Monitor Profile: Reimaging Wnuc, Atkins Shoots The Bullet Across Bow Of More Female Rivals

While talk was swirling at the recent Country Radio Seminar in Nashville about the perceived need for a male-targeted version of the country format, WNUC Buffalo, N.Y., PD Chris Atkins was hard at work preparing just such a station. In fact, Atkins blew off the CRS at the last minute this year to ready the station's March 14 relaunch as the Bullet.
WNUC, licensed to Wethersfield Township, N.Y., is unhappily situated halfway between the Buffalo and Rochester markets, and Atkins says its signal reaches an area that covers about 10 counties, or the entire western third of the state. While Atkins claims WNUC is No. 1 in most of those counties, "when you get into the metros you start running into problems" in terms of ratings. In the fall Arbitron book, the station had a 1.2 12-plus share in Buffalo and a .9 share in Rochester. "Let's face it, we can't fall off the floor with our ratings," says Atkins. "They couldn't get much worse."
Until its change to the Bullet, WNUC had been trying to compete directly with the very successful WYRK Buffalo and WBEE Rochester, two stations that Atkins says "have absolutely nothing in common programmingwise," so trying to counter-program both was quite a challenge.
"We were trying, apparently to no avail, to copy both stations" and, in the process, "sounded like the little kid brother of both," he says. "We were safe and sterile." Thanks to the heritage of WYRK and WBEE, Atkins says, WNUC was always perceived as "the other station." Worse, he says, Buffalo listeners thought of WNUC as a Rochester station and vice versa. The station was, according to Atkins, in the midst of "a major identity crisis."
What to do? "Enter the Bullet," says Atkins.
The idea started, he says, around the holidays last year, when he was feeling "disenfranchised" by current music. "In the last year I've started getting bummed out about what was coming out [of Music Row]. We were breaking our backs calling ourselves "new country' and trying to beat both [rival] stations to the new music and literally every week going, "There is nothing to add this week.' " Slowly, Atkins began to realize that he wasn't alone and that his entire staff, and many of his listeners, had also lost their passion for the current country music.
"We started doing some focus groups," he says. "A lot of field work went on into the early winter months to find out what was going on in our listeners' minds." Staffers also flew down to Arbitron headquarters in Maryland for diary reviews aimed at discovering why, despite a cume of 106,000 in the Buffalo TSA, Atkins says, "we were getting killed."
What they discovered was not only an identity crisis but a "very large phantom cume problem." Despite being the second-choice station for a lot of people, Atkins says, "we don't get anywhere near the [diary] credit we deserve."
But here's an ironic twist. Because WYRK is so female-oriented, according to Atkins, WNUC has always attracted disenfranchised males, to the tune of about a 60% male composition. The growth audience for WNUC has actually been among "women who don't use WYRK, but that wasn't a big enough audience to make a difference for us." So since the males were already on board, why not super-serve them?
"WNUC wasn't a bad-sounding radio station-it just didn't fill a need," he says. "The Bullet fills a need." As proof, he says, "I've answered the [request line] more in the past two weeks than I did in the two years I've been here."
As part of the change, Atkins not only started playing more male-appeal records by artists like Charlie Daniels, George Jones, and Merle Haggard, he also paired a male co-host with the female morning jock and upped the frequency of the service elements, doubling the number of traffic and weather reports, as well as adding three more morning-drive newscasts. In addition, he tapped a new, male production voice talent and lined up a new logo and new programming clocks. Other changes included doubling the size of the library, and, Atkins says, "a lot of re-branding and re-imaging."
Now the station is using liners like "high-caliber country" and "bringing out the big guns."
Prior to joining WNUC as PD a little more than two years ago, Atkins was PD at WFRG Utica, N.Y., country radio's original "Frog" station. He says that experience taught him the importance of branding. "People don't remember things like "continuous country favorites' or "14 in a row.' Our name was "New Country 107.7.' Blah. It said nothing." With "the Bullet," Atkins says, "people remember the name," thanks to reminders like gunshot noises between songs.
In the music library, Atkins says, "there is absolutely no age limit on a song. The library we put in is completely based on [the questions] "Is it a hit record we want to hear?' and "Is it country?' There were some songs we had to cut that were hard for me, like "Strawberry Wine,' [because] it's such a female-oriented song." But, he adds, "it's not about gender; it's about content. There is a lot of stuff by Suzy Bogguss and Tanya Tucker that makes more sense for us than a lot of the female stuff out right now."
The current library hovers at about 35 songs, and heavies spin 42 times a week, so, Atkins says, "We are by no means an oldies station." With a two-hour clock, the station plays 21 songs in a row throughout the workday and is "sweeping music through two hours of the other guys' commercials."
Here's a recent 1 p.m. hour: Collin Raye, "That's My Story"; Jo Dee Messina, "Lesson In Leavin' "; Mary Chapin Carpenter, "Down At The Twist And Shout"; Brad Paisley, "Me Neither"; Dwight Yoakam, "Long White Cadillac"; Kenny Chesney, "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy"; Charlie Daniels Band, "South's Gonna Do It"; Alan Jackson, "Mercury Blues"; Lee Ann Womack, "I'll Think Of A Reason Later"; Brooks & Dunn, "My Next Broken Heart" and "You'll Always Be Loved By Me"; John Michael Montgomery, "Sold (The Grundy County Auction Incident)"; John Anderson, "Black Sheep"; Marty Stuart, "Little Things"; and Montgomery Gentry, "Daddy Won't Sell The Farm."
"There are acts now that I can play that I couldn't play two weeks ago, like Charlie Robison and Chris LeDoux," says Atkins, adding that male country is "not a novelty format; it's an alternative format. This gives us a more competitive product. It's easier to brand and sell. The goal for us is to be the first [male country] success story."