Thursday afternoon commutes always tend to be particularly traffic-filled. On December 16, that was certainly no exception in Boca Raton, Fla. Thanks to the “snowbirds” and full-time residents, getting home from the office at 6pm took some time.
Helping our Editor-in-Chief with the 30-minute commute home: Javier, a thirty-something Dominican who recently relocated to South Palm Beach County from New York City.
Javier’s audio choice for his Lyft duties didn’t involve Spotify, or Pandora, or SiriusXM. It was a FM radio station. The timing couldn’t be better, given radio’s incredible delivery of millions of dollars in listener donations to charities galore during the 2021 holiday season.
By Adam R Jacobson
I didn’t plan on using Lyft to commute from the Streamline Publishing offices to my home on Thursday. But, that was the case on December 16. After a mild traffic delay, my driver pulled up and welcomed me to take a seat in his immaculate 2016 Honda sedan with some 186,500 miles on the odometer.
At volume level 5 on his car stereo: WXDJ-FM “El Zol 106.7,” the contemporary Tropical-tinged station owned by Spanish Broadcasting System (SBS).
I instantly chatted up my driver, Javier. He was Dominican and recently located from the Five Boroughs of New York. Javier liked the warmer weather, and shared in his Caribbean-tinged Spanish how he didn’t miss spending upward of 90 minutes trying to find parking in Gotham.
We then started talking about why he chose El Zol 106.7. After all, there were other choices to be had, from Miami to the south and West Palm Beach to the north. His answer? The personalities at El Zol resonated with him.
Setting up a dream scenario for any radio station, Javier talked fondly of El Zol’s longtime morning program, El Vacilón de la Gatita. He spent five minutes lauding Alex Sensation — a musical tastemaker and recording artist in his own right who has enjoyed a relationship with SBS for several years. Then, of course, there was the continued listening to El Zol, right into the evening shift.
If there ever was a perfect “P1” for the radio industry, it is Javier. While I’ve documented in previous columns my ability to always get a Lyft or Uber in the New York Metropolitan Area tuned to a local radio station, this was a first in South Florida. And, the fact that Javier listens to El Zol 106.7 is testament to the power Hispanic radio has with U.S. Latinos, the subject of many Hispanic Radio Conference events in Miami.
But, the timing of Javier’s radio consumption is also significant for it meshes nicely with the giving of radio listeners across the U.S., and the remarkable tally our co-owned Radio Ink has totaled as of this morning. Radio listeners have collectively contributed upward of $20 million this holiday season, with community fundraising stories galore appearing every day at RadioInk.com.
Among the Hispanic success stories is another Tropical-tinged contemporary station serving Spanish-speaking listeners in Florida — Beasley Media Group’s WYUU “Maxima 92.5” in Tampa-St. Petersburg.
The station successfully raised $147,380 during its twelfth annual St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Radiothon. This year’s total’s surpassed 2020 by $10,000.
“The world, as we know it, is full of challenges yet sometimes, with the noise of constant headlines and news bombardment, we lose track of what real problems look like,” said Program Director Nio Fernandez. “A child battling cancer and his or her family gripping to hope allows stations like ours to field that call and do so proudly.”
How much money has Spotify or Pandora raised from listeners to its personality-free, soulless streams? How much money has SiriusXM collected from its consumers — not for donations but to fuel its own profit machine?
Free, community-connected radio has again shined. It’s another message to send to those CMOs that still look down on AM and FM as outdated, linear relics that seemingly can’t give them the ROI that is easily attainable through the right messaging and good creative.
The millions in donations are proof positive that with the right call to action, marketers can’t lose with Radio.
