Who Cares

Our radio industry seems to have had the passion squeezed completely out of it as the commercial investment companies have squeezed into it.  Why did the investors show up in the first place?  Because the product people had created such compelling entertainment that our margins were topping 50 and 60 percent.  So who wouldn’t want into that kind of business plan and then want to squeeze a few more percent out?  In the process they squeezed most of the product people out and with them went the those most passionate about the product and left a lot of great sales people with nothing very creative to sell.  That leaves the investors holding a rather smelly bag and resultant ratings have been nothing to write home about as our stations have become a pasteurized homogenous tangible dated product.

Ownership and investors need to do a deep gut check on the product side, much as CBS has, and get some passion back into the equation.  Let’s get the hallways humming again and try some new concepts. Yes, many will fail and that will lead to many more successes.  Entertainment is a continuously evolving process and every day is a new one.  Maybe this blog post from Mediapost today will add a little inspiration.    Garry Leigh at Snafu Consulting

Last week Max wrote “You’re Nothing Without A Link.”Dwight Zahringer wrote in response, “Well, I am glad to see that mainstream media is finally getting it to a certain point. I’m happy to read this article but also shake my head on why these simple tactics take so long to get embedded in the brain of media professionals. I work with so many agencies- people with large professional degrees that their parents paid a lot of money for and they never learned basic common knowledge that they must evolve with media. SEO is basic and if you write for a living then realize this simple statement, ‘Content is King, Links are Queen.’ Without content there is nothing for search engines to grab and without links there is no way for them to find content. Keep up the education. Bite small and chew, then swallow.

Friday, May 2, 2008  Why Passion Matters By Max Kalehoff  In a hyper-competitive market, competence is expected and only flawless execution is tolerable. But that’s no longer enough. Today, the ultimate competitive advantage is passion.When passion lets loose, you drive focus, cultivate mastery, leverage spontaneity, foster creativity, build intuition and live toward mission. The dots connect. Clarity emerges. Your own bar of excellence sets higher, and you become infatuated with exceeding it. The result is accelerated and extended value creation that otherwise would never have been possible. Think of the places in your business where the presence of passion really matters — making you stand out beyond the rest, or sink into mediocrity. It’s about approaching things with the utmost thought and care, versus doing anything less. In my experience, there are a few places in business especially sensitive to passion:    Listening and understanding your customers and the market.  Innovating based on your market insight and intuition.  Building your product with quality and speed.  Ensuring the highest aesthetic and usability.  Refining your product over and over and over again, until it’s better and better and better.  Paying attention to all the details and signals that comprise the experience.  Inspiring your employees, customers, investors and other stakeholders.  Engaging and collaborating with customers.  Fixing things quickly when they go wrong — and then making them far better.  Using your product yourself and recommending it to friends because you truly believe it’s the best.Businesses with passion tend to excel in these areas, while businesses that don’t tend to just get by or break. I know — this is all obvious. But the irony is that most businesses and brands I encounter come up short. It’s probably because passion is not something that can be bought, outsourced or faked. Rather, the presence of passion has more to do with an authentic and fierce desire for your product to really change the game. Of course, it also has a huge amount to do with the CEO and leadership. It has to do with hiring and grooming an employee base that is culturally aligned and motivated with a real stake in the outcome. Same for investors, advisors, customers and partners. Who’s doing it right? We can all name some of the mega-brands that veer toward passion, like Apple, Google and JetBlue. But passion is equally important in smaller businesses, and perhaps more attainable and prevalent. In my life, some examples include instant-messaging aggregator Meebo and microblog platform Twitter. On a micro scale, there’s my barber Alberto at Astor Hair, the many local farmers at New York’s Green Markets, the Little Mexican Café near my home and, of course, my son’s nanny, Aliana. Does your business and product embody passion? If not, it’s probably at risk of being displaced by one that does.

Brand Experience Explored

 

Articles abound in business publications today on the best ways to stay afloat during the deluge of downright dismal economic news and I want to focus on understanding the customer’s expectation of their brand experience with you, and staying true to it. 

• Who is your customer? 

I guess the answer to that depends on the corporate environment you experience today and may well change tomorrow.  A few years ago for most in radio, it was the listener as the first touch point followed by all who come in contact with our brand downstream from that point. As we began reaching margins in the sixty percent plus range, Wall Street jumped in with both feet and coincidentally fragmentation and compression factors changed the underlying economic formulae of our industry such that customer focus moved to analysts/brokers/investors/accountants and listeners were lost in the rush.  Remember the days of ratings AND revenue.

So now that the dust has settled and consolidated companies can’t meet promised numbers leading to core assets being shed to keep income propped up, will new smaller and more limber ownership return to user centric models again putting a priority on meeting the listener’s expectations or is it even worth trying? 

This week’s radio push of “well we’re trying to put a radio receiver on every device from here on out, who cares if the programming we put on all those new receivers isn’t any more compelling that what we know as radio today” simply won’t do it.  Promos for HD radio channels don’t seem to be resonating very well as televisions messages on digital set top boxes just confuse the products for all. What does the HD message hourly strive to do for your brand?  Point up the weaknesses of your present programming by pitching the strengths of your other digital programming?  Can it offer the ability to go deep on some relevant facets of what makes your sound different and compelling thereby underlining your strengths?

Let’s learn a lesson from Barack who over the last week appeared to lose sight of his core message and become much more like Hillary and the DC old school his constituency so dislikes.  We need to stay on message and not become more like our competitors thus diluting our worth to all.  Why did the listener come to us in the first place?  Legendary stations create an audio experience unlike all of the others available anywhere.  What is our perceived brand and what are we doing to deliver on that every quarter hour?  No not what corporate is trying to say to stockholders with a catchy new slogan, but our brand to our LISTENER which makes us unique and unduplicateable.  Truly successful broadcasters use a multitude of means to reach and remind listeners of that brand and to reinforce it’s unique bond with that listener. 

Now that being said, the listener is ever changing and our interaction with them in  preaching brand relevance today must always evolve and grow. As consumer’s attitudes and habits are changing forever thru our housing crisis, petroleum price run-up, and price inflation on absolute family necessities ,we need to understand what the audience has now decided are meaningless luxuries or are truly important items worthy of sacrifice in an unsure economic climate.  The real core values of many are being re-examined and family resources being reallocated to reflect these changes so the same old rules in reaching emotional and financial touch points are now different.

Expectations have changed on a fundamental level over the last several months and what have we done to understand them, much less meet them?  Before you give away another gallon of gas, let’s find out what will really win the hears and minds of the fans of your brand, and highlight their chosen solutions rather than underline the same old problems.   Your answer needs to be different from the next station up the dial or another url on your listener’s IE Favorites. If not, you are simply background noise in the digital universe.  To increase usage and grow your brand, you must first understand your brand perception today and them employ the necessary tactics to keep it’s usage relevant and fun as your audience changes.  Let’s get to work.

 

Garry Leigh

Behavioral Targeting And Radio?

This morning while reading a breakdown of research related to behavioral targeting, it again became clear that most new or emerging media mavens really have no concept of the environment of those using or consuming their service.
The trick has always been to create greater user relevance and a richer experience whatever the medium or mix of media, and we in radio have spent decades researching the “psychograph” of our audience to deliver just that.  As the ability to track an individual across the depth and breadth of their daily experience again becomes the obvious missing link in figuring the ROI on a media plan, are we delivering our internal research results to quantify our strength in reaching their target?  Our focus group, call out, auditorium testing, frequent listener group profiles, relevant website e-commerce numbers, and ratings qualitative (when all are truly and accurately measured) all add up to a fairly clear picture of our listener and their daily cross-platform exposure to a marketing message.  Most new and emerging media can only dream of such an understanding of their user base and are frantically trying to find ways to glean metrics across multiple platforms, publishers, portals, etc. while we do little to really maximize their message within our carefully constructed context (or listener environment).  We are so far ahead in this area and yet obviously are doing little to make our metrics work within the planner and buyer’s world.  Can you put your research into a format to make it simple for them to incorporate into their buying programs versus these new media siphoning off billions from ad budgets?  Google is creating vast wealth from contextual advertising, which is what successful broadcast operators have done for years.  How are we doing in stating our contextual case versus theirs?  As behavioral begins to show dramatically better ROI than contextual, and it is according to Jupiter Research, what are we doing to put our story into those terms and to have our own metrics to support it?  Or do we simply try to defend our traditional media portion of the pie and let the rest take what they will?
We have a new internet generation to sell on the merits of our product and it’s efficiencies while we have the challenge of better adapting the advertisers message to maximize impact within our context.  Are you running or working on creating different creative to match the daypart or does one size fit all?  We spend years working with our personalities on tailoring their content to the quantifiably available audience, so wouldn’t it help to do the same for every element in the hour?  If your company doesn’t own outdoor, tv, digital out of home, etc., are you doing everything possible to have current glean metrics on your audience’s consumption of their products?
We have always researched to improve ratings and thereby improve revenue.  Now we need to include research to generate metrics for millennials to make the broadcast choice an obvious one in their media makeup.
Garry Leigh

Where Is The Upside?

Event marketing is the short answer? What do you have on the calendar for 08 and how big is the lift?  This should help motivate your sales folks!  Garry Leigh

According to research released recently by PQ Media, spending on branded entertainment marketing grew 14.7% to an all-time high of $22.3 billion in 2007, nearly doubling in size over the last five years as brand marketers continue to shift budgets from traditional advertising to alternative marketing strategies which include:

1. Event sponsorship and marketing
2. Product placement

3.   Advergaming and webisodes

This marketing strategy that integrate products into entertainment venues that provide high engagement and interactivity, represented approximately 8 cents of every marketing services dollar spent in 2007, according to PQ Media. And the market for branded entertainment is projected to expand another 13.9% in 2008 to $25.41 billion, despite slowing overall economic growth.

Patrick Quinn, President & CEO of PQ Media, said “… there are strong secular trends driving investment from traditional advertising media to alternative marketing strategies… Americans are spending more time outside their homes, online at work, communicating via wireless devices and multitasking with various media, which has created a generation of elusive consumers for brand marketers to reach… (leading) to increased investment in alternative marketing tactics.”

Key trends impacting each segment of branded entertainment include:

1.   Spending on event sponsorship and marketing, the largest segment of branded entertainment, rose 12.2% to $19.18 billion in 2007. Event sponsorship and event marketing attract new customers by using face-to-face engagement

2.   Paid product placement spending grew 33.7% to $2.90 billion in 2007, and at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.8% from 2002 to 2007

3.   Spending on advergaming and webisodes increased 34.8% to $217.0 million in 2007, fueled by efforts among marketers to reach the elusive 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Advergaming and webisodes, while the smallest branded entertainment segment, is the fastest growing, climbing at a 51.7% CAGR from 2002 to 2007

Branded entertainment is expected to grow at a double-digit pace in 2008, driven by nearly $9 billion in event marketing spend, robust product placement spending, particularly on reality programming, at $3.5 billion, up nearly 25%, and growth in webisodes of 46%, as major networks begin to produce full-length online episodes in an effort to tap the coveted youth market.

The outlook for branded entertainment marketing through 2012, says the report, is for double-digit growth overall, despite slower economic expansion in the period. The sector is projected to grow at a 12.8% CAGR from 2007 to 2012, exceeding $40 billion.

For additional information from PQ Media, please visit them here. This was published by MediaPost 

Google Results When Searching Radio

OK, not exactly, but Google’s new venture into selling radio ad space may help those in radio better understand and justify the medium’s role in the advertising equation.  We have all heard much about it but many have not taken the time to get articulate about the pitch being made on our behalf.  Here we go….    

Broadcast your ads on the radio, and increase the impact of your AdWords campaigns.

Radio advertising can increase the overall impact of your ad campaigns when used in conjunction with online advertising. 57% of online radio listeners look up items on the web after hearing an audio ad. Learn more.

Radio is also a cost-effective way to reach customers who are not online — whether they’re driving to work, or the gym, or the store, you can still get your message across.

With Google AdWords, you can launch radio ad campaigns in just a few quick and easy steps,and do it all online.

 

Create a custom radio ad. Use the Google Ad Creation Marketplace to get help creating an ad that’s customized to your business. Get in touch with professionals who provide quality scriptwriting, editing, production, and voice over talent – all within a budget you set. Listen to sample radio ads created in the marketplace
Showcase your business on over 1,600 terrestrial FM and AM radio stations across the U.S. Target your customers on “top ten” stations in all 25 of the most popular US markets — we can even guarantee premium inventory during all standard dayparts.
Closely monitor your campaign performance. Review online reports to track results of your radio campaign. You can find out exactly when your ad aired, and you’ll even have access to a recording of how your ad sounded on the radio. Read inside tips on what makes a successful radio campaign

 

©2008 Google – AdWords Home – Help – Print Ads – TV Ads

 

 

Online Selling Offline

Terrestrial radio, and in fact traditional media in general, has suffered from the perception of being on the outside looking in to a new world of interactive technologies and methods of brand engagement.  Judging by stock prices and revenue generation, agencies and clients have been looking for and finding other viable means of message distribution and probably more importantly, finding metrics for justification of those decisions which radio has never quite been able to muster.  Print circulation figures have never proven real, Arbitron methodology is beyond antique and is opaque at best, the writers strike has made television up front irrelevant, while online and emerging media metrics have proven easily manipulated by bots and click fraud of all kinds.  What is a media buyer or interested client to do?  Combine metrics across all to gain clarity on each!  Boy this took way too long and it took a company like Google, not Project Apollo (Arbitron and Nielsen combined) to get it done.  We can’t be afraid to embrace any of this but rather need to look ahead of this V1 and insure future versions are as accurate and truly representative as possible.  Here is a glimpse courtesy of MediaPost.   — Garry Leigh

Armstrong Unveils ‘Top Secret Strategy’ To Agencies: Dashboards, Tools To Scale Media Buying

by Joe Mandese, Friday, Mar 7, 2008 8:00 AM ET

ORLANDO – GOOGLE IS NOT out to disintermediate advertising agencies, but it looks as if it has it’s heart set on disintermediating some other organizations that help agencies manage how they buy media. That was one of the takeaways from Google President-Advertising and Commerce, North America, Tim Armstrong during a keynote address Thursday at the American Association of Advertising Agencies Media Conference here. Unveiling what Armstrong referred to as Google’s “top secret strategy” for helping agencies transform the way they plan, buy and manage media – not just online, but across all their media options – Armstrong show a new “dashboard” approach it has developed for agencies for managing buys across media. “It basically takes a mix of different media types and puts them together,” he said, adding that the system, which is still being developed, was part of a suite of new tools Google is building to make the lives of media buyers “easier.” The new dashboard, he said, would enable buyers to manage mixes of offline media like TV, radio and print campaigns, with their online display and search advertising, and to harness their data streams to show how one platform influences traffic to the others. Armstrong described the dashboard as one of the things Google excecs have been drawing on “napkins” to better service agencies, but said he continues to be greeted by fear and trepidation from shops when he meets with them. To illustrate that point, Armstrong recalled an especially difficult sales call he was summoned to by Google CEO Eric Schmidt a while back with an agency chief who ripped Google’s approach to the advertising marketplace. What did Armstrong do? He hired the exec, former Interpublic Chairman David Bell, to help design better systems for helping ad agencies. It is the same spirit with which Google has recently begun striking alliances directly with agencies, such as its much publicized hook-up with Publicis, which Armstrong said was all about building “tools to help you guys scale.” One top media agency executive in the room told MediaDailyNewsshe loved what Google was doing, but not necessarily the way it was communicating it. “We always feel like they are talking down to us,” she said. Joe Mandese is Editor of MediaPost.