Photo Credit: 107.7 The End

While some terrestrial radio (AM/FM) proponents are busy criticizing Pandora, one programming team in Seattle is proactively keeping radio relevant with the “2 Minute Promise.” KNDD, “107.7 The End,” an Alt Rock station in the Entercom family of stations, has changed up its program strategy to improve the listening experience of their audience and to increase the value of commercials to advertisers.

We heard you, and we’re going to do something about it. Starting now, we will take half of our commercials off the air, and we’ll never play more than 2 minutes of commercials at a time. We call it the 2 Minute Promise – we promise to get you back to the music faster and play more music every hour.

For the customer, this strategy gives terrestrial radio one of the top benefits of its streaming competitors: less interruption of content. Combining this strategy with “Live and Local” programming, where on-air personalities are are NOT syndicated or homogenized, but active in the local communities and engaged on social media, is the key to terrestrial radio maintaining listenership as audiences are met with more and more audio options. The difficulty is that quality content and programming is not cheap. If this catches on, as finance writer Rocco Pendola thinks it will, the cost of radio advertising will go up.

Once Clear Channel and Cumulus Media follow suit…[it] will immediately raise the value of advertising on radio. Radio stations will be able to charge more, focusing on premium clients. Because, instead of seeing the advertisement you pay for get buried in a sea of commercials, you receive featured treatment.

It is the dearest hope of the media buyer in me to see radio transform itself into an even more viable medium, eliminating the long, scan-inducing commercial breaks to win back the dedicated, albeit impatient listener. But the changes must be executed carefully, from the locally owned and managed radio stations all the way up to the CBS’s and Clear Channels of the world, to keep radio affordable for local advertisers. Because local is the lifeblood of radio.