RADIO INTERVIEW 101 How To Use Trade Publications

Radio and media, like every business, have their own set of newspapers, magazines, and sites that are dedicated to their particular business concerns; they are referred to as "trades". Your goal is to understand how these trades can be used to help you get more interviews, and, to decide if you really need to use trades in the first place.

For radio, the trades are divided into three types, each of which are for different people at the stations. Tech and engineering trades such as Radio World target the engineering folks, and except for very small stations where these guys are also the station owners, these trades are not going to be able to help you at all.

Next are the trades which target the management; at small stations these may be the same as the PD or morning host, but otherwise these trades may not reach those you are after. These trades include Radio Ink, Small Market Radio Newsletter, Ad Week, Advertising Age, Inside Radio, and Radio Business Report.

Lastly are the trades targeting the programming or talent, including producers, which are your main source of interviews. These trades are your most likely place to start, and include Radio & Records, Talkers, Mouth, RTIR, All Access, and for non-commercial stations, CMJ, Chart, and The Current.

"Trade Support" is how you work with the trades. "Trade support" means buying ads in the trades for the purpose of building your name awareness, so that the producers and hosts will be more likely to book you. The first thing I need to point out, however, is that is that you should not expect to get calls from your ads. If you do get some calls, that's great, but the actual booking is going to require you calling the stations.

The idea of trade support is really two fold: First, your ad will carry important info about your current interview availability. Second, since your ad is appearing in something which is read by many radio people, these people will feel more at ease in considering your interview, since they know that their counterparts at other stations will be seeing the same thing. (This does not happen if you just mail your info directly to the stations, since they do not know who else is getting it.) But you still must call the stations to actually book the interviews.

As for the type of ad to place, we'd recommend taking your ad budget and dividing it up so that you have some presence in each issue of the trade for about six months. Keep in mind that basic awareness will not begin for a few months. Thus, a nice small ad, maybe something as simple as just your name and topic (no picture needed), should be sufficient as long as you keep it in every issue.

Bigger ads (say, 1/4 page) would have room for pictures of you. And even bigger ads (1/2 page) would also have room for some station quotes from previous interviews. And as you start nearing full-page size, you can start inserting details about you,

You'll also want to include a link to the radio-only portion of your marketing info on your site. If you are buying a printed ad, then just include the URL of your radio info (which is probably a separate page from your consumer info.) If your ad is on a site, then just link to your radio info page.

Trade support is great for building awareness in the radio community, as long as you follow up with phone calls for the actually bookings. Just don't expect the trades to start ringing your phone all by themselves.

Next topic: Getting Your Own Show, part 1