Radio's future can be even better than its past. Making Waves, the new book by Mark Ramsey, can help any broadcaster navigate a world of endless competition. An action plan for the future plus expert advice from Seth Godin, Douglas Rushkoff, Joe Jaffe, and many more. Read the Introduction, the foreword by Peter Smyth, or buy it now on Amazon.
The reach and usage for portable audio media (mp3 players/iPods) is only slightly higher than the reach and usage for online radio.
Specifically, mp3 players had 11.5% daily reach and 69 minutes of daily average use. Streaming had 9.3% daily reach and 67 minutes of daily average use.
Nobody is really talking about this, but I think this is enormously important: Not only is mp3 player use less common than we would assume based on the buzz it receives, but online radio almost equals its overall reach!
Further, the reach of online radio is GREATER than that of mp3 players among 35-54's (13.5% vs. 11.5%). To rephrase this, 35-54's are more likely to listen to online radio than to use an mp3 player.
Mp3 players have a big advantage among Men (15.8% to online radio's 10.6%) and 18-34's (20.8% to online radio's 10.9%).
Needless to say, traditional radio is more likely to be used by all these groups. But that's not the headline, because that's not news. Unlike traditional radio, mp3 players and online radio must be specifically and actively engaged. Thus, these listeners are people who choose what to listen to rather than simply listen to "whatever is on."
Better ramp up your online radio strategy!
One Take on the Future of Advertising
"Social media, video, and mobile."
"Consumers have much greater leverage over marketers, however marketers can invite consumers to participate, they can create feedback loops."
There's a "new accountability standard put on the table by consumers."
"If advertisers can figure out a way to co-create with consumers, everybody wins."
Watch this video:
How to get HD Radio on your iPhone
One way to get HD Radio on your iPhone:
1. Go to Radio Shack or its online store
2. Spend $80
3. Download the free HD Radio app
4. Carry your slim and beautiful iPhone around with a bulky and clunky adapter wherever you go
Another way to get HD Radio on your iPhone:
1. Download any radio station app since virtually all stations that have them feature their HD channels on them - all for free, no extra gadgets required
2. Enjoy
In the former case, we're trying to sell audiences (and ourselves) on a technology, all other considerations be damned.
In the latter case we're trying to bring audiences fresh content regardless of any technological obstructions, obligations, or behavioral hoops.
Which would YOU do?
Well that depends on whether you're in the business of selling audiences or the business of selling HD Radio chips.
This is not about what we want, it's about what consumers want.
I don't know about you, but I vote that we do NOT treat our audience - and the thoughtful folks in our industry - like fools.
(By the way, I'm no more excited about the Sirius XM gadget that turns your iPhone into a satellite radio for $120).
I've been poring over this study during the past few days and I find it to be very compelling and quite sound, notwithstanding the way some of its results have been spun.
The radio industry has largely focused on the conclusion that radio's dominance as an audio medium persists, despite the public perception to the contrary. And it has been especially notable that this dominance persists among 18-34's (even though a long series of studies by my company and others have made this point for years).
This has been viewed as cause for celebration in radio circles, and while it's certainly good news, we need to understand what it really means. And that's this:
Two primary values of radio in a competitive audio marketplace are its ubiquity and its ease of use. It is, in other words, the perfect medium by far for passive listening. When you don't want to fool with hardware, when you don't want to program your own station, when you don't want to re-sample the same list of tunes on your iPod, when you're in environments (especially the car) where alternatives are either scarce or require even a modicum of work to enable, then the radio and its popular content rules (note that I'm talking about music stations here; News and Talk stations are a whole different story).
This is not to diminish what radio provides in any way. Quite the contrary. Most of the music listening world will not want to self-program their stations most of the time. Just ask them. The audience for letting the content flow over you is certainly greater than the audience which insists on control.
But here's the thing: The distance between "control" and "passive" is shrinking. And the ease of use and ubiquity of "control" is destined to grow. And as the value proposition of "control" grows, more people will want to be in control, even if control is limited to switching from the FM band to the Online Audio one which is most assuredly coming to a car near you (look at the picture below - closely).
So it's critical that we recognize something important: Being used by many listeners is not the same as being loved by them. Clearly, you can be used dispassionately until a more passion-filled alternative arises. When "ubiquity" and "ease of use" are two of your key attributes you are skating on the thin ice of time and technology's good graces.
Being loved is not that hard, really, as long as we set out to achieve it.
So let's!
I'll write more about this study later this week.
Pandora nearly beats CBS in Online Radio
Change is in the wind.
Just take a peek at the new rankings from Ando Media from the fast-growing world of online radio - and keep in mind these statistics are from the US only:
CBS Radio is number one - but look at who's number two, Pandora.
Pandora, the company with exactly zero terrestrial radio stations. Pandora, the company that has no Arbitron nor any need for Arbitron. Pandora, the company that actually charges folks who use the service the most.
Pandora is a handful of streams away from being the leading source of online radio in the US (among those that Ando measures).
During September, Pandora was launched more than 80 million times - 20 million more than CBS Radio and 60 million more than Clear Channel and its hundreds of streaming brands.
60 million more!
Recognize, of course, that this industry is young. Recognize, of course, that it will only grow.
But recognize, most importantly, that your station - our industry - need not be the leading players or even significant players in this world unless we specifically set out to do so.
You don't win at online radio by repurposing your over-the-air signal online.
You win at online radio by providing an experience matched to the digital medium and the expectations of a digital audience. You win by catering to the audience, not to your pre-existing over-the-air brands. You win by thinking digital, not by thinking analog belongs digital.
This is radio's game to lose.
(Note: AAS is "the average number of streams of one minute or more that are active within a time period." And SS is "the number of streams of one minute or more that are started within a time period").
The Listener, not your Content, is the "Product"
The Atlantic recently posted a note on the slow death of the newspaper business, and one of the comments to that note was so perceptive (if not necessarily novel) that I thought I'd share it with you because it has consequences for the radio industry, too.
Wrote the commenter:
Newspapers were dying anyway but the Internet has hastened the process by exposing the newspapers lack of accountability.
The average schmuck buys a paper and sees it as a product designed to inform him, the customer, about the world around him/her.
But in any financial transaction the customer is identified as the person who pays the money, and since newspapers only get 20% of revenue from subscribers this means the subscriber is not the “real” customer.
Newspapers get 80% of revenue from corporate advertisers, so they are the “real” customers. And since the corporate advertisers don’t take delivery of the newspapers it means the newspaper is not the real product.
The real product is the reader, and the newspaper is just a medium (like radio waves or tv signals) that is used to “deliver” the real product (our eyeballs) to the real customers (corporate advertisers).
People are important in the newspaper financial model, just not in the way that they thought they were.
With the Internet, you can have news websites that have zero corporate advertising, which means they are ACCOUNTABLE to the subscribers who donate to the site. This is why the newspapers can’t simply transfer their business model onto the web and hope to survive.
It’s not about technology. It’s all about accountability.
Again, it's not exactly news that the "real" customers to newspapers - or to radio - are the advertisers and the real product currently being offered up is not the content on the air but the ears listening to that content - ideally as many as possible for as long as possible.
But thinking about the flow of dollars this way has important consequences for our industry at a time when there's a sudden disconnect (as there is) between the volume of listeners we attract and the amount of money our customers (the advertisers) consider them worth.
And what it means in the final analysis is that we must provide layers of accountability which add value to our product (the ears or eyes our content generates). That value, I must add (although it should be obvious) is in the eye of the customer (the advertiser), not in your eyes and mine.
It is not, in other words, about "monetizing our content" wherever that content may be found.
It's about enhancing the value of our product (our audiences) to our customers (advertisers).
The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it's likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.
When "broadcasting" is the business of sharing content worth sharing between individuals who trust each other, what business are YOU in?
Isn't this one reason why so many small businesses are attracted to social media? Because they can become their own media - their own "broadcasters" - to those consumers who have proverbially "raised their hand" and said "connect with me"?
I think traditional broadcasters have been so obsessed over how to market their radio stations in a social media age that they too often forget that our clients have the same challenges and the same opportunities as we do.
Our job is to help them more effectively execute those connections and to do so with the added kick that comes courtesy of the "megaphone" called the radio station and its various assets.
Time to put these pieces together in an integrated way.
"Integrated marketing," as the phrase goes, isn't about bundling a variety of marketing tactics into one campaign. It's about magnifying the effectiveness of marketing for the benefit of our clients and the consumers they covet.
It's about making the connections more effective.
If we're still counting ears rather than connections in another five years, woe unto us.
The Most Important Thing You'll Read about Radio's Future This Year
Don't read this if you don't care about radio's future or if you're counting down the days to your retirement.
Every now and then some thinking comes along that puts it all in perspective. This piece from Ad Age is one such summation of thinking that has been bubbling up over the past few months from folks like Tom Asacker and others.
What is the blueprint for what radio will need to be to compete successfully as a vital enterprise in the years to come?
The trajectory of our future can be summed up as follows:
Almost every consumer marketer I've spoken to...is moving toward the goal of making marketing more outcome-specific, targeted, useful and conversational, and less about blasting of what we've generally called "brand" messages via specific platforms. They see some of today's media companies as shaping into useful potential partners in those efforts, and others as increasingly redundant -- and they're spending less and less with the latter.
The radio - media - company of the future will:
1. Act more like a marketing company than a media company.
Says Ad Age: "Good partners will be marketing companies, operations set up and focused on solving brand marketers' problems by means of the connection they can create with an audience and results that connection can deliver."
In other words, the model will shift from selling access to listener ears in bulk toward selling solutions to marketers' problems via connections. That is essentially the difference between "advertising" and "marketing," so choose your side of the fence wisely.
2. Be organized around an audience and not a platform.
Broadcasters frequently talk about being "platform agnostic," but too often what that really means is putting our radio signal in other places or on other devices. That's just transporting the problem, not solving it. Your job is to rally an audience of raving fans and satisfy the appetites of those fans while connecting them to the marketers who crave them. Period.
3. Work directly with marketers.
Being bought off a ranker is not the same as working in partnership with marketers. Increasingly, the ranker-buyers will be the obstacles to our success, not the reason for it.
4. Not just create spaces for ads next to content, it'll create whole media channels and platforms for brands
Writes Ad Age: "Brands want to be at the center of content and communities and they're going to create these channels with or without media companies." It's up to us to bring the talent to the party and to build these channels in concert with advertisers. Or they will simply build them without us.
5. Employ technologists who can build device-agnostic platforms for marketers.
Note the distinction between building these platforms for marketers and building them for your radio brands. Recognize above all else who is in the driver's seat. Hint: It's not your radio brand. It's your radio brand's customer base, the marketers.
6. Know how to deliver instantaneous gratification when it comes to measurement, and it'll be measuring outcomes not outputs. A rating...stat is not going to be enough in the future, and certainly not when it's presented weeks after the fact.
The dawn of the post-Arbitron world is before us.
What are you doing to make your efforts accountable today?
How Pandora can become the New "Radio"
From Inside Radio:
Pandora is pushing its way into the car. The pure play webcaster that allows users to create and customize their own radio
stations has its eye on the auto market and home appliance integrations. Pandora VP of business development Jessica Steel
tells eMarketer that many of its 30 million registered users stream the service in their car via mobile apps. “We’re definitely
looking at ways to make that experience more seamless — basically making all the core user interactions of Pandora integrated
into the vehicle, so that you don’t have to fumble around with your iPhone to skip or rate a song.” Pandora has partnered with
Sony to be included on Blu-Ray players and other devices. Echoing a refrain often heard in the over-the-air radio industry,
Steel says: “Success for my team looks like Pandora being available on pretty much any connected entertainment device.”
Where do I begin?
This is not "echoing a refrain" often heard in the over-the-air radio industry.
It is a fundamentally different notion to get Pandora integrated into a piece of electronics, let alone a car, than it is to integrate a radio. We should not assume Pandora is following our lead but rather assume that we are following theirs, and none too successfully.
Pandora is new and fresh and shiny and popular among the young and/or hip.
Radio is not and not and not and popular among the older and/or not so hip.
Yes, our cumes are massive. But this is not about who uses the radio, it's about who loves the radio.
And radios will only follow the audiences who love them.
The call for radios to be integrated into devices that never used to contain them is one which could have been made a generation ago. Where were we then? Indeed, the time to get a radio in a toaster was 1985, not 2010. Today, such a move would be viewed as a gimmick, not a value-add.
Pandora, on the other hand, is all value-add.
Radio must to be pushed into devices which don't already contain them, while Pandora can be pulled in - by audience or consumer demand.
If you make cars or electronic gadgets, which will you respond to faster, "push" or "pull"?
The largest concern you should have is that Pandora's entry into the auto market - something I view as inevitable - has the potential to create a complete substitute for your (music-oriented) radio station. And this will happen much faster than you think.
Remember what PPM tells us: "Fulfill expectations." Well, if "more music" is your expectation, Pandora is a better radio station than you are. And it's certainly better tuned to my tastes than yours is.
So what are you going to do?
Lobby for more FM and AM dials in more places, or redefine what radio means for a generation which craves novelty, freshness and innovation?
How to Make Money from Online Radio
Online radio continues to grow as a viable category for audiences and advertisers alike.
As we plug along in our efforts to fully monetize this medium we need to recognize something critically important:
Online radio is not simply radio online.
In other words, we need to take advantage of the novel capabilities of the digital medium as we build our online radio strategies and not think of the medium simply as the over-the-air signal repurposed.
One (and only one) of the novel capabilities baked into the digital environment is the ability to efficiently target by matching consumers to the messages that are most relevant for them.
I should say it's potentially baked into this environment, because the vast majority of radio companies are surrendering this power and the significant monetization value this capability represents.
And that's because they are not requiring registration to their websites and/or streams.
Listen to this chat with AndoMedia Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Reynolds, who paints a picture of tremendous upside - but only if we act.
Radio's future can be even better than its past. Making Waves, the new book by Mark Ramsey, can help any broadcaster navigate a world of endless competition. An action plan for the future plus expert advice from Seth Godin, Douglas Rushkoff, Joe Jaffe, and many more. Read the 