national production work anyway, and I felt I could do that from anywhere. So we moved to Minneapolis two years ago. And the other factor, of course, was that there are three hundred and sixty-six ad agencies here, and they all need radio production. And of the three hundred and sixty-six, there are some pretty big ones: Campbell, Methune & Esthy; BBD&O; Mona, Meyer, McGrath & Gavin. Those are just some of them. There are lots of agencies with two and three hundred AEs here. This is a major advertising market.
After we got here, I began getting a lot of work from the Christian radio market. It was kind of a conscious choice to go after it. It's a very under-served market. You interviewed Sterling Tarrant recently, and he does a column for Radio And Production, too. There are some guys like him who are doing good work in the Christian radio markets, but you very rarely see guys who do voice work, guys who do liners and sweepers and spot production, going after the Christian market. They'll break their necks going after the standard secular radio stations across the country. They'll mail all kinds of stuff to them. I'll bet every radio station in the country gets tons of paraphernalia from little production houses across the country saying we can do this, that, and the other. But the Christian radio stations don't get that kind of stuff. There's basically two or three people doing it. Of course, I'm making statements against interests because after this runs, everybody in the world will try to do that, but that's okay. If they're good enough to get the work, they should get it. The Christian radio market is totally ignored and it's a huge market. There are two thousand Christian radio stations in America.
I work with a lot of the non-commercial Christian stations, and there are five hundred and fifty of those. They're supported much like Public Radio. I started doing work in that arena and instantly got well known and instantly started getting a large portion of the biz. So, basically, right now, about fifty percent of the work 30:60 Productions is doing is with Christian radio stations, and fifty percent is work with retail ad agency type clients. It's a weird mix.
I could try to go out and compete for spot production, promos, sweeper and ID production at stations in Dallas and LA, but there's a million guys doing that. So I decided to try to work with a market that I thought was under-served and, frankly, that needed a lot of help. And it's a good feeling to be able to produce stuff that actually makes a difference for these guys; it actually helps them. You know, when you're banging out liners and sweepers everyday, it's easy to take it for granted. But there are Christian radio stations where you have to explain to them what those things are and how they're used. So, it's more than money. You're actually meeting a need.
R.A.P.: Tell us about the studio you built with the loan.
Scott: One of the things that has helped us to be more efficient is that we've gone all digital here. But, what I got back then with the loan is not what I've got now. The first studio had an Otari 8-track and a Tascam board. We had the Alesis QuadraVerb, Alesis 3060 compressor, and EV RE20 mics. And we had a lot of MIDI gear. We had a computer dedicated to running CakeWalk. We had a Roland FP8 digital piano, a Roland SCC1 synthesizer, and an Alesis SR16 drum module. Then we got a Roland GR1 guitar synth, and we spent a ton of money on libraries.
That was in Idaho. Then, when we came here, we went all digital. Now we're using a DigiDesign Session 8. We still have all of the MIDI equipment, and we've added a Digitech TSR-24 effects box. It's a great unit. And now we've got a Symetrix 528E digital voice processor. We have two computers, now. One's dedicated strictly to the music and Session 8, and one to administrative.
R.A.P.: What type of computer are you using for the Session 8?
Scott: We're running a Pentium 90.
R.A.P.: 90 megahertz! I'll bet that takes a big fan to keep it cool!
Scott: Yeah. We've got an iso-booth now. We had to because of the fan noise. There are two fans actually. There's one right on the Pentium chip inside, then there's the standard blow-through fan on the power supply. Almost all of the Pentiums have a separate fan because they run so fast. But in terms of the computer side of the business, if you're going to run something like a Session 8, there are so many things that make a greater difference than the processor. There are things like RAM and the ability to have good graphics which is based on having really fast on-board graphics cards with separate memory. Our on-board video graphics cards have 16 megs of RAM with accelerators. There's no waiting for a wave form to be drawn. It's instant and that makes a difference.
R.A.P.: And most of that is done in the video card?
Scott: Right. And that's one thing a lot of people don't know. They don't get that. And when you hear people complain about the speed of workstations, what they're really complaining about is the speed of their video card. By all means, when people are buying workstations, I encourage them to spend the money big time on accelerators for video.
And the other thing to spend the money on is the right kind of hard drive. This is a crucial mistake that nine out of ten people who call me make. They see my name in the RAP WorkStation Network, and they call me after they've bought their hard drive. They're trying to save money by going down to the local computer store. They see a 1-gig drive for $599 and they buy it. The problem is, this is not an A/V drive. The way that hard disks seek and write data is different between an A/V drive and a standard drive. With an A/V drive, the caching system is different. Without getting too technical, the hard disk is a round platter and the hard disk head sits on an arm over the platter and reads data. It gets data from the disk and then it waits for the disk to spin around again before it gets the next bit of data. It will store certain amounts of data in RAM while it's collecting all this information. But if this is done on a Session 8, for example, what happens is you start to backlog the sound, and the sound starts getting stored in RAM instead of getting played. There are special hard drives designed for workstations called A/V drives where everything is instantaneous and the seek time is much faster. The seek time is the time it takes the head to seek out the data on the platter. This time is much faster and the data transfer rate, sometimes known as the throughput, is also much faster on an A/V drive. So, you can have continuous sound, and it doesn't get choppy.
Anyway, guys will spend four, five, or six hundred dollars on these hard disk drives that are meant for computer data. They'll try to load them up on a workstation, and they'll start to get this kind of weird sound. It's like a slow CD ROM where the audio starts to sound like it's being scissored or clipped. Well, go to some computer super store and look at a 386 or a small 486. Look at a standard 1X or 2X CD ROM and have it play some audio. You'll hear what I'm talking about. And the other thing is that these drives they're buying for four, five, or six hundred dollars are not commercial quality drives. They just don't have the MTBF, mean time between failure, that they need to be successful.
We stepped up and bought Micropolis A/V drives. These drives are a thousand dollars apiece minimum for one gig, but these drives have a very high data transfer rate and a very fast seek time. The seek time is like six milliseconds. On these other drives, it's somewhere around twelve. And, believe me, that makes a difference. Buy an A/V drive. Every drive that is A/V is so designated in the model number. And Micropolis is my favorite manufacturer, but there are others out there. And scuzzy drives are inherently faster than IDE drives. These guys are buying IDE drives, and that automatically makes them slower.
R.A.P.: Are scuzzy drives typically external?
Scott: With Macs, they're not, but with IBMs, they tend to be external. That's why they are a little more expensive because you've got a power supply inside the drive as opposed to relying on the computer's power supply. And this brings about the other problem with IDE drives. These guys I'm talking about are buying all these 1-gig drives and stacking them up in their systems. And they've got two hundred watt power supplies that are starting to get drained. By the time you add one of these accelerator cards with 16 megs of RAM, and by the time you add a couple of these internal 1-gig drives, guess what? Now you need a new power supply.
Every card you add requires power, and these little two hundred watt power supplies aren't designed to handle this. So these guys start to build a series of upgrade problems for themselves trying to save five hundred bucks, and it's like jumping over a dollar to save a dime. So I strongly recommend people get an A/V drive. And they are coming down in price. When we bought ours, they were fifteen hundred. Now they're a thousand. It's definitely worth the money. They can't come down too much more because of the mechanical process involved, so it's worth getting them right now because they make a difference. Also, there are some 9-gig drives available in the scuzzy format, which is really nice. You can buy nine gigs now for about fifty-six hundred bucks. And there's nothing like nine gigs when you're working with audio because, of course, everybody who has had any experience knows that they're real storage hogs. Basically, you're looking at ten megabytes per stereo minute. Actually, it's ten point five if we're going to be totally accurate. So you want to have lots and lots of storage space.
Anyway, we've got the Session 8 now. Everybody told us we were crazy, but one of the biggest steps we took was to do away with our mixer. We're just using the Session 8's internal digital mixer, and it's working great.
R.A.P.: Are you a musician?
Scott: Yes. I write, perform, and produce almost all the music. I occasionally have a little bit of help--some subcontract guys who come in and help me with the real advanced stuff that requires a lick better than I can play it. You know, MIDI's a marvelous thing. You can slow stuff way down, then you speed it up, and all of a sudden you sound great. My mom was a music teacher, so I've been playing instruments ever since I was a little kid in grade school.
R.A.P.: Tell us more about your ad agency, Visionary Advertising. In the beginning, was Visionary doing any production?
Scott: Well, actually, in the early years before there was 30:60, it contracted it out, but we did a lot of the copywriting. Primarily what I did was go sell people on using radio. Then I went and wrote the ideas. I did the whole thing through RAB. I'm a CRMC, a Certified Radio Marketing Consultant. I did the whole trip, and I've probably written two or three thousand commercials. That's the most fun part for me, you know, the creative side.
R.A.P.: During this time, did you utilize production houses in Boise or did you go to the radio stations?
Scott: Radio stations.
R.A.P.: So you were one of those agency guys that would come in and sit there with the Production Director during the session.
Scott: Right. I'd write the copy.
R.A.P.: Did they love you?
Scott: Well, you know, I think some of them loved me because I was getting them some schedules they never saw before, but they didn't love me for the fact that I wouldn't accept the standard quality. But, the one thing I had going for me was that I was probably the biggest radio agency in town. The people knew I loved radio and they knew I was converting accounts. When I got the Cellular One account, I took sixty percent away from newspapers. The newspaper people were not happy with me.
R.A.P.: So, 30:60 Production came about when you saw an opportunity to create additional income by creating your own production house.
Scott: Right. Then we were able to bill the client not only our fifteen percent markup on placement, but we started charging three hundred dollars a commercial.
R.A.P.: In Boise?
Scott: Does that sound like a lot to you?
R.A.P.: Well, do you know what the talent at the radio stations would charge?
Scott: Zero. Boise is one of those terrible markets where those guys who work their butts off to try to do their best get paid nothing extra.
R.A.P.: Amazing. It's like the word "agency"...
Scott: ...gives you the right. And, you know, frankly, that's the whole reason I didn't work at a radio station. I was smart enough to see that if you called yourself an agency, people would pay you. I have incredible empathy for Production Directors and production assistants at radio stations across the country. Typically, they're working with poor equipment. Typically, they get no respect. Typically, they're low man on the pay totem pole. My wife and I would talk about my career in the early days, and I'd say, "Well, the good news is, I've got a career I love, and the bad news is, it doesn't pay anything."
One of the things she and I really learned is that marketing is everything. And amongst the guys who want to break out of radio stations or the guys who have and have started their own little side business, there's one little thing many of them forget. You can't just say, "Okay, now I'm a production house." You've got to go sell. By being an agency, we were able to get three hundred a spot. Now it's a lot better, of course. We're in Minneapolis and it's nine hundred a spot.
R.A.P.: And that would include voice talent and production time?
Scott: House voice talent, the copy, the studio time, and in some cases I'll even throw in some original music for that. And if they want a jingle, well, we're kind of spendy on jingles. The bare minimum for one cut is twelve fifty. That's just one mix-out. We go to like thirty-five hundred if they want twelve or fourteen remixes with doughnuts and such.
I've got two people available to sing my jingles who are particularly talented, and they need to get paid. Michael and Kerri Hodge. They used to be backup singers with Stevie Wonder. They happen now to be a Christian act. They're called Two Hearts, and they're played on almost every Christian radio station in America. They're husband and wife, and they live in Nashville.
But, jingles aren't a big part of what we do. Music itself is more of a part than jingles themselves. One of the ways I sell 30:60 Productions is to go to a client and say, "Look, if we're going to use a production library here, there's no way I can guarantee you that the bed we use will not be used by every other guy in town, maybe even your competitor. If you want some exclusivity here, one of the things I can do for you is I can create a bed that flows around the spot, and if there's a place where we need a hit or where we need to accentuate it, we can write it in as opposed to writing the copy around the bed. We can write the bed around the copy." That's one of the selling points we have; we can throw some original music down. Also, it's just cheaper than buying into these libraries.
And because of our ability to do sound effects from samplers, the drum machine, and the various synths we have, it gets real easy to create a bed real quick. For example, the telephone company down here in this part of Minneapolis is called Vista Telephone. One of the big ad agencies hired me to do a long form thing for them--kind of an audio brochure they wanted to send out. They couldn't find a music bed they liked, so I just kicked up the synthesizer, and as we were listening to the voice track, I just started fooling around with some sounds. The agency guy says, "That's great! What's that?" I said, "I'm just making it up as I go." They wanted it, paid me extra, and we used it. And that particular agency has now decided to use me exclusively.
R.A.P.: What libraries are you using?
Scott: For sound effects, we use the Hollywood Edge and some others. Actually, one of the libraries I use the most isn't necessarily the sharpest. It's this cheap little CBS library. It's available through Mix Magazine for like twenty-nine bucks. It's four CDs of the CBS Television sound effects archives, and it's really good. It's incredible. I use that thing all the time. The Omni Effects is my favorite sound effects library. I think it's by far the best. We use a lot of their effects. For music, we're using FirstCom and Network, but I'm kind of at a point where I want to rebel against that. It's getting kind of spendy. We're going away from the music libraries and starting to write our own.
R.A.P.: To what do you most attribute your success with 30:60?
Scott: Salesmanship. A lot of guys who are really talented musicians or talented copywriters or talented producers are not necessarily talented salesmen. So I made it my business to learn everything I could about selling.
And then there's this huge ad agency here in town that started using me because my wife met them at a conference in St. Louis, Missouri. This conference had nothing to do with radio and production. She happened to meet these people, and I don't know how the conversation ended up the way it went, but they needed a radio production house. It turns out they are exactly three miles away from my studio...and she met them in St. Louis!
Another thing we did along the lines of this salesmanship stuff is we started our own networking group. We knew networking groups were powerful, and we couldn't find one. So we started one. We just sent mailers to businesses all over town and went and rented a place for lunch. Every month we gathered this business building networking group. We invited small businesses to come to it. We had thirty or forty small businesses show up every month to have lunch, and we'd have a guest speaker. I was always real visible there because I was one of the ones who helped set it up, and I was typically the emcee. So, when it came down to anybody needing advertising, they always came to me, and I always sold them on the idea of radio and, "by the way, if you're going to buy a radio schedule, you need to step up and also pay for some production and make it stand out."
R.A.P.: For you, I get the feeling it's not all salesmanship. You obviously have some talent outside of your marketing skills. You're a talented musician, and your copywriting skills must be well above average, too.
Scott: I guess I'm more reticent to toot my own horn about my individual skills. It's easier to say I'm a good salesman and marketing guy, but obviously we do write some good copy. It helps that my wife is a writer. She has a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, and she started out as a newspaper reporter. She's written for Gannet and USA Today a lot for the past ten years, and now she's a features writer for an agricultural magazine. Land O' Lakes, the butter people...they send this magazine to hundreds of thousands of farmers, and she writes for it. But she's involved in all kinds of writing, and she helps me with copy. She edits everything I write, and we bounce ideas off each other.
And I've got other creative guys that I work with, like Scott Combs. He and I co-write some stuff; we've worked on a few jobs. What's really interesting is that some of the ad agencies who typically would hire me as a button pusher, are now starting to involve me in the copywriting process as well, which is really fun.
R.A.P.: Do you have a marketing degree?
Scott: No. I went to Columbia School of Broadcasting, and all I have in the terms of marketing is the CRMC, the Certified Radio Marketing Consultancy, which is given by the Radio Advertising Bureau in New York. And I have street experience. When I went to Columbia School of Broadcasting, it was basically to be able to pass the third class license back when you had to get the endorsement, back in the old days.
R.A.P.: What's in the immediate future for 30:60 Productions?
Scott: We're now expanding into multi-media. We're doing sound for multi-media. We're releasing a share-ware product that is basically music. We've got our own little production library we're putting together with stingers, lasers, drones, some things for multi-media, and some drum beds and stuff. We've digitized all this, and we're releasing it as wave files that any Windows computer can access by double clicking on it and playing it through your sound card.
We're trying to take advantage of all the technology. We've got an Internet address. We're actually delivering some of our production over the Internet. We're just going crazy. It's really fun. Our Internet address is
R.A.P.: Unbelievable! You've certainly taken your business a long way from the early days in Boise, and it sounds like you have a great future ahead.
Scott: We're supporting ourselves. I think you're the luckiest man on the planet when you can do the work you love and actually make a living at it. I just wish that radio production in this country would be more like it is in England where they assign producers to salesmen, and the whole thing gets treated with a little more respect. There are only four or five radio stations in England. And it's government controlled, so it's a whole lot different. Basically, there are two copywriters for every AE. When a guy goes out and sells a radio account, they make production and creative the forefront because they recognize that is what it takes to make the spot work. And if you don't make the spot work, you don't get to sell another schedule.
This is where the future lies for those of us in radio production, whether it's in radio stations or ad agencies or production houses--it doesn't matter. We need to take the time to educate the time buyers that they need to learn more than OES (optimum effective scheduling). They need to learn what works in terms of the spots. All salespeople are selling OES, and they act like that's all they've got to do. "If I can get the guy to do an OES schedule, we'll be successful." Well, wrong. It's got to be an OES schedule featuring a creative radio spot, and where I think radio production guys can start to get respect and start to get a better paycheck is by educating everybody at the station and the clients and everybody in the process as to just how important it is to have a good commercial. When good commercials start to work for people, and that starts to get brought to the forefront...like I say, the proof's in the pudding. We did a Wallpaper World spot recently. When you've got a hundred and fifty people at a grand opening in a snow storm, especially a Minneapolis snow storm, you know it worked, and that's why people buy radio, to put butts in seats, to get people knocking on doors.
I listened to some of the spots on the Radio And Production Cassette this month [March 1995], the finalists for the RAP Awards. There's some really creative, quality stuff there. We need to showcase that talent to the rest of the industry at large and even to the general public and get people to see it. Look at cable TV. Even they are going on a public relations campaign lately. There's something like five hundred and sixty-two independent cable TV providers, and they got together and agreed on a public relations campaign where they would run spots across the country saying, "If we don't get to your house in time for installation, it's free! And if we don't do it right, it's twenty dollars off!" and all this stuff to try and improve their image. We ought to work collectively to improve the image of radio producers because, really, instead of being the low man on the totem pole, in my opinion, we ought to be the high man. When we do the good creative, when we get the people listening, it doesn't matter if you've got Howard Stern for the morning. Somebody's got to pay Howard's salary.
R.A.P.: You won't have any trouble getting most creative types to agree with you. It seems the difficulty is with that huge group of radio owners and managers who don't seem to see things the way they do in England.
Scott: Well, once again, it's a perception problem. We have to almost start marketing and selling to our managers.
R.A.P.: How would you do that?
Scott: I would do it just like I do to anybody else. I would start writing press releases to my manager. Instead of calling it a press release, I'd call it a memo, an interdepartmental memo. I'd occasionally just start to point out things like, "By the way, this particular client this month had great success with this spot, and the reason we think it worked is that we got a little extra time to work on it." Or, "We asked for this piece of equipment last month. You bought it for us, and now we're able to do things we couldn't before. We thought we'd let you hear a sample of it." I'd start to produce demo tapes every other month and send them to the manager and say, "Just thought you'd like to hear some of the great creative coming out of your radio station." Start selling yourself to your managers. Do the things I do to my ad agency clients, to your managers. I have to send out media kits. I have to send out demos. I have to send out press releases.
It's like the Nike thing, just do it. It can start to happen. Let's start asking for title changes. Let's start it with us. Instead of allowing ourselves to be called Production Directors, let's ask the boss if we can have our business cards printed next time with Creative Services Director. That's one step towards changing our image. This is all a perception problem here. We quit calling salespeople salespeople, and we started calling them marketing consultants. We quit calling trash men trash men, and started calling them refuse engineers or something like that. So, let's start calling ourselves Creative Services Directors or pick some other title that starts to bespeak of the value of your position.
And when we have an AE come in and go, "Hey, Joe, you know the spot you spent the extra time on for me Friday night. I want you to know my client loved it and it really worked." When that happens, let's apply some marketing and salesmanship to the situation and say, "Well, Dave, would you mind putting that on a letter for me just so I can have it for my file?" Or, "Dave, would you mind coming in here and just saying that on the mic for me so I can record it onto my next demo?" Let's start getting that kind of data and getting it back to our managers. These are the things I do. When my clients rave about a spot, I say, "Hey, step over here in front of the mic and say what you just said again," and I entwine it in my demo. It's just salesmanship and marketing.
And I'm going to tell you right now, there are better radio producers than Scott Bourne on this planet, probably a whole bunch of them. I think one of the reasons I get the biz, though, is that I've got the guts to go out and ask for it, number one, and number two, I'm smart enough to know how to sell it. I admit, I have some ability, but it's just like rock and roll bands. Some of the best rock and roll bands are heard in garages.
R.A.P.: Any parting advice for readers looking to further their careers in radio production?
Scott: Stick with it. Try to start selling the virtues of what you do to the people who pay you and go for as much computer knowledge as you can. It's going to be even more critical in the future. Learn the Internet. Learn how to deal with digital workstations. I don't think that you're even going to be able to buy an analog 8-track in a year or two. Learn as much as you can. Try to improve yourself. Don't get discouraged, and if you want proof that there is life after radio, that it can be done, call me and I'll give you a pep talk.