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An IPOD Economy
by JIMMY RISK
Have you glanced the share price of public radio companies lately? From
Clear Channel to Cox, you'll find Satellite Radio, a 3 year 'start up' or
'up start', however you see it, to be valued better than any of them. The
Good news for us is that even if satellite radio ramped to the 60-70 million
cume that Mel Karmazin predicts, it still doesn't affect the local selling
landscape where we make our living. What we should take from satellite radio
is the feeling of how genre specific radio should sound and I can tell you
they do it very well and are growing it everyday. The Bad news however,
is that there is one portable hand grenade in our local marketplaces that
is sapping your TSL as we speak. This report from Dave Van Dyke proves it!
After you read this article, go to www.bridgeratings.com/press_1032005-ipods.htm.
An IPOD Economy
It is called "The Ipod" and it's brand has become to downloaded
music what Kleenex was to tissue. It's reach encompasses all formats. You
can now fit the music of 20 radio stations, with total control of programming............in
the palm of your hand. Yet most of us want ratings and revenue for giving
people less than 500 songs, far too many times, and 7 bad commercials in
a row.
Radio's response seems to be things like the People Meter, High Definition
Radio, and now a $30 million dollar ad campaign to let you know where you
heard the hits first. My question about the PPM is, 'what is it you're measuring
when someone is connected to an Ipod'? My second is what will HD radio really
do other than enhance the sonics of the rip n read loan commercial? Are
both initiatives part of a logical evolution for terrestrial radio? For
sure. Will this make the medium fun again and less vulnerable to the competition?
Not in this lifetime!
And my answer to radio's current $30 million on air campaign reminds me
of an old axiom, 'Better to keep silent and thought a fool..................than
to speak and remove all doubt'! So Avril Lavigne is going to tell you in
a 30 second spot where you heard her first while EVERY ONE of her tracks
will be played on XM and Sirius and then downloaded to an MP3 player....which
now resides on your dashboard? What different feeling will the listener
have about radio as a result of this campaign remains to be seen, but I'd
be finding another 30 mill for the following;
1. PROGRAMMING: Invest in the mindset that narrow playlists are NO longer
the way to win in music delivery, TSL notwithstanding.. Just look at the
Jack format wherever it bows. All of the old rules need to be broken right
now!
2. TALENT: Find and nurture personalities (like record labels that find
bands) that can make the space between songs listenable again. Make the
control room a breeding ground of activity that crackles on air and whose
electricity will attract future stars. Radio needs to create a genre again.
3.SALES: Install a guy like Roy Williams and let him train the local franchise
how to make the 'loan commercial' compelling as hell. People do love good
commercials...........and so do advertisers. Radio would have never caught
the spotload flu if it was consistently churning out great, theatre of the
mind, spots!
GO WHERE THEY AIN'T!
4.CONTESTING: Finally, the third rail of radio promotion is changing from
a tired, unmeasurable model of traditional contesting to a quantitative,
listener retentive approach. A loyalty program that rewards listener behaviour
with prizes, and all the fun stuff a local radio station can deliver. The
early adopter stations who do it now also know that the one place to beat
Satellite radio and an Ipod, is a program that engenders the listener to
keep coming back on air/online. .That '9th caller' you never knew, is now
replaced with a 'share of mind' listener whose music preferences, buying
habits, and lifestyle are known to you through electronic permission. And
when your advertiser figures out that you can truly measure ROI through
a loyal database, you become the only game in town. Traditional media is
just starting to enter this arena.
Loyalty guru, Jill Griffin says, "US companies spend seven times more
money trying to attract new customers than keeping existing ones".
Does this sound familiar? It's the 'existing ones' that can mean all the
difference in a station's TSL and revenue.
Griffin says, "Loyalty is the result of paying attention to what it
takes to keep a customer and then constantly providing it".
Will a loyalty program make a bad station, good? Never. Will it make a good
station great? We see it every day.
Here is what you need to embrace. Do NOT underestimate the pac man nature
of technology. In a skeletal amount of time, it has eaten and spit out more
industry's than anyone could have ever forseen. If you still love your work
and think your job or company is immune to it, you need to look at what
the lumber industry did when it consolidated. They literally forgot to plant
trees.
Get out of your chair right now and start reinventing the greatest music
and information box of all time-The Local Radio Station! Because if people
like you in every corner of a station don't start trying right now to find
the best in our inventive selves, the radio that we have known will be reduced
to cross country signals programmed with syndicated talk, news, sports,
financial and the like. And that's fine in an upper demo, share priced world.
However, it won't be that magic music box, on your night stand, in the car,
on a beach somewhere,................... anymore. And chances are, you'll
be doing something else.
jimmy risk
www.LoyalEars.com
586 771 7449
jimmy@LoyalEars.com
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