A COOL time at Entercom Radio

For my COOL Week I went to Entercom Radio in Westlake right across the street from Westlake High School. Entercom is home to mix94.7, Majic 95.5, 96.3 RnB and talk 1370. I was only there for Wednesday and Thursday, but I learned a lot in those two days!

The first day we met Ann Peterson who is the head of accounting and recruiting, she gave us an overview of what we would be doing each day. We met with a different person in each department. Our first stop was meeting with someone from the IT part of the radio station, which went totally over my head. Kacey, the head of IT, just told us how the radio signals worked, how you work a sound board and control room and how you can tell how many people are listening to the radio. That is about all that I took away from that little preview. Then we went on to meet with someone in the “traffic” department, but that is not someone that reports on the morning traffic. It is a radio term that means planning out all the commercials and how they get inplemented. It was interesting to learn that the commercials are not just put in at random, someone actually specifically puts those commercials in during that time slot for a commercial break. The amount of money that a company will pay for a commercial is ridiculous and some of the ads don’t even make it on the air. My favorite part of the day was definitely when we got to watch a band perform in lounge. The band was called “The Mrs” and are a local band from Westlake, they weren’t bad– not great but not awful. It was five Westlake housewives that wanted to start a band and they did, pretty much. I do give them credit for writing their own songs. We also made a commercial for H-E-B; we read from a script and recorded our voices and the combined it all together to make commercial about Valentine’s day, though it wasn’t real and didn’t air. Hearing your voice record is about as fun as listening to nails on a chalkboard, but the experience was super cool. After lunch we met with sales which is where we learned about the “money making” part of radio. The salespeople are the ones that find companies that want to buy an advertisement during a commercial break. If it was up to the sales department there would be twice as many commercials on the air than their currently are, because that is where all the money comes from. Overall the first day was very informative and I learned a lot about the behind the scenes part of radio.

The second day we got to meet with all the radio personalities, we sat in on MIX in the morning with Booker, Sara and Alex. I really enjoyed getting to watch how a morning show worked. The show starts at 6 am and ends at 9 am so the hosts get there at 4:30 am to prepare. Booker, Sara and Alex were really nice and gave us a really good overview to what it was like actually being on air. Being in radio is not a quick business– it takes time and you have to wait your turn to get your “big break.” By the end of our meeting Alex even offered me an internship if I wanted one during the summer when I am in college. A department that I didn’t know much about but found very interesting was promotions. Aaron Hurd and Blanca Deen are the people in charge of what I think is the fun stuff, all the contests and concerts and giveaways. They find companies that want to sponsor a promotion and come up with some way to make it interesting and give it away. For example they had a contest going on that if you entered your name you were in the running for a new diamond necklace and $200 gift card to the Vince Young Steakhouse on Valentine’s day. I found that really interesting because you get to meet with new people everyday, make someone’s day and be creative. The last stop on the grand Entercom radio tour was meeting with Nikki Nite, the director of programing. She is the one that decides what songs will be played. The fact that she has to plan out which song to play every hour and how to mix it up and count how many people are listening to that radio station, just seemed like a very stressful job. One of the most interesting facts that I learned was that the top 5 most popular song will be played 30 times in one day, because the odds of someone staying on the same radio station is slim so you play a popular song over and over and at some point people are going to listen to the whole song.

I had a great experience at Entercom and learned a ton even in the short span of two days. It reassured me that I was going into the right field of communications, but do I want to do radio and be on air? Not really, but there are a lot of behind the scenes that seems really interesting. COOL week was overall a really great experience and I would recommend it to all incoming seniors!