No Chicago radio stations have captured the hearts and ears of Baby Boomer listeners, and the eye of local media, like WLUP-FM 97.9 and sister station WMVP-AM 1000, formerly WLUP-AM.
From the antics of such high-profile talents as Jonathon Brandmeier, Steve Dahl, Garry Meier and Kevin Matthews to in-your-face advertising campaigns and even their own North Pier store selling “Loop”-related T-shirts, hats, watches, CDs and videos, the stations have created a hip cachet that appeals to listeners between 25 and 54-the age group most valued by advertisers.
But in just over a year, a flurry of format and personnel changes have prompted both die-hard listeners and competitors to wonder just what’s going on at the stations’ headquarters on the 37th floor of the John Hancock Center. For example:
– There’s the transformation of comedy-talk WLUP-AM (which had experienced a yearlong ratings decline) to all-sports WMVP-AM, and the mass shifting of “Loop AM” personalities to WLUP-FM, which then dropped its 15-year album rock format.
– Then there’s the purchase of a third station, album rock WWBZ-FM 103.5, still subject to government approval; the acrimonious, front-page-making breakup of Dahl and Meier after 14 1/2 years together, resulting in new solo shows for each; the switching of Brandmeier to afternoons after 10 years of mornings, and the suspension of his simulcasts on the AM and FM; Matthews’ move to mornings from middays; the short-lived addition of controversial syndicated personality Howard Stern on WLUP-AM; and the return of a whiz-kid programmer, Greg Solk.
Finally, there’s the parent company, Texas-based Evergreen Media Corp. which, in addition to WWBZ, has also purchased or announced plans to buy stations in Houston; Jacksonville, Fla.; and San Francisco, to the tune of $133.6 million, financed in part by two public stock offerings.
To echo singer Marvin Gaye, “What’s going on?”
In a word, confusion.
“How can WLUP listeners not be confused?” said Seth Mason, executive vice president of Chicago-based Diamond Broadcasting, an Evergreen competitor that owns WXRT-FM and WSCR-AM. “It seems like an awful lot of changes over a very short period of time. I think there’s only so much you can play around with people and expect them to still listen.”
“Part of life is change,” said WLUP-FM/WMVP-AM general manager Larry Wert, who along with Evergreen Media chief operating officer (and former WLUP-AM/FM general manager) Jim deCastro masterminded most of the changes. “We’ve had a fair amount of change here that was predictable. But there’s also been a fair amount that was not predictable.”
So far the jury is out on all the changes, according to Paula Hambrick, a Chicago advertising time buyer who has closely followed all the recent moves at WLUP-FM and WMVP-AM.
“A lot of clients are taking a wait-and-see attitude toward them, since we won’t see any solid numbers on the changes until the fall quarter ratings come out in January,” she said. “At this point advertisers are looking at the track records of the various personalities and at how the shows sound on the air to decide what to do in the short term.”
According to Wert and deCastro, the changes were all part of a strategy to separate WLUP-FM and WMVP-AM.
“We wanted to put all of our talk personalities under one roof-either on the AM or the FM,” said Wert, 37. “What we decided was to rebuild AM 1000 as an all-sports station. As well as we did with personality radio for Baby Boomers on WLUP-AM, we think the format can be even more effective on the FM band.”
WLUP-FM has a talent roster competitors lust for. Morning man Kevin Matthews is a versatile and talented comic and he stands ready to enlarge the loyal audience of “Kev-Heads” he has made during six years on middays on WLUP-AM. While new midday man Garry Meier may never have the audience he enjoyed during his partnership with a now woefully lonesome-sounding Dahl, he stands a good chance to prove wrong those who said he’d fall on his face as a solo act.
While Jonathon Brandmeier’s afternoon-drive audience may not be quite as large as his morning audience when he was simulcast on WLUP-AM and WLUP-FM, Brandmeier was the No. 2 afternoon personality with his target audience of men aged 25 to 54 in the summer ratings quarter and No. 4 with men and women in that age group. Rounding out the lineup in evenings are former “Partridge Family” TV star Danny Bonaduce and one-time WGN-AM late-night stalwart Eddie Schwartz.
The addition of Schwartz in May 1992 still puzzles many industry observers. During his long tenure as WGN-AM’s late-night voice, Schwartz was lampooned continually by Loop personalities, particularly Matthews.
While Loop management denies it, many saw the wooing of Schwartz for more than $200,000 a year as a chance for the Loop to thumb its collective nose at WGN. While Wert says he’s pleased with Schwartz’s ratings performance, Schwartz has one-fifth the audience he once had at WGN.
The `Blaze’ for music
The acquisition of hard-rock WWBZ-FM-the “Blaze”-should receive FCC approval around the end of the year, though Evergreen has been managing the station under a local marketing agreement since July. Made possible by new FCC “duopoly” rules that allow an owner to hold up to two AM and two FM stations in a market, the addition of WWBZ-FM replaces WLUP-FM as the company’s Chicago music outlet.
With all the publicity the stations have received in the last few years, some wonder why neither WLUP-FM nor WMVP-AM ranks among the city’s top stations among listeners age 12 and up. In Arbitron Co.’s summer ratings, WLUP-FM ranked No. 11 and the old WLUP-AM was tied for No. 17. The Top 5 stations were, in order, WGCI-FM, WGN-AM, WBBM-FM, WUSN-FM and WBBM-AM.
According to Evergreen’s deCastro, advertisers are more interested in a station’s ratings with its target audience than with the “age 12-plus” numbers that tend to generate media publicity when it comes to who’s up or down.
“Compared to the urban audience of WGCI-FM or the older audience of WGN and all the people who have grown up listening to it (WGN), we’re not going to reach that level with all listeners,” he said. “I think with WLUP-FM we can now seriously make a play for the Top 5. But will we be No. 1 with listeners of all ages? I don’t think so.”
The Stern factor
The Howard Stern fiasco is also indicative of some of the overall confusion. After a long period of negotiation, Stern’s syndicated, New York-based show made its debut on WLUP-AM in October 1992, where he used his first morning on the air in Chicago to blast Dahl and Meier, on opposite him on WLUP-FM, and Loop management.
Stern made barely a ripple in the ratings in his 10 months on WLUP-AM, ranking a dismal No. 19 in morning drive with listeners age 12 and up in the summer ratings quarter, good for a 1.9 share. A year earlier, Brandmeier, who had long been simulcast on WLUP-AM and WLUP-FM, had a 3.5 share on the AM station alone.
In August, Loop management pulled the plug on Stern. Stern and his syndicators immediately filed a $35 million breach-of-contract suit against Evergreen Media, charging that WLUP had violated Stern’s three-year contract. Stern is asking for an additional $10 million in punitive damages, claiming that his reputation had been damaged with future affiliates. While the U.S. District Court in New York recently dismissed the suit on a technicality, Stern’s syndicator has refiled the suit in New York’s state court.
Ironically, Wert says it wasn’t Stern’s ratings that did him in, citing signs of growth among young male listeners (he was tied for No. 7 among men 25 to 54). Instead, Wert says the threat of being fined by the FCC for “indecent” broadcasts by Stern was too great a risk. Between the time Stern came and went in Chicago, stations that broadcast his show were fined more than $1.3 million by the FCC for indecency violations.
Some competitors call that excuse a smoke screen, as Evergreen has been fined several times in the past by the FCC for allegedly indecent broadcasts by Dahl, Meier and Matthews. In fact, Evergreen’s refusal to pay a $6,000 fine assessed against Dahl and Meier in 1989 and its decision to challenge the commission’s guidelines on indecency will find the company locking horns with the FCC in a federal court in Chicago next year.
A ratings risk
On the programming front, Evergreen is taking another risk with the dismantling of the old comedy-talk WLUP-AM, which in October became all-sports WMVP-AM. With the exception of Dahl, who holds down WMVP-AM’s morning-drive show, all the former WLUP-AM comedy-talk personalities-Brandmeier, Matthews, Meier, Bonaduce and Schwartz-are now on WLUP-FM.
It’s a risky move for a couple of reasons. While it had been in a ratings slump during the last 12 months, WLUP-AM with such comedy-talk stars as Dahl and Meier, Matthews and Brandmeier had proved that AM radio could attract listeners aged 25 to 54 who had largely fled to the FM band. Indeed, until recently WLUP-AM consistently ranked near the top in the advertiser-valued 25 to 54 audience demographic.
According to Duncan’s American Radio, which tracks radio station revenue, WLUP-AM and WLUP-FM billed a combined $27.2 million in 1992 (advertising is sold on both stations together)-second only to WGN-AM in Chicago, which led Chicago and the nation with billings of $40.4 million. That’s in spite of increased competition that has found the AM and FM stations’ combined average yearly audience share steadily declining since 1989.
Now as WMVP-AM, the station enters into a crowded all-sports format that didn’t even exist in Chicago until WSCR-AM emerged in January 1992, with a sunrise-to-sunset lineup of sports talk (it’s seeking a 24-hour license). In late September all-news WMAQ-AM, which broadcasts Bulls and White Sox games, went all sports talk from 6 p.m. to midnight. And if that wasn’t enough, Highland Park’s WVVX-FM is also doing sports talk at night, mainly via syndicated programs.
“There is only room for another sports talk station in addition to WSCR if it could do the format significantly better than the `Score,’ ” said John Gehron, general manager of “smooth jazz” WNUA-FM. “And the Score has done a great job so far. One of the basic rules in marketing is that `first wins.’ And WSCR was there first.”
According to figures compiled by Strategic AccuRatings, a competitor to Arbitron, during the first four weeks of the fall quarter, WSCR had a 2.1 share of listeners aged 25 to 54 to WMVP’s 1.3, though WMVP is leading in mornings with a 2.5 to a 2.3 share.
Finding a focus
Media buyer Hambrick is more upbeat about WMVP’s chances than those early ratings might suggest.
“By going all-sports, they have at least drawn the lines and begun to focus themselves,” she said. “At least now they can tell you what it is that each one of these stations does, which for a long, long time they couldn’t do.”
Returning to oversee WMVP sports programming is Solk, who started out at WLUP-FM as a 15-year-old gofer and was by his 20s WLUP-AM/FM station manager before leaving to program an album rock station in San Francisco. With Blackhawks hockey on WMVP, ESPN network sports, Dahl in the mornings and longtime sports chatterbox Chet Coppock now in afternoons, Wert remains confident that WMVP will succeed in the long run.
“The sports radio arena is competitive right now, but Chicago is also the best sports city in America,” he said. “We don’t expect to see big (ratings) right away, but we do expect to build a quality product that advertisers will be proud to be associated with.”
On another front, Evergreen’s deCastro says he has shifted plans to try to syndicate to other markets the shows of WLUP-FM personalities like Brandmeier and Matthews from the back to the front burner, now that the station’s talent lineup has stabilized.
Still, competitors continue to scratch their heads over some of the recent moves at the stations.
“I have a lot of respect for Larry Wert and Jim deCastro,” said WLS-AM/FM general manager Tom Tradup. “I suspect that they aren’t doing this by the seat of their pants, and that they have some research that tells them that what they’ve done is the way to position themselves for the year 2000. But it does take someone with a Sherlock Holmes hat and a magnifying glass to divine what they’re up to.”
“From the outside it may look like there’s some turbulence, chaos and confusion with the Stern situation, the breakup of Steve and Garry and the change of WLUP-FM from rock ‘n’ roll to talk,” Wert said. “And perhaps it’s made us look vulnerable. But I think it’s OK to be the underdog at times, and if anything it’s made us dig in harder. Now we not only have our blueprint in place, but we’re poised for the next rung.”
