It’s hard to believe that 2020’s holiday season is upon us and you know what that means – holiday music and year-end specialty programming! Asst. GSelector Product Manager John Bonou joined us again to help identify holiday best practices, tips and tricks.
First, we began with understanding how GSelector handles Active versus Inactive elements. Essentially, if you don’t need GSelector to acknowledge the elements during the scheduling process, then deactivate elements. This will greatly improve GSelector’s performance while maintaining the deactivated element’s history and attributes. Don’t interpret deactivating an element the same as deleting an element. They’re simply in the background, waiting for you to activate and play them. Blue circles are active and orange squares are inactive.
Next, it’s time to work on your holiday clocks. Remember to work smarter, not harder. Utilize tools like the Clocks and Grids Save As function to duplicate your existing Clocks and Grids and then replace them with holiday positions. Any schedule can have a defined grid, which can be overridden by any clock or schedule of clocks. Switch to a new grid via the override tab: Clocks | Assignment | Grids | Definition | Schedule | Dates. Pro Tip: When you set the override holiday grid, don’t forget to make sure you are correctly returning to original programming when the holiday schedule is complete.
Once we have the content and clocks ready to go, we can start to analyze our projected turnovers using the Goals tab. From the Daypart and Grid window, don’t forget to select your desired holiday Grids and yes, you can define your Holiday clock schedule and then work within that “environment” by switching between grids. As long as you’re not coping settings across your primary and holiday grids, you can freely work within these two grids and it won’t affect your “on air” schedule.
John Bonou presented the concept of scheduling based on a single Category Group / Category and then defining Station Content, like Primary, Secondary, Fill, etc… Either create rotations based on natural projected turnovers or implement Content Goals by going to Goals | Content. John recommended users work off a desired percentage with some flexibility for GSelector to properly find and schedule elements. For example, John wanted a turnover of roughly 30% of his hourly clocks to include Holiday Primary Content. So within the Goals | Content tab, he defined a Content Goal with a percentage minimum of 20% and a maximum of 40%. Don’t forget to add the Station Content Goal into the Holiday Priority List!
Continuing with additional scheduling tips and tricks, we migrated to holiday Priority List best practices. First, we broke down the difference between Title & Song Minimum Separation. Think of Song as, “Boyz II Men – Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer” versus all Titles “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.” With the amount of similar holiday music, it’s always good to use a duplicated Priority List and identify “holiday rotations” versus “regular rotations.” John Bonou even offered the concept of packeting titles together, maintaining the traditional Song Minimum Separation rules and then creating a sub-packet rotation based on the desired packet turnovers. Did you know that GSelector can even match elements with the same Title and Artist? You can adjust that setting by going to Setup | Station | Features | Attributes and Song Identification.
Finally, if you’re not switching to holiday music this season, but would like some relief by mass scheduling stock programming, like a Year End Countdown, A-Z long form programming or any other type of Theme, remember to again – work smarter, not harder. Isolate elements via the Library | Browse and then utilize the Browse List to drag and drop desired elements. You can filter by attributes on the left and/or single click on the Library Browse’s column header to sort A-Z. If you want to do a year end countdown, pending your History settings, add an attribute field like Total Spins, sort A-Z and then drag and drop them over to the Browse List.
If you’re looking to schedule and then repeat a long form piece of programming, we recommend embracing the Copy Schedule option from Scheduler | Copy Schedule. You just choose the source and target station and yes, they can be the same station. Repeat this process for all of the desired times you wish to repeat/duplicate your schedule. If you have questions on which option to use, don’t forget about F1 for the dynamic help. If you’re planning on returning to your original programming halfway through the day, users can easily duplicate a third grid with a split schedule or simply define a single grid for the transition day and use the Clock Override, Clocks | Assignment | Overrides, to override the hour(s) by a clock.
We’re looking for GSelector 4.9.0 and Zetta 5.20.1 Beta users right now! If you’re interested in getting the latest and greatest from RCS, reach out to your local RCS office and let them know you would like to become a Beta power user. We have more sessions on the way as we continue to broadcast live every Thursday at 11am ET. Don’t forget to follow us on www.Facebook.com/RCSSoundSoftware and RSVP for future RCS Live sessions.