Spanish Broadcasting System has reasons to cheer
Wednesday was a champagne day at Spanish Broadcasting System Inc., its local programming executive said, as the company was perhaps the biggest winner when the spring Arbitron ratings were released.
Not only did its Mexican regional music station, KLAX-FM (97.9), shoot up from 11th to sixth place, tying rival and longtime ratings leader KSCA-FM (101.9), but the company also saw big gains at the tropical music station, KZAB-FM (93.5), it launched in March, where the previous format didn’t even register in the ratings.
The numbers charted listeners 12 and older from March 27 to June 18 and showed KLAX increasing its overall share of the L.A. radio audience from 2.8% in the winter to 3.5%, while KSCA dropped from 3.7%.
“L.A. is just a wildly competitive marketplace in Spanish right now,” said Bill Tanner, executive vice president for programming at Spanish Broadcasting System. “It’s taken quite a while to put this together. You have to do the research and talk to the people and get the feel of the station correct.”
KLAX had been the market’s No. 1 station for almost three years, until spring 1995, and morning man Juan Carlos Hidalgo had been co-host of L.A.’s top a.m. drive-time show. Then the numbers started slipping. In 1998, Hidalgo moved to afternoons, and KSCA began a long run as the leading Spanish-language station in L.A., often placing No. 1 overall. In addition, its morning host, “El Cucuy,” Renan Almendarez Coello, began a six-year run in which he dominated his Spanish- and English-speaking competitors in the ratings.
Tanner had been programming vice president at KSCA’s parent, Hispanic Broadcasting Corp., until he and others moved to the South Florida-based Spanish Broadcasting chain in 2000. “It’s taken quite a lot to compete with the stations we did originally,” Tanner said. “A lot also had to do, to be honest with you, that Renan moved from the mornings to the afternoons.”
In February, Coello decided to give up the rigors of a morning show and moved to afternoon drive-time, a change that industry analysts expected would benefit KLAX. The latter retooled its morning show, creating a new team around Hidalgo -- who returned to mornings in 2001 -- and injected more comedy into the program, Tanner said. One running gag involves crank calls to unsuspecting listeners using audio clips from Mexican President Vicente Fox.
Eleazar Garcia, KSCA program director and operations manager for its parent, Hispanic Broadcasting, credited KLAX’s success to the changes in its morning show but said he’s confident that KSCA would be able to keep its rival at bay.
Coello’s replacement in the morning, Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo, from KLOK-AM in San Jose, has not been able to maintain his predecessor’s ratings. But Garcia said his audience has increased steadily. “He’s growing according to our expectations,” he said. “We have no doubt he’ll be No. 1 in the market.”
While KSCA’s morning show slipped from second to a fourth-place tie in the latest ratings, dropping from 5% of the audience to a 4.1% share, KLAX increased from 12th to seventh, rising from 2.7% to a 3.6% share of the audience. And that success in the morning boosted the entire station, following the conventional wisdom that since morning drive has more listeners than any other part of the day, a successful morning show can boost the fortunes for a station’s full day of programming.
Tanner was no less exuberant about a smaller project, KZAB. Called “La Sabrosa,” it plays a mix of tropical dance music, including cumbia, punta and soca, and is aimed at Central and South American expatriates, whom he said didn’t have a local station catering to their tastes. In its previous incarnation, as the Foursquare Gospel Church’s outlet, the station didn’t even garner enough listeners to register in the Arbitron ratings.
In the winter, which included only three weeks of “Sabrosa” broadcasts, the station finished with a .5% share of the audience, a figure that boosted the station to a modest tie for 40th.
In the spring, however, with a full ratings period to its credit, KZAB exceeded Tanner’s prediction and more than tripled its previous number, finishing with 1.7% of the audience 12 and older, for 24th place.
“You can tell almost from the first moment of the phone reactions” that a station will resonate with its audience, Tanner said. “Almost invariably that translates to ratings if that continues. People are happy to have a station that reflects their culture.”
*
Stimulating the ratings
The conflict in Iraq was only a week old when the spring ratings period began, and when the survey ended three months later, with the fighting and its aftermath still dominating the airwaves, talk station KFI-AM (640) had jumped from a fourth-place tie to third overall.
“Obviously the war had a lot to do with it,” KFI program director Robin Bertolucci said, as her station jumped from a 3.7% share of the winter audience to 4.3% in the spring.
Its rival news-talk station, KABC-AM (790), also jumped, rising from 15th to 11th place by increasing its audience share from 2.5% to 2.9%.
But the area’s all-news stations, KFWB-AM (980) and KNX-AM (1070), remained flat or even declined during the span. Bertolucci said she thought it was interesting that in a ratings period dominated by news events, “the biggest winner was a talk station.”
“People wanted the information, and they also wanted to talk about the information and some context on what it all meant,” she said. “Apparently people liked what they heard and stuck around.”
Along with the strong showing by KFI overall, its morning host, Bill Handel, also took over the top spot in a.m. drive, according to the latest numbers. Bertolucci said she would continue tweaking the station’s lineup, especially on the weekends, to maintain and build the fan base it has gained.
According to Arbitron, KFI has a weekly audience of about 1 million out of the 10 million listeners in the Los Angeles market.
“The way we look at it, we have 9 million more people we can get,” she joked. She added that the station’s true goal is to get those already listening to the station to listen even longer and to persuade their friends to tune in.
“We try to be the kind of radio station people don’t turn off,” she said.
The spring ratings were oddly reminiscent of the numbers from summer 1994. Hip-hop station KPWR-FM (105.9) was No. 1 then (tying with KLAX), and the O.J. Simpson trial helped push KFI to third place while doing nothing for the news stations’ ratings.
