by Charles Deitz

If it was two months from now, I could write this piece with a fuzzy remembrance for those days when you never think you’re going to make a deadline, want to fire all your staff and go back to the drawing board. I would love to be writing from that safe vantage point in the future, but it is not the future it is now. My team finds themselves entrenched in a radio station re-imaging project, fully loaded and completely unprepared, with more bad ideas than you can shake a stick at.

We are the last official radio broadcasting class at Mount Hood Community College, in the last term, on our last legs, and right when we are all putting one foot out the door, they ask us to come together for the biggest project the program has ever pulled off. But out of the mire, brilliance prevails. Bold product development, courageous marketing, and groundbreaking sponsorship strategies all with a comfortable budget of zero. We may not have state of the art facilities, or a list of deep industry contacts, but instead we are a bunch of rag-tag creatives with big hearts, big egos, and a giant slingshot.

The task at hand is seemingly easy, flip the image of a college rock station, or in other words, blow it up. Saying that is the only easy part, in order to accomplish the mission, the 14 person class was divided into three teams, Product, Sales, and Promotions and Marketing, each team with 4 or 5 people, each hungry for the goal of creating a remarkable radio product.

The product team is busy with creating a new logo and position statement, which is grueling creative labor at best, and then forming a new web site which is user friendly and better than the other sites out there, which there are many. The promotion and marketing team has a hard row to hoe because they are trying to create buzz about something that is not only intangible but does not even exist yet. Sales is slated to manage the product and market it to sponsors in the community. Keep in mind that no one actually has experience doing any of this, so it is just as academic as it is real-world. As the leader of the sales team, the only thing that is helping us push through the awkward process of generating clients is the overwhelming propensity to fall flat on our faces, otherwise we wouldn’t even get out the door.

Our reading revolves around Seth Godin’s bovine line of texts, and we are creating a Purple Cow with a Big Moo, hopefully. In this world I am a sapling, but the teachers and students are providing enough water and light for us to grow some strong roots. We have given ourselves the moniker of “The Future of Radio” which to some might sound like saying ” The Future of Horseshoe Making” but we are here to reinstate relevance, reinvigorate radio creative, and save this ship cause we threw the life boat out last year. We’ll see what it looks like in two months.