The Day I Told My Son What I Have Done

OK. Bear with me here. This requires a bit of background, but that’s what makes this story so delicious. It’s the payoff of a joke with a 14-year setup. Indulge me.

Back in the early 90s, when I got out of grad school, my first “real” job was with a radio consultancy called Broadcast Architecture. I started there as an immature project coordinator, and left six years later as an immature Vice President. While I still had a lot to learn, that surely wasn’t the fault of the two men I worked for there, Frank Cody and Brian Stone, who to this day have had an immeasurable impact on my life and career.

My main job at BA was audience research. We used wireless dials with a digital readout of 0–100 to test music and other forms of radio programming with radio listeners. Two to three days a week, for nearly six years, I was in a different city, testing new and old songs in front of 100 new people a night. Between that and a steady barrage of focus groups, I believe I talked to 40–50,000 people over my run at BA. Each night, I’d have to keep them motivated for as much as two hours while they used their dials to respond to hundreds of 8–10 second “hooks” — the most recognizable part of a song. If people flagged, the scores went down, which would give us flawed results. It was doing this for hundreds of nights that taught me how to engage a crowd and read a room…