The holiday season is at its conclusion. Christmas is tomorrow. Hanukkah starts tomorrow. Kwanzaa begins December 26. It’s Boxing Day in the UK. The 26th is also a radio holiday: “the day programming returns to normal.”
Many radio stations wrap their All Christmas All the Time format at 12a on December 26. The songs of the season have been placed on hold until November ’25. Those stations that employed the Christmas Tactic will be anxiously awaiting the rating results from the fall sweep and the Holiday monthly to know if it was as successful as they anticipated.
Those who executed it in a way that engaged the audience, enticed merchants to use their stations as the soundtrack of the season in their store, and saw inflated listening levels as memories were rekindled with music, will be celebrating in January following the rating returns. A part of the reflection on the tactic is asking, “Did you take full advantage of the cume that visited the station over the holiday season?”
We know, proven by research, that a portion of the audience leaves when the All Christmas tactic launches. There is an audience that comes from “other” during the tactic that, if executed properly, increases your ratings by more than offsetting departure losses. It’s the one time when a format change has a “use by” date. Listeners who leave because they dislike the All Christmas tactic know that on December 26th it’s over and they can return. In this case… an expiry date is good.
To properly evaluate the success of the tactic, you have to evaluate the execution of the tactic. Did you play the biggest most memorable traditional Christmas classics in a regular rotation? Did you create a Superpower category that treated turnover like a Top-40 does and did you showcase those songs keeping them connected to your station’s branding? When you play new music that is original and not a cover of a classic, do you identify the artist & song title, manage the rotations, and surround it with big well-known songs? Are you using imaging to own the tactic?
Your station’s imaging should have been produced and presented in a way that there is no question that you OWN Christmas. It is your holiday. Artists and celebrities endorsing what you’re doing go a long way to giving you ownership. Your station name and frequency are connected to the holiday. You should have reminded the “visiting cume” what you do the other 11 months of the year. You do that by playing promos and air imaging that puts your regular format on display. It’s an opportunity to showcase your most high-profile personalities. Your inflated cume is a chance to convert listeners from other stations and bring them to yours.
Did you sell special advertising packages that reflect the larger audience by raising rates for the All Christmas Tactic? If you’ve executed the format over multiple years and you have a track record that shows your ratings spike, that should equate to a higher rate being charged to advertisers for December and the Holiday month.
When you sit down to review the performance of the Christmas tactic, examining audience measurement, it’s important to remember that in Nielsen the December 2024 month began on November 9th and continued to December 4th. This is why many All Christmas stations began the tactic in early November. For PPM markets, the Holiday Sweep started December 5th and will continue until December 31st. Unfortunately, many of the coveted national advertisers discount the value of the Holiday rating sweep.
The final step of your evaluation; was there a marketing package that reached more than your own listeners? It could be on your sister stations, on your website, digital marketing, cable TV, direct marketing, or perhaps Gateway ads on podcasts or streaming apps. If you want to excel at the tactic and use it to expose your regular format to a larger audience, you must market and own the Christmas tactic.
If a radio station fell in the woods and it wasn’t marketed, did it make a sound?
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