When Haley Jones left the MD post at KSWD/Los Angeles to head south to San Diego’s Triple A KPRI, she was taking over a station that, while highly respected in the Triple A community, had battled signal issues and a highly competitive market to perennially score around a 1.0 share in Arbitron books. Since then, Jones has applied the skills she learned over years in programming at outlets like KFOG/San Francisco and KMTT/Seattle, along with her passion for both music and radio, to lift KPRI to a 4.0 in the last PPM numbers, with the station trending the same for the following month. With PPM making it even tougher for stations focused on new music to score big ratings, how did she do it? Read on and find out.
When you got to KPRI it was a station with a perennial 1.0 share. Now there was a big 4.0 share in that last book. What was your strategy in driving these numbers?
Where do I start? Honestly, it’s some luck. We have great music, it’s a great time for Triple A and I’m fortunate enough to have owners that believe enough in the brand to market the station. I don’t mean that we’re spending a million dollars in marketing, but we have a great little TV commercial and we’re buying weeks here and there; it’s really moving the needle. I also have a staff full of phenomenal pros that are ridiculously focused right now, and they’re working on every little teeny, tiny detail. When we listen around the market and we listen around the world, one of the things we’re finding is everyone is so busy, that they don’t sound engaged on the air. So we work really hard to sound engaged. What a concept, right? I don’t think we nail it 100 percent of the time, but we’re trying and we’re doing better than we did a year ago. I have a great MD now (Bryan Schock) and I have a consultant by the name of Tim Moore. He’s a phenomenal talent coach. It’s a lot of things coming together. It’s three years of blood, sweat and tears, not just from me but from the entire staff.
