When the all-Christmas field in Kansas City suddenly became wide open, KFKF jumped in and tried it last fall. The results were huge in both ratings and revenue. The station turned in what PD Dale Carter (pictured) calls a “dominating performance,” which made a believer out of a skeptic. “I think Christmas fits country,” Carter now says. “I buy into that now maybe more than I did before.”

The trick, of course, will be keeping some of those new listeners. But the station had a multi-pronged plan in place to do just that.

The following Stark Country Q&A with Carter was conducted on Monday, but the release of the holiday book today prompted an update posted in the section specifically referencing ratings.]

SC: Where did the idea originate to try the all-holiday format?
DC: I would love to claim it as my own, but it came from our GM, Marc Harrell. In the course of the last year, both of the AC stations [in the market] that had traditionally done Christmas music changed format, so, it created a hole. He always felt that Christmas kind of belonged on KFKF because KFKF is kind of the god/family/country station; very patriotic, very family-oriented. So he felt like it would do very well here.

SC: Were you hearing any early rumblings in the market about anybody else potentially picking up the format?
DC: Not really. We showed our hand early testing the [station’s Christmas] logo when we were promoting the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert in October. Then we jut basically went on the air with it Nov. 1 and said ‘The day after Thanksgiving, we’re going to be the all-Christmas station.’ The combination of that and the sales effort taking all the money out of the market I think precluded anybody else from doing it. Quite frankly we were surprised that nobody else jumped in, but we’ll take it.

SC: About a week into the format you altered the music quite a bit, lowering the number of country Christmas titled you were playing. Why the change?
DC: When we started the day after Thanksgiving, we almost 100% duplicated what KSD St. Louis had done the year before. They were one of several stations that had done Christmas in St. Louis, and the ratings were pretty good. But really after the first weekend of listening to it on the air, and feeling like we were missing some of the songs that the other two ACs had [played,] we AC-ed it up quite a bit.

SC: How country had it been initially, and how much did you cut it down to?
DC: It was maybe 55/45 AC to country. Where it ended up was probably about 20% country.

SC: Did that turn out to be the right mix, or did you continue to tweak it?
DC: We tweaked it through the life of it. It’s my understanding from people who have done this that you’ll do that every year. Tony [Stevens] has been the music director here since 1984. [Country’s] all he’s done. And I’ve only done country since 1984, too. We were out of our depth when it came to a lot of these artists. So, really, we were glad we had Ed Walker with us doing afternoons, because Ed was PD of [cross town] Star. When he came over to do afternoons at KFKF in 2011, he thought he had finally escaped the Christmas plague, but it followed him to KFKF.

SC: What kind of reaction did you get from listeners when you announced the change was coming?
DC: Mixed. Really, when we flipped, we didn’t get the ‘I hate you, I’m never going to listen to you’ calls because we basically spent a month telling them we were going to do it. But they were definitely in two camps. There was no middle ground. It was ‘I hate your station and I’m never going to listen again. I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ and people who were saying ‘Wow, I’m glad you’re finally doing this. It really belongs on KFKF.’

SC: Did that first group of callers scare you?
DC: Yeah, it does scare you a little bit when you see people say they’re going to tune you our forever when I had a lot of trepidation for doing it in the first place.

SC: Were you running down to the general manager’s office with concern after every call and e-mail like that?
DC: I did. And he would get e-mails from listeners that were thrilled we were doing it and he’d send those to me, so we kind of had an e-mail trail going back and forth between our offices. I was sending him e-mails saying ‘See, I told you this would kill us,’ and his would say ‘See, I told you this was a good thing.’

SC: How soon did you know that it really was a good thing?
DC: When we got the first number that reflected [the change], week three of the December book, where and we took a nice jump. We’d been basically in the mid-fours [before the change], and we rolled in almost a six share in that week. That took us from eighth 25-54 to fifth. And then the following week, when we tweaked the music, we went from fifth to first, and we’ve been first ever since.

If you look competitively at where Q [sister country station KBEQ] was before and where they are now, and where the Wolf [cross town rival WDAF] was before and where they are now, it almost looks to me like if we lost listeners, it’s marginal. It looks like we kept our audience and gained about another half of that audience. Our cume’s gone from the 300,000 level to nearly 600,000. Q stayed relatively even to where they were. My thought was a lot of our listeners might end up over at the Wolf, but they continued to trend downward.

SC: Was there some cross plugging within the cluster?
DC: What really made a difference, and this is something I’ve come to believe in is a big way, and that’s cluster love. Out three other stations were on the air saying, ‘Hey, if you want Christmas music, our sister station at 94.1 is where you’re going to want to be.’ We, conversely, to try to keep the country listeners in the family while we were playing Christmas music, were saying, ‘If you want country, you have our temporary blessing to listen to [KBEQ] 104.3.’ One of [the promos] said ‘You have our permission to go up the dial to 104.3 but no further.’ [WDAF is at 106.5.]

SC: What were you expecting from the ratings? Did you think they’d be as good as they were?
DC: I knew the Christmas ratings would be good. I didn’t know they would be this big. But what happens afterwards? If we blow off our audience, how quickly can we get them back? This week, we’ll get the entire holiday book, which will take us through Jan. 4. But if you look at week three… we’re still at an 11.1 share, which is first 25-54. We’re No. 1 in mornings, middays, afternoon drive, No. 2 at night, and No. 1 on the weekends.

SC: How concerned are you about that ratings halo, and what happens after?
DC: Looking back on it with hindsight, we really had done nothing to market this radio station in the last five years, maybe more. We’ve done no outside marketing, so this was our biggest attempt at outside marketing. Because the buzz on the street was KFKF is the Christmas station, so we had them for five weeks. Our goal, then, is to convert that cume.

We spent 2011 clawing our way back into this thing, and we had gotten to the point where we were seventh 25-54 (M-F 6a-7p). My goal had been to get us into the top 10 and be a strong flanker to KBEQ.

My goal—and we’ll know at the end of January if we’ve done this—is we were seventh going in, maybe we’re sixth or fifth coming out. I have no expectation that we will maintain an 11.2 share, which is where we are today [Monday].

It’s a dominating performance. If you look at 25-54, averaged through three weeks of the holiday book, we’re an 11.2 25-54. The No. 2 station in the market has a 6.8, and they go down from there. It’s a huge story.

[In the full holiday book, released today, KFKF went from a 5.9 25-54 in December to a 9.8 and first place for the holiday book, although isolating the fourth week of the book, the station fell from first to sixth when the holiday format ended. In the 12-plus numbers, it was up 6.8–11.0. Overall, says Carter, “We came out better off than we went in.”]

SC: Were you doing anything specifically through the life of the Christmas format to try to retain the new cume?
DC: Yeah, a couple of things. We went on with a teaser campaign that said ‘We’re coming back as a country station bigger and better, with something only KFKF can do.’ We started that almost immediately with the Christmas music. And then on the 15th of December we hit with the specific promo that said we were going to play back the top 1,000 songs in the stations’ history from A to Z by title, and do that the week between the holidays [Christmas and New Year’s Day] with contests every hour [giving away CDs and tickets to the station’s Superbowl party.]

Also, when we played an Alan Jackson or George Strait [Christmas] song, or Faith or Martina, we ran a sweeper into that saying, ‘Here’s an artist you’ll hear on KFKF even after Christmas.’ So hopefully we got some folks who might have heard Alan or George and thought ‘I want to know where I can hear more of that.’

SC: And you continued contesting in January?
DC: Jan. 5 and 6 were the first two days of the January book, and we’ve got Chesney coming in June, and Strait coming in February, so and we did 12 chances to win both days. [Winners] got to pick which concert to go to. The grand prize winner gets to go to both and go backstage for both. We felt like that was pretty strong to start January with.

SC: Do you think you’ll have some company in the format when you do it again this year?
SC: I wonder if we’re going to be alone. We have already committed to doing it this year. We’re going to flip a day earlier, on Thanksgiving Day. Our strategy at this point is to be on the streets, as we are, to take as much revenue off the table as possible. That’s one of the big incentives for doing it. There’s a lot of money behind this. We had the biggest month we’ve had in years on KFKF with Christmas sales-wise.

SC: Knowing what you know now, would you recommend all-Christmas to other country stations?
DC: I think Christmas fits country. I buy into that now maybe more than I did before. It doesn’t look like it benefited either [competing] country station greatly, so that tells me we kept the bulk of our audience, and we were able to pull audience from just about everybody else. It became a five-week commercial for us.