Forget about hit parades, Rush Limbaugh or sports talk. This is the kind of cheery chat broadcast by WYPA-AM 820 on the radio dial:
“Taking charge of your life means developing a plan for self-improvement.”
“It’s useful to develop a mindset of leadership.”
“You must see the big picture.”
“If you believe you can, you probably can.”
All right, so they’re a little obvious, but the folks at WYPA are hoping there’s gold in those nuggets of positive thinking. With a format strictly dedicated to personal growth, WYPA is the only radio station of its kind in the Chicago market, and only one of three in the nation.
“People absolutely get help from the station,” says Tony Jacobs, WYPA’s enthusiastic general manager. “I’ve got letters that say, `I was on my way to a sales call, and I got a tip from you guys and it sealed the deal.’ It really is amazing.”
Joanne Seaman certainly thinks so. A budding writer, Seaman started listening shortly after the station first went on the air last April. Although still unpublished, she credits WYPA with helping her set priorities in favor of her writing.
“I’d always wanted to do it,” says Seaman, 48, “but I just let everything else come first. Then I started applying some of the things I heard on WYPA and I finally found a way to make the time. I’ve finished three short stories in about six months, so I’m feeling pretty good right now.”
Here’s how WYPA which –bills itself as “Your Transformation Station” — works: Broadcasting from sunrise (roughly 5 a.m.) to near sunset (about 5 p.m.), the station divides each hour into short segments, anywhere from 6 to 8 minutes long, that offer up wisdom from motivational gurus such as Deepak Chopra, Anthony Robbins and Harvey McKay. It follows the same format Monday through Friday — a constant diet of “success skills,” “healthy lifestyles,” and “business skills” (with a handful of commercial breaks and an hourly news report).
The segments are advice and counsel, usually packaged in the form of a brief vignette, so listening can be a very easy, soothing experience. WYPA plays ideas the way other stations play hit songs.
“With the exception of WGN and WLS, AM in Chicago has some difficulty in attracting and keeping a listening audience,” said Tony Gray of Gray Communications, a Chicago-based media consulting firm. “Right now, talk — whether it’s sports, or news or whatever — that’s what’s attracting a measurable audience. And this format has possibilities.”
Not everyone agrees. “This will wear thin very quickly,” predicts Alan Caroba, a New York-based radio expert, about WYPA’s approach. “They’re appealing to people with the attention span of fungus.”
But the ever-optimistic Jacobs, who used to work for USA Today’s Sky Radio, which beams live radio programing to airline passengers, predicts WYPA could generate annual revenues of $3 million to $4 million in just a few years.
With owner John Douglas’ other stations, KBPA (1220 AM) in San Francisco and WVPA (1340 AM) in Washington, D.C., WYPA makes up an informal network that plays material culled mostly from the Nightingale-Conant library, a tape label that specializes in personal growth and owns almost all the big names in the self-help business, including Brian Tracy, Barbara DeAngelis and Wayne Dyer. Currently, WYPA works off about 4,000 different tapes to produce its short segments. (Nightingale-Conant, which is considered a pioneer in the personal growth business, was founded by the late Chicago radio personality Earl Nightingale.)
“It’s a hustle to sell their books and tapes,” says a very unpositive-thinking Caroba. “Some people may feel that they benefit from it, but it’s still a hustle. People don’t become successful because they listen to something for eight minutes.”
Not surprisingly, Jacobs strongly disagrees. “Do you have to listen to the entire album to like a song or get something out of it?” he asks. “Our listener is used to listening to tapes already.” He adds that Nightingale-Conant sells 50,000 tapes a day worldwide. (But at Chicago’s Transitions Bookstore, which specializes in New Age and other positive thinking products, Nightingale-Conant is a steady but unspectacular seller, according to the management.)
“We don’t pay for their tapes, and in exchange they get to the hawk their tapes,” says Jacobs. The deal is good for the next 17 years.
While they share a format, the three feel-good stations, especially Chicago’s, aren’t carbon copies. On weekends, the WYPA on-air schedule changes. There are hourly programs, featuring speakers with local connections such as Les Brown. These are mostly community-based shows, some brokered, some not.
Brown, whose live show airs Sunday morning and is often a cross between a coffee klatsch and a raucous church service, says he wouldn’t be doing a show on any other station but WYPA.
“I think, particularly now, at the beginning of a new millennium, that it’s important to offer people insight and integrity,” says Brown, who also hosts listener events — motivational lectures and seminars at which WYPA fans can see their gurus in person.
He previously had served as host of a daily show on New York’s WBLS-AM but says he prefers WYPA’s format because his weekly show gives him more time for speaking engagements, training sessions and taking care of his health. Brown, who is now living in Chicago, is recovering from prostate cancer.
“Chicagoans like their own,” says Jacobs, who tries to give the station a local flavor through Brown’s show, another program with former WMAQ-TV personality Mary Laney, and a series of short chats called “Messmerizing Moments” by former Blackhawks announcer Wayne Messmer.
So are Chicagoans tuning in to WYPA?
Jacobs says yes. “We cross all racial barriers and age barriers,” he explains. “I get letters from people who manage restaurants, and who work in kitchens, people who own hundred-million-dollar businesses. All of them listen with the same vigor.”
According to Merit Kahn, WYPA’s advertising sales manager, the station’s going gangbusters, with ads from car dealers, financial institutions, corporations, motivational speakers and lots of companies recruiting new employees. (The station’s rate card says advertising time costs $150 a minute, compared to the industry average in Chicago of $500).
“We don’t have a clue about numbers,” she says, “but we know — from community events we sponsor, from phone calls, from the way listeners respond to advertisers — that we’re doing very well, and that we’re reaching, well, everybody — men and women, young and old, blacks and whites.”
When Kahn says the station has no clue about numbers she is referring to the fact that WYPA doesn’t subscribe to any audience measuring system. But, in fact, according to Chicago based Accuratings, WYPA’s got a 40,000 weekly cumulative audience, ranking it 40 out of 50 in the area market, with a .4 rating share. A ratings share refers to the percentage of radios in use.
Jacobs knows he’s got a nice niche now but that, no matter how successful it gets, WYPA will have to change to expand beyond its core audience. “As it goes down, we’ll have to do more business, more interactive programming,” he says. “In order for it to have legs, it’ll have to have more interaction with the audience. It’ll have to grow.”
Seems only right, after all.
