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Friday, May 24, 2013

Jelli CEO Mike Dougherty & CBS Radio-SF VP/Programming Michael Martin
By Joey Odorisio

User-controlled radio service Jelli has been spreading throughout the country. The service combines tried-and-true radio features such as requests and the “Cage Match” with social networking and video game concepts. Already running as an online radio service at Jelli.net, the service is a hit at Modern Rock KITS (Live 105)/San Francisco, where it has grown from a weekly specialty show to the station’s weeknight programming. FMQB caught up with Jelli CEO Mike Dougherty to discuss how the service works, and CBS Radio-San Francisco VP/Programming Michael Martin to talk about Jelli’s ratings success in the Bay Area.

Mike Dougherty and Jateen Parekh launched Jelli in September of 2008 in San Francisco. The pair originally came from the tech world, not radio. Dougherty worked at Microsoft, while Jelli CTO Paraekh was closely involved in the creation of the Amazon Kindle. Dougherty notes that “our first day on the job was September 15, which was the day that Lehman Bros. and Merrill Lynch blew up. We were an unfunded startup in the radio business, going through one of the worst recessions in advertising in a long time. My wife asked, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re leaving Microsoft now?’”
            Dougherty continues, “We were obviously very excited about this opportunity and started building this concept of crowd sourcing for the radio, where an audience and the Web could be directly involved and connected with the radio station. Our server platform we built allows us to integrate the automation system at the radio station, and it really does unlock so many programming possibilities.“
            The social media aspect allows Jelli to access specific data about listenership as well. “For example, we learn a lot about the audience when we’re on the air. We know who they are and where they’re from in real time,” Dougherty said. “We aren’t doing this right now, but since Jelli is choosing the song that plays next, we can also choose the ad too. We can target specific audiences and start to experiment with placing a more targeted ad.”
            He continues, “In traditional radio, it’s more difficult to do that because of the lack of the ability to target. With Jelli, because we understand the audience so well and we also are the platform that chooses the audio file that plays. We can connect those two together and make sure the ads we play are the most relevant to the audience.”
            Jelli could also expand into more avenues of audience measurement. Dougherty notes that “you have to be careful with privacy, but you could expose some of this data in real time to programmers who could have a dashboard on his real time audience. We’re not talking about Twitter; we’re not about Facebook. We’re talking his actual traditional broadcast and finding out who is participating and what kind of music they like…so a kind of free music research comes along with it.”
            As for the logistics of how Jelli works, it mixes standard radio features like the request line and the “cage match” with aspects of video games and social networking. Jelli can also be integrated with a user’s Facebook account. Dougherty notes that this is essentially “free viral advertising for a radio station’s brand on Facebook.”

Mike Doughtery

            On the Jelli.net webpage itself, users can vote for songs, bookmark them as their “favorites” and shoot off “rockets” and “bombs.” When it comes to voting on songs, Dougherty says that Jelli allows for pure transparency in its processes. “If a song has a 15 score, and then the next song has a 15, then songs have 14’s and so on... That is literally the score. You can change the score by voting a checkmark or an X. It adds or subtracts a +1 to the score. So it’s very transparent to the user base, unlike request shows or other ways radio uses requests. The audience always knows where it stands. There’s no black box that your request goes into. The audience always knows exactly what they need to do to get this song to play.”
            When it comes to your favorite songs, you can even “vote all,” which adds +1 to every one of your favorite songs to increase their scores. Dougherty adds, “if you like another user’s tastes, you can go to the user’s profile and ‘vote all’ on their favorites too. It’s like following someone on Twitter where you can say, ‘yeah, I love your taste man, Vote All.’ Now I’ve voted on every one of your favorites and all of those songs now have an extra +1 on them.”
            There is also the “Rock Meter,” which lets users simply vote on if the song “rocks” or “sucks.” If the meter swings to the “sucks” side all the way to the left, the track “blows up” right in the middle of the song and is knocked off the air, via wacky sound effects.
            As for the “rocket/bomb” concept, he calls it “a super vote. Part of the game mechanics is if you used up one of your rockets to get a song played, you can get your rocket count replenished when other users vote for it on the Rock Meter. It rewards good behavior and rewards a user who picks a song that other people like and gets it on-the-air.”
            He adds, “There’s the chat window with a live chat room going on alongside the station. There’s also a fun, eBay-auction kind of experience, where as the clock ticks down to the next song, you can compete to see if you’re going to be next. It can literally come down to the last second.”
            Dougherty adds that Jelli has a request form ”where we ask users what songs we should be adding to Jelli. They can vote on it, just like they do to Jelli. We also do that for features, asking what Jelli should add. One user said right at the beginning that there needs to be a death match: two songs enter, one song leaves. It would be kind of fun to do a true ‘Hot or Not’ experience on Jelli that we could add to the experience, especially for Pop songs which generally have that very big divide between whether people love them or hate them.”
            He continues, “We also look at it from the perspective of social jukebox. Basically a lot of people playing together…listening to the same song like at a bar jukebox, where we can give the audience some tools like you can at a jukebox. If you put in $2.00 your song jumps ahead of the queue, like in the digital jukeboxes they have now, that’s how the ‘rocket’ works.”
            While Jelli is a 24/7 online radio service, it is expanding onto the FM airwaves. Jelli inked a deal with Triton Media last October. Triton, through Dial Global, syndicates two versions of Jelli: “Rock Jelli” and “Pop Jelli.” They began airing on ten stations starting in March: WBOS/Boston; WPST/Trenton; KXTE/Las Vegas; WJBX/Fort Myers, FL; WJLK/Jersey Shore, NJ; WKRL/Syracuse; WKLL/Utica, NY; KISN/Bozeman, MT; KBAZ/Missoula and KTRS/Casper, WY.
            However, Jelli got its FM foothold first at Modern Rock KITS (Live 105)/San Francisco. Launching in June of last year with a Sunday night-only, two-hour edition; Jelli recently expanded at Live 105 into a nightly show. Dougherty says that CBS Radio-San Francisco VP/Programming Michael Martin “and the programming team at Live 105 saw this as an opportunity to reach out to an audience that’s spending more and more time on social media and engage with them in new ways. Live 105 has always experimented with new programming ideas, and this was something that fit with that strategy, especially with the Male 18–34 demographic.”
            The original Sunday night version of Jelli on Live 105 “was a totally automated show, with no DJs and very much about the participation in the chat window. It was a very active show, and had a lot of fun things happen on the show with the audience participating. Obviously we played a lot of songs that are popular on Live 105. The audience also was able to have a lot of fun and they did things that radio did more of in the past. For example: themed Rock blocks. A few weeks ago, the Sunday night show was just animal songs. The animal block started with a few songs with the name animal, Pearl Jam – “Animal” was one of the first three songs of the show. Pretty soon they went into ponies and horses. Then they went ironic and had a cougar mini-block with The Lemonheads’ cover of “Mrs. Robinson,” and then “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains Of Wayne, and then the show ended with a debate whether an oyster is an animal. So they went with Blue Oyster Cult – “Godzilla.”
            Dougherty continues, “I was talking to a senior executive at a big radio company last night, and I mentioned the animal block. He said when he was a DJ, he thought about treating programming like that. But things effectively changed a bit when the music research ended up driving more of the choices in the programming.”
            The weeknight version of Jelli is called the “Free For All,” with Live 105 DJ Menace acting as a color commentator on the show. He also has a sidekick, Megan Holiday, who chats with listeners online in the chat window.
            Martin adds that he named Menace the host of “Free For All” because he didn’t want a typical DJ in the time slot. “I wanted someone who got the whole concept of the Free For All, from the on-air execution to what’s going on in the chat room, and just the overall mentality. He’s really just doing color commentary: ‘Looks like a real indie night. Hey, you ’90s freaks are coming out. What’s up with all the Pearl Jam haters? Why are you guys trying to rid of Pearl Jam records?’”

Michael Martin

            Martin says that Jelli has been a ratings hit as well. “Looking at Men 18–34 in nights, last week Live 105 was at a 10.3 share for second place. Before we aired ‘Free For All,’ this station was sitting about ninth or tenth at night. When you go to Men 18-49 it’s the same story. Right now we have an 8.5 share for second place. In almost every demographic: Persons 18-49, Persons 18-34, Men 18-34, even Men 25-54, there was a rise.” He adds, “The first people who came to the party were the college kids, so it made sense why the 25-34 numbers were up. It wasn’t really a teen thing, it was more college kids.”
            While on-air, the show essentially runs like a syndicated program. Martin says, “We have designated when the talk slots are, exactly how long they will be there, and where exactly they’re placed. Menace has zero control over those. When he hears the sound and the bed hits, start talking… and shut up at this point because the train is rolling with or without him. I think that Jelli is going to get to the next level of technology where we can actually pause the game and talk where we want. Right now it’s just hard, designated talk spots.”
            Martin says he’s still getting used to the idea of turning the station over for an entire airshift to the listeners. “There’s nothing in Selector for that airshift - nothing. On the back end we’ve chosen the sandbox they can play in, but I put no controls on it. What if they want to hear five Bob Marley tracks in a row? What if this hour has six new songs in it? I wanted to see what the audience would do, and Jelli gave me the opportunity.”
            “I started asking, ‘Oh my God, what if Muse doesn’t play? What if our top researching records don’t play?’ Well, we could force them in and make sure they’re scheduled, but I thought that was really not delivering on the 100 percent, you-control-it message. Plus, I wanted to see what they would do. Why not see what the audience is actually going to do, versus what we think they’re going to do?”
            However, the Live 105 edition of Jelli doesn’t go as deep and wide as the online version. And the weeknight Free-For-All is a bit more limited than the Sunday version on the air. Martin says that “programmers like to put these songs in these little tertiary, ‘spice’ categories. The one thing I learned about the audience really fast was if you give those songs to this crowd, they will flock to it. They won’t race to your Powers, and then every now and then give you a little spice. They will race to the spice, because they’re checking the B.S. level of this. They’re checking to see, ‘Will they really play this?’”
            “Now the good thing is that it does take a collective effort. It’s not just one kid sitting there who can dictate your radio station. It’s a collective movement that has to happen. You can also watch the chat room and watch them try to rally each other: ‘Come on man, let’s do this! Let’s push this up!’ I think it’s a fine balance of what you play, a little bit of calculated depth of how far you want to go, and every station is going to be different.”
            Dougherty says the next step in Jelli will be linking it to mobile devices. “Just think of a remote control for your radio, with a Rock/Sucks buttons on your iPhone. You could literally choose this station and directly participate, and get all this great information on about what’s happening on the radio station, but also the Rock/Sucks Meter and shoot a rocket off right from your car or right from wherever you are on to the radio.”

[eQB Content by Joey Odorisio]