What do Women Really Want (from Radio)?

It’s a Friday afternoon in the Twin Cities, and as commuters start their shift homeward, local radio stations gear up to travel with them via the broadcast tradition known as “afternoon drive,” a time coveted by advertisers (along with its cousin, “morning drive”) for the heavy number of ears seeking distraction.

On Minnesota Public Radio, reporters parse the intricacies of President Obama’s nuclear non-proliferation treaty with the Russians. WCCO’s Michele Tafoya talks to the assistant secretary for housing, David Stevens, about a mortgage rescue plan announced earlier that day. AM 1500’s Joe Soucheray waxes eloquent over a local basketball player. And at stations such as The Patriot, KTLK, and KTNF, noisy white men crackle with right- and left-leaning polemic.

At FM 107.1, the radio station recently rechristened myTalk, hosts Lori Barghini and Julia Cobbs are talking about vaginas . . . or, rather, vagina jewelry, as promoted by actress Jennifer Love Hewitt. “One month ago she informed the world about vajazzling and now it’s a company,” Barghini marvels. (This would be of interest to the pair, who joined the station in 2002 after their Bodyperks nipple enhancers hit the pop culture zeitgeist, showing up on HBO’s Sex and the City.)

“There are little Swarovski crystals to make little patterns that you can put on, um, any part of your body that you’d like to decorate,” Barghini ventures. “It’s specifically meant for the poufy pubic hair that you may have.”

Cobbs interrupts her best friend and sister-in-law, “Lori, all of this goes on a bare pubic bone. It does not apply to hair. Don’t you get that? There’s barettes to use for that.” Barghini responds with her trademark cackle—really the only way to describe the throaty ack ack ack she regularly emits when amused—and the two are off and running.

Pop culture and Hollywood gossip rule the roost these days at FM 107.1, the Hubbard Broadcasting–owned station that, since its debut in 2002, has zigged and zagged through a mélange of syndicated shows and hosts geared toward female listeners. The latest format push, which began informally last fall and officially in February, promises “a little gossip and a lot of laughs.”

When the station launched, it was one of the only radio stations in the United States to offer talk programming targeted at women. Eight years later, despite a brief flurry of national interest in the concept, myTalk still stands alone (and only flirts with profitability) as it seeks to lure a larger percentage of the 2.7 million weekly Twin Cities radio listeners than the 100,000 or so it has averaged in the past. To pull that off, will myTalk 107.1 need to provide the broadcast answer to the age-old question “What do women want?”

“Noooooo!” Hubbard Radio president Ginny Morris and her top lieutenant Dan Seeman exclaim when the question is put to them during a recent interview. “Women want lots of things,” insists Seeman, the vice president and general manager of myTalk 107.1 and Hubbard Radio Network. “They want adult contemporary music, they want news and information, they want sports. There are lots of radio stations that women can listen to in this market. We happen to be the pop culture radio station.”

Why the interest in females? “Women are where the money is,” Seeman says bluntly. “Every buying decision made in almost every household is directed by women.” When women are engaged, conventional wisdom holds, they spend and spend.

Since Hubbard Broadcasting purchased FM 107.1 in 2001, the station has been searching for commercial radio’s holy grail—female listeners. Sure, it might have been easier to launch a smooth jazz or country station back then, as some consultants advised, but the profitability would have been “modest,” Morris explains. However, finding a format that will bring large numbers of female listeners (and their money) to the station has been a tougher code to crack than anything novelist Dan Brown imagined.

Programming a station for men is easy, says Michael Harrison, editor and publisher of the influential talk radio magazine Talkers. “You do news, sports, or you talk politics. But people don’t know what women want on the radio.”

Morris was initially intrigued that “many, many women listened to spoken word television but nobody had tried it on the radio. So we did a very specific study about whether or not people would listen to talk radio targeting women. We played clips from The View, and we talked about Oprah. But it was a little like trying to test whether people liked the taste of chocolate ice cream when they’d never tasted chocolate ice cream.”

So Morris decided to launch an audio version of Vanity Fair magazine: “a little news, a little goofiness . . . we threw a bunch of different things against the wall.”

In those early years, local hosts such as Ian Punnett (who was later joined by his wife, Margery), former WCCO-TV reporter Kevyn Burger, and Lori and Julia were interspersed with syndicated advice shows from Dr. Laura Schlessinger and Dr. Joy Browne, as well as female-oriented shows such as Satellite Sisters. Burger, who joined the station in 2003, recalls being told, “You can talk about anything you want to talk about, just talk about it like girlfriends would talk about something.”

The station avoided the talk radio label. In fact, its on-air studio still carries the sign “Conversation Studio” as opposed to the “Talk Studio” sign hanging on AM 1500’s studio next door. It also was careful not to promote itself as exclusively female in orientation (although it was almost immediately dubbed “Chick Radio” or the “Menstruation Station” by local wags).

“Every time we tried to define this as a women’s station, all it did was make women mad. Our focus groups would tell us, ‘Don’t define us that way,’ ” Morris explains. Instead, the station described itself as offering “Real. Life. Conversation.” and pretty much left it up to its hosts on how to interpret that.

“When it was domestic violence week, I put the call out and women were calling about ‘How do you get away?’ ” Burger recalls. “We talked about genetic breast cancer.” Burger would go on to win the American Women in Radio and Television’s Gracie Award for her monthly on-air breast examinations. (The station also just won a Crystal Radio Award, given within the national radio industry to the 10 stations that make the greatest efforts in public service.) When Burger developed breast cancer herself, she lived that part of her life on the air as well.

In those days, Ian and Margery Punnett’s morning show carried a more spiritual focus (Ian is an ordained minister) and the couple “brought our life to the radio in all of its complexities and glory,” he says. Lori and Julia gossiped about Hollywood, fashion, flirting, and, well, vaginas. “I love talking about sex,” says Barghini. “I’ve got good, sound experience.”

While those listeners it attracted “love, love, loved,” the station, Morris says, “not enough people were tuning in.” However, Morris’s radio experiment attained traction nationally as the decade progressed. In 2005, a study commissioned by the ABC Radio Network found that only 3 percent of women aged 18–54 felt that talk radio was relevant to them. Half those surveyed found nothing of interest on existing talk stations. Later that year, ABC launched a division devoted to women’s talk. And a group of women, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem, launched GreenStone Media to develop and syndicate female-focused programming.

In 2006, Steinem talked about GreenStone at a Twin Cities radio conference. Women, she said, didn’t want to hear about news stories that “report only problems, not solutions.” They wanted less politics, sports, and “verbal prizefights.” What women did want, she said, was radio “that treats everyone with respect.”

Ian Punnett, a 35-year radio veteran, heard a similar presentation from Steinem in Washington, D.C. He turned to a friend sitting next to him. “We’re already trying that,” he whispered. “It’ll never work.”

Punnett dubbed the approach “the smart girls’ revenge. It wasn’t about lipstick or cool shoes, it was about how great our lives are because we are so competent and smart. Anytime we veered toward that, it always sounded bad and wrong. Women may claim it’s what they want, but it’s different from what they’ll actually listen to.”

Talkers’ Michael Harrison recalled a national conference where leading American women in radio talked about women’s programming. “It was moderated by Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Sally Jessy Raphael was on the panel, plus big-name female program directors and executives. And every one of them disagreed about what women want to hear. It became a joke. The audience was hysterical.”

The idea that women wanted more empowerment from radio tanked when GreenStone’s syndicated offerings fizzled. It was a “miserable failure,” says Harrison (it barely lasted two years), although he maintains that it was “the execution, not the concept” that was to blame. Still, radio geared specifically to women vanished, almost overnight. ABC dismantled its women’s division, and most of its radio shows, such as the Oprah Network, moved to satellite radio, where ratings don’t guide programming decisions as directly.

At Hubbard, a privately owned business not beholden to shareholders or as susceptible to the gusts of popular trends, Morris and Seeman kept thinking, and tinkering. “As we really defined who we were, through market research and focus groups, the women’s thing just got us into trouble,” Seeman says. “Internally, I think our staff felt we had to ‘empower’ people instead of just entertaining them. We found what worked was when we stayed in our lanes of pop culture. Lori and Julia have had the most popular show on this station since its inception, and it’s clear what they’re about.”

It’s a concept Seeman is not sheepish about. “TMZ’s got its own television show now and People has never been more popular. We’re still appealing to women, we’re just not going to label it as the women’s station. We’re just here to have some fun. The news stations aren’t reporting a lot of happy news right now with the economy and two wars, so we feel like this is a place you can go and escape for a while.”

There’s also an anecdotal perception that labeling the station for women ruffles the feathers of the station’s gay male audience as well as a more surprising demographic: their non-gay counterparts.

“Straight men tell me, ‘I wouldn’t admit this around my buddies, but I listen,’ ” says Cobbs. Barghini adds, “I think it’s a way to peek inside how women think without having to get into a conversation with them.”

Shifting from syndicated shows to more expensive local hosts, the station began to morph from earnest to entertaining. It adopted a new tagline, “Living Life Out Loud.” The lighter turn was particularly hard on mid-morning host Burger, who had just finished a public battle with breast cancer and was in the midst of a divorce. “They said, ‘We want to be a place where people come for fun,’ and I must say, I had buy-in on that.”

Burger tried to lighten up her show. Local journalist Jim Leinfelder, a frequent guest, recalls being “disinvited” to appear. “Kevyn was told I was too MPR-ish,” he says. Then, last October, Burger was disinvited as well.

“Kevyn is a great broadcaster and we love her,” says Seeman. “But when we made this turn to pop culture and gossip and fun and laughing, all of her news broadcasting strengths became her weaknesses. She tried, but she had a hard time convincing our listeners that she wasn’t the journalist anymore.”

“I was as shocked as when I found out I had cancer,” Burger recalls about learning her show would be cancelled. “They said research showed that listeners found me smart and well-informed, and that was out of step with the brand.” However, she adds, “I wish them the very best. When I took the job, I figured if I lasted three years I’d be lucky, and I had seven years.”

But the “Living Life Out Loud” change still didn’t fix the station’s fundamental problem, says program director Amy Daniels. “People still didn’t know what we did. Was 107.1 a music station or a talk station? And if it was [a talk station], what did it talk about? We decided that we needed to be a lot more transparent.”

The new myTalk brand debuted in February, its “My Pop Culture My Gossip My Radio Station” billboards saturating the Twin Cities. TV commercials and bathroom displays all emphasized the station’s new focus on fun and pop culture. The TV ad portrays Lori & Julia as a “guilty pleasure.” Other promos joke: “Some stations boast of breaking news; we give you the break-up news. Some give you the Dow Jones; we’ll give you the Star Jones.”

“In the past we’d had a hard time getting people to try us because we weren’t defining what we were,” Seeman says. “Now, on every corner in this town we have these billboards saying, ‘pop culture, gossip, talk, radio station.’ ” If you can’t figure out what we’re offering now, we really can’t spell it out more clearly. It may not appeal to you—that’s OK—but if it does appeal, I hope they’ll tune in.”

Although it’s too early to judge the success or failure of FM 107.1’s latest turn, Seeman was encouraged by the latest Arbitron radio ratings, which showed an average of 155,000 listeners were tuning in each week. Although it’s just a fraction of the million-plus listeners tuning into soft rock WLTE, it represents some of the best numbers the station has ever seen.

Seeman says his next benchmark of success will be when listenership hits the 200,000 mark. “Ginny’s always been clear that we will stay committed to this format as long as it continues to grow, both in revenues and ratings.”

He bristles at the suggestion that the change has “dumbed down” the radio station. “I hate people saying that. There’s nothing stupid about what we’re doing here. These are really smart hosts and their take on pop culture is usually very smart. We’re not going to change the world, but neither is sports [radio].”

But what about those women and what they want from radio? “Look,” Seeman adds. “Twenty years ago there were really two radio hills in this market: news at WCCO and an opinion/talk station at AM 1500. Now you have a left hill, a right hill, an MPR hill, and a sports hill. There’s a female hill, too. We just don’t know how high it is.”