Despite some recent troubles, National Public Radio is a powerful, trusted non-profit and media brand. Many listeners around the country are also familiar with Chicago Public Media and its flagship station WBEZ, the home of several programs that are popular far beyond the metropolitan area. The staff of WBEZ understands that the strong loyalties attached to both brands are not to be taken lightly, which is why they wanted to think carefully as they branched out in new directions and expanded the brand online. In April 2010, The Insight Labs helped out by convening a session in which members of the station’s leadership team met with several Chicago marketing experts to think through Chicago Public Media’s complex relationship with its audiences.
Curious about how WBEZ has continued to build upon its brand, Insight Labs Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson recently spoke to Chicago Public Media’s Daniel Ash. Ash, the organization’s Vice President of Strategic Communication, reflected on the value of the Lab, how to make branding meaningful throughout an organization, and what for-profit media can learn from NPR. Their conversation follows:
Andrew Benedict-Nelson: Could you tell me the story of your Insight Lab experience?
Daniel Ash: We had some planning meetings with Jeff and Howell around this Lab, and we made a decision that we were essentially going to have a discussion about the Chicago Public Media brand. We were in the process of going through a brand transition, if you will. At the beginning of our conversation were these really interesting people who were ready to talk about the brand, what it stood for, and where we wanted to go with it … as a radio station that was becoming multimedia.
It started with a very intensely focused briefing on some of the business challenges we were facing, and then it opened up. Jeff and Howell provoked a conversation that was seemingly all over the place. At first we didn’t know what to do with it. But it eventually got grounded because of the character of the group.
The conversation was really personal in our case because most of the people were really familiar with WBEZ. They had a personal attachment to the station where they love “Car Talk” or “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” or Ira Glass. You had all of that driving the initial conversation. But then you had the professionalism of the group that grounded us and helped us unpack the issues we put out at the beginning.
ABN: Could you tell me a little bit more about those specific issues?
DA: WBEZ shares a problem that many local stations share, which is that people see our brand as being synonymous with National Public Radio, when in fact we are a separate legal entity with a separate mission and separate goals. We were part of the founding group that created NPR 40 years ago. We created NPR because we wanted to be able to offer sound news, information, and content to our audience here in Chicago.
But in creating our success and building NPR in the industry, we created a dilemma for stations, which is that everybody knows the national brand but few people have the same type of understanding of the local brand. … There’s a financial factor associated with that because increasingly NPR is going direct-to-consumer, and more listeners are giving directly to NPR. … So over the last few years we’ve set out to create a unique experience associated with the local public radio brand here in Chicago. …. From a marketing standpoint it’s an extremely tough challenge. That’s a little bit of backstory.
So [the Lab] really got interesting when people got beyond their personal stories and really started to think about the problem itself. You had as a part of this meeting a guy from CVS [Gary Mitchiner] who before going to CVS had worked in development. He gave us a number of ideas about establishing the “brand promise” of WBEZ, the “Ten Commandments” of WBEZ, really thinking about the membership base. It was a pivot into a much more meaningful conversation about how we distill our story and own that story in a way that is really simple and really clear. … We’re the most trusted news and information source in the region, and there is a relationship that comes with that trust. How do we make that part of everything we do?
One thing I learned when I was a newcomer to public media is that our brand identity is a function of whatever is on right now. So when “This American Life” is on, we’re “This American Life” and everything that represents to people. If you’re watching “The Office” on NBC, NBC at that moment feels like “The Office.” We don’t expect to be any different, but in terms of representing the overall brand we had to run through the connective tissue that linked our serious journalism with “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” and our theater programs at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night. We need to understand that regardless of what’s happening right now on the radio, we have to produce a brand … that at its core is building on this deep sense of trust. To use a food and beverage metaphor, we’re going to use the finest ingredients and the best judgment in whatever we prepare or bring to that table.
ABN: What about the end of the Lab?
DA: So at the end when we walked out of that meeting, the brand management staff (which I’m responsible for) felt really good about the conversation being a helpful exercise where we heard from a room of professionals who have some deeply similar experiences but that are also somewhat different from what we do. We talked about our challenges and they talked about their challenges. It was very refreshing and rejuvenating. …
ABN: How have you been able to apply ideas from the Lab within your organization?
DA: Creating change in an institution like ours — or any institution — is a difficult exercise. … [The Lab] became an important chapter in a conversation that was already happening, because we were unexpectedly dropped in with people who had no meaningful connection to us other than their own listenership, as compared to board members, donors, funders, and all these other entities that have a stake in the matter. It was quite refreshing to have a very high level conversation with people who have no business with the institution. To me that’s invaluable, particularly with an entity like ours where you have a very small marketing team and a programming team that sometimes doesn’t see themselves as part of a branding discussion. I think that helped me and my team think about how we nudge the organization forward in the right direction.
There was a time at this institution where it was very much the case that the programming staff, the people who produce the content, would come up with a new program, be it a segment of a show or a feature or a new podcast, and editors and producers would get together and be driven by someone’s idea. … [T]he marketing staff was involved only to schedule promos or do some other event associated with the product. Maybe put an ad in the paper, something very tactical. The frustrating thing is that from a brand management standpoint, how people experience the product is the heart of the brand. It is the brand. It’s the core. …
Now we are at a stage as an institution that when new ideas emerge, there is much more interest and willingness to get many types of people around the product to the table. Editorial is still controlled by editorial, but when thinking about a new feature or program, there is much more willingness to think about what it means to WBEZ as a brand that is trying to reach educated people in Chicago who care about their communities. …
We spend a lot of time evangelizing internally about the core values and core attributes that have to exist in everything that we do. … The “public” part of public media can’t just exist when you think it should exist. It has to permeate everything that we do in appropriate ways. You’re not going to have members decide what we cover on the morning newscast, but we should have our ear to the ground and let what we learn from the community impact our long-form features or the enterprise journalism that we do. …
It’s taken a lot of time to implant these ideas in the minds of the people who produce the brand and essentially manage the brand every day. … People are thinking more affirmatively about what they do in the context of the overall identity. You can’t have an identity that is managed by two or three people in a corner. That belief is really starting to take hold here.
ABN: Could you tell me about some of the other specific people in the Lab and what they brought to the table?
DA: My marketing director was very impressed by the marketing guy from Potbelly’s [Bill Sleeth], who talked about the challenge of developing a visual identity for a brand, how you police that but also give room for localizing the brand. … It takes a hell of a lot of work to develop a system that everyone adheres to but also be willing to give you some wiggle room so that the Potbelly’s in Hyde Park is not exactly like the Potbelly’s in Lincoln Park, which is not like the Potbelly’s in southern Wisconsin. … This is stuff you just wouldn’t get from a lecture about branding, but by sitting in a room and getting to know one another and revealing stories that challenge you in an authentic way.
ABN: How might some of the ideas about branding that you saw emerge from the Lab apply to other non-profits?
DA: I think the whole idea of knowing your story and being able to tell your story in a simple, uncluttered way is key. I know that as a person who has worked for a number of non-profits now, we like to tell our story in all of its ugly detail, just because the work is so much of a passion. But in fact from a fund-raising standpoint or a PR standpoint people want to be able to shorthand you with an instant “What do you do?” We protect animals. We rescue dogs. We feed children. You’ve got to be real comfortable with getting right to the point.
I think that with public media, you have to get comfortable with the idea that it’s not going to restrict you, that over time it’s going to help people get what you’re all about. You can go from a message of “we produce the highest quality journalism” — a very high mission — to something that’s as simple as “we spark conversation.”
My team and I, that’s a phrase we use a lot around here. When we first started using it, people hated it. People would say, “What about the journalism? What about the lack of bias? You’re leaving out so much!” But I was intentionally leaving it out, because whatever it is, whether it’s journalism or comedy or “Louder than a Bomb,” [a poetry slam competition] we’re going to do things that people will want to talk about after they see or hear it. … You’re going to say, “I heard it on NPR. I heard it on WBEZ. I went to a taping of ‘Wait Wait.’” You’re going to talk about those experiences. Those conversations will lead to a community discourse that over time will improve our community and make it richer.
Non-profits can benefit from getting comfortable with taking everything you do, taking all the long hours and all the special efforts, cutting right through and saying “All of it is about X.” Getting to that point will help you grow your business, whatever that business is, because your message will be clear to more people. You have a better shot at taking those folks and turning them into supporters, contributors, fans, whatever. But the message is key.
I’m not a radio guy. For a lot of people who have worked in radio their entire lives, the objective is to keep listeners on the broadcast as long as possible. Given everything that’s going on with media and consumer behavior, maybe the expectations have to be different. People aren’t going to come in and turn on that radio station and listen to it non-stop. … So why should we continue to produce programming that way? People tune it and tune out and it’s much more of a revolving door. But if you accept that people act that way, it doesn’t mean that you can’t build loyalty. It means you have to think about building loyalty in a different way, that it’s not just a function of time exposed. … It’s a function of what each exposure adds to the overall brand.
ABN: So let’s say that instead of non-profit leaders you were asked to give advice to some media folks — public, private, broadcast, print, any kind of media. What would you tell them based on your Lab and your experience building the brand at WBEZ?
DA: I know it’s almost cliché, and it’s something that we lucked into, but I would say it’s not about delivering media — it’s about the relationship you have with the audience and how that relationship evolves. Many of the old commercial radio broadcasters think they are in the business of delivering content because that is one function of what they do. But if they are going to grow their business they need to deliver and share content in a way that builds a relationship with the audience, no matter what platform it is.
The mere act of transferring information from A to B is not enough to build a meaningful business. Instead, you have to build a relationship with the potential to grow and be long-lasting. By hook or by crook, NPR created a brand that was the passion of a generation that wanted an alternative to other media sources. Because they were involved in building it and funding it one person at a time, people across the nation are already supporters of NPR programming and they start to act like shareholders: “We own this thing. We made it happen.” … We have an advantage there because we have always been about the public.
I think some public media enterprises lost sight of that and tried to behave more like commercial media, trying to build an audience and sell access to that audience. They didn’t care so much about what that audience thought. But now even advertisers are saying, “We want to be in places where consumers want to be.” …
What’s sad is that people think they can short-circuit the process and do it really fast, so you have these sort of burnout media enterprises. We still have the number one podcast in the country, “This American Life.” It’s not because of clever advertising or some gimmick. It’s really a function of the 15-year relationship that we’ve developed, that Ira developed, with our core audience.
We get a lot of people who ask, “How do you create the next ‘This American Life’?” You can’t do it in six months. You could try, but you’ll flame out. … Public media creates the opportunity to take our time. We have a chance to be smart. We don’t want to be smug, but we have a chance to design content that develops that long-term relationship with the audience. You don’t get that with Fox or ABC, but you do get it with public media. I believe that. I know a lot of folks push back and say you have to be fashionable, you have to compete. But that’s not our game. It could be our game, but we’d just be like the commercial stations.
ABN: It sounds like what you’re saying is that given all the changes in the media landscape, a lot of commercial media outlets could take a page from NPR’s book.
DA: I think anyone could take a page, but in a way you have to take the whole book. You can’t expect to manufacture the type of loyalty we have. I think you have to be willing to think about content production and give things more time. I know a lot of peers in commercial media who say, “You don’t have time. You’re either making money or you’re not. You’re either building an audience or you’re not.” But some of the biggest hit shows were lucky in that they had sponsors who were willing to take a risk — “Seinfeld” barely made it through its first couple of episodes. …
It was the same thing with “This American Life.” When we launched that show, people thought it was not going to stick. Ira had a weird voice. It was too long. People only listen to the radio for two or three minutes at a time, they said. What we said was, give it time.
The most recent example is “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.” When it launched — Torey Malatia [Chicago Public Media's CEO] still has the clippings — it was lambasted. People literally thought it had gotten booked by accident. They didn’t like the concept. They didn’t like the panelists. It was, “Give us Garrison Keillor and Michael Feldman and we can’t handle any more funny business.” But what we were able to do was say, “We’re really going to play this out.” The audience was constantly giving us feedback and helping to shape the show. There was co-construction, back and forth. Because people give money to public radio, they love to give you feedback. The dollar-a-day donor is also going to give you a bit of advice.
I don’t see these as complaints. These are people who are co-constructing their engagement with the brand. If they don’t like what we did on “Worldview” [a WBEZ global affairs program] we don’t have to just send them a mug and hope they forgive us. Let’s bring them down to the station and have a conversation. … When you build a product for a new audience, make them part of the process. When you launch a new show, be very open about it. Say, “This is a new show, let us know what you think.” Get comfortable taking that journey with your audience.