I fell for it!

Friday's post about an All-Christmas station was just a stunt by the Omaha station, which has now changed its format to "Everything Rock...the '80s and More."

In radio, "stunting" is what a station employs when it is about to change formats, and uses a temporary format in the interim in order to create buzz around what their station is about to become. Furthermore, it pretty much drives away their previous demographic. Stunting is also used to confuse other radio stations that might be competitors - with no hint to what the station will eventually settle on playing, they can't adjust or change their own programming strategies in order to steal a piece of the advertising pie. Often, the stunting will be drastic - an all-classical station will change to all-metal - or just inane - like playing one artist or even one song over and over again.

I'm not sure if stunting for only a few days is the norm, but I seem to remember WNEW stunting for months and months until they finally settled on (the failed) Blink 102.7.

However, it will be interesting to see who goes all-Christmas this year. WPLJ went all-Christmas for the first time ever last year (past their "24 Hours Of Christmas"), and I think WNEW did as well.