As yet another L.A. radio station switches over to an all-talk format this week, you have to wonder how much yakking the Angeleno audience is ready to hear.
KRLA-AM 1110 was purchased in April 1997 by CBS, which has been eyeing a format change for the obscure oldies rock station ever since. Talk seemed the logical alternative especially because music formats nearly always do poorly on AM with its non-stereo signal.
But the L.A. airwaves already are pretty talky. There’s No. 1 talk station KFI-AM 640, as well as KABC-AM 790, KIEV-AM 870 and CBS’s own KLSX-FM 97.1. And that’s not even counting the all-sports, all-news and public radio stations.
During the past year, the combined share of L.A.’s talk and sports stations added up to about 11 percent of the audience. That number isn’t likely to change very much just because a new player has entered the format.
“(The audience share listening to talk) could go up another point or more, but after that, everybody feeds upon themselves,” said radio consultant Allen Klein of Media Research Graphics in Encino.
Nonetheless, Klein and others agree that the switch to talk is a good move for KRLA. Considering the station’s ratings place it about No. 30 in the L.A. market, it has nowhere to go but up. Further, CBS has a big bench of talk talent to place on the station because it owns 25 percent of syndicator Westwood One.
From an advertising standpoint, there are major pluses and minuses to the talk format. The big minus is that it tends to attract an older audience, especially AM talk, and that’s a demographic many advertisers don’t find very appealing. The big plus is that advertising, especially retail ads and direct-response, really gets results on talk.
“When you’re listening to talk, it’s more foreground than background, so people are maybe focusing a little more (on the advertising),” said Lisa Guterman, senior broadcast negotiator with TBWA Chiat/Day.
So if nothing else, KRLA’s format change may be good news for advertisers because while ads on talk tend to get better results than ads on music, Guterman and others agree that it doesn’t cost any more to advertise on talk than on comparably rated music stations. And there are generally more commercial minutes per hour on talk than on music, which means KRLA is likely to get a lot healthier.
Objection sustained
In the reams of press materials and advertisements that are part of the effort to market Playa Vista, you’ll see the word “sustainability” crop up a lot. Nearly every press release on the mixed-use development contains a paragraph spelling out the developers’ goal to create a truly sustainable design.
The problem with all this sustainability talk is that it remains a fuzzy concept that’s difficult to define. Critics of the 1,000-plus-acre housing, office and movie studio development near Marina del Rey have another new word they use to describe the marketing hype: “greenwashing.”
“For them to use the word ‘sustainable’ in reference to this project is ludicrous,” said Bruce Robertson of the Ballona Valley Preservation League.
Sustainability is a theme of a campaign engineered by developer Playa Capital LLC’s in-house marketers, plus P.R. agencies Roddan Paolucci Roddan of Palos Verdes Estates and Rogers & Associates of Century City. It is based on notions spelled out in the Ahwanee Principles, a document created about a decade ago by a group of progressive architects and planners known as the New Urbanists.
The principles state that communities should contain schools, shopping, parks and workplaces within easy walking distance of each other and transit stops. They should have a diverse mix of housing types to avoid economic segmentation, and plenty of open space.
“Sustainability” as defined by Playa Capital’s marketers means a self-sustaining community, one at harmony with the environment, that is energy efficient and has all the necessary amenities packed together to minimize traffic.
While critics blast Playa Vista for the amount of traffic it will add to Westside streets, Kenneth Agid, Playa Vista’s vice president of marketing, points out that Los Angeles is going to grow with or without the project with most of the new housing built on the city’s fringes. Building houses closer to the city core can only serve to reduce auto trips in the long run, he said.
Further, Playa Vista is creating mechanisms to encourage people who work in the community to live there. For example, its telephony systems will allow residents to easily connect via modem with their workplaces, as long as they work at Playa Vista.
“The underlying principle is to take people off the roads, to afford people the opportunity to live and work in the same community,” Agid said. “There’s virtually no new residential development within the urban fabric of Los Angeles, where the jobs are.”
But critics cast a jaundiced eye on the use of the term “sustainability” as it applies to Playa Vista.
“This is just, I think, a way to whitewash a pretty dense project,” said Margaret Crawford, chairwoman of the history, theory and urban studies department at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Marina del Rey. “I wouldn’t call it sustainable.”
Despite the developer’s efforts, Crawford says there is no reason to believe that people living in Playa Vista will work there, or vice versa. No study has ever shown, she says, that you can reduce car trips in and out of a development by designing it a certain way. And she is skeptical of Playa Capital’s claims of environmental responsibility, such as a recent press release trumpeting the fact that the developer was recycling thousands of tons of steel and concrete already at the site.
“That’s just good business. Anyone would do it, I don’t think they should be congratulating themselves for it,” she said.
But not every developer does it to the extent that Playa Vista does, says David Herbst, vice president of corporate affairs for the developers. Herbst says the company is committed to wetlands restoration, recycling and open space.
News Editor Dan Turner writes a weekly column on marketing for the Los Angeles Business Journal.
