We were honored this week to have Stanislas Mourdon, RCS Senior European Engineer, live in our new offices in White Plains, NY to discuss how some of his users interpret Zetta Splits. If you have a morning show or other primary content that you want to distribute across multiple stations, why now have Zetta handle the heavy lifting for you? We discussed some of the benefits of Zetta Splits, how to customize workflows and more importantly, we expressed the importance of reaching out to your local RCS contact to help us, help you achieve your programming goals.
First, let’s begin by reviewing Zetta Splits. For today’s conversation, we conceptually discussed Zetta Splits, instead of focusing on how to build out your Splits. If you’re looking for an extensive video on how to construct your Splits and their corresponding behaviors, then reference our previous RCS Live here. Zetta Splits is the programming feature that allows a main Zetta station (Zetta Splits Master) to host the primary content, like a morning show, and then when the Splits Master triggers an element that is allowed to breakaway, the Splits Client (follower) is allowed to play their local content, like their own local commercial traffic log, returning to the Splits Master programming when finished.
Stan was on hand to review how important Zetta Splits are to his current programmers, outlining how you can not only feature one morning across multiple stations, but identify what assets types or programming elements can be localized. Use Splits to schedule local commercial traffic logs, imaging, or music segments. Speaking on scalability, Stan was describing how he has one user that has a single morning show that is broadcasting across 100 radio stations, while maintaining local music for each station.
There’s something to be said regarding programming decisions, like a network head end that is distributed across multiple affiliates, but there’s even triggers the morning show itself can fire while on the air during a content break. For example, Zetta can feature Hot Keys Tags. Define the element you wish to play via a Hot Key and if that Hot Key has Tag properties, then once the morning show talent triggers the Hot Key, Zetta will play each Zetta Split’s corresponding element. So, if you’re thinking as a programmer, what is that Hot Key playing? It could be a local Legal ID, telephone number, contest promo, etc… Let’s offer an example in which the morning show is running a gift card contest where each local station will be giving away their own gift cards to local winners. The on air product would sound like, “It’s time for you to win with the RCS Morning Show!” The talent would fire the Hot Key, along with the corresponding Tags, and the air product would sound like, “Now’s the time to call – 914-259-4600,” featuring each local station’s telephone number. Again, making sure that you’re respecting the programming properties, like including the same runtime for all corresponding Tags, there’s no limit on how users can design their Tags. Each local Tag can be voiced by the local imaging voice, a voice tracker, or whomever you want.
In addition, with the new Zetta Imaging Fallback feature, programmers can define a piece of audio to play, but if there’s no audio available to play at the Splits level, like an expired run date or the Production Director doesn’t have the promo ready, then Zetta will fall back to the next available piece of audio. These can be station specific, Splits, Station Groups, or Global. This way, your local Split always has something to play.
Zetta Splits can be a very valuable tool, especially if your station is looking to feature one primary content across multiple stations. And of course, users can blend when they want to include Splits. Perhaps it’s only for a single daypart, or all day but excluding a single daypart. And with Zetta Split’s scalability, the most important question becomes, “What do you want to achieve?”
RCS is always looking for Beta users! If you want to get your hands on the latest RCS features for Zetta, GSelector, Aquira and more, then reach out to your local RCS contact to become a Beta user. Also, if you’re going to be attending a radio conference this year, like the Country Radio Seminar (CRS), then schedule a time for a free one-on-one training session. Bring your GSelector database to discuss scheduling techniques or review Zetta workflows that won’t affect your on-air product. Find out more information here. And while you’re there, users can apply for our current open positions. Don’t forget to check out all our past videos online on our RCS Live Archive. and we’ll see you next Thursday at 11am ET for another RCS Live.