Thursday, October 15, 2009

How Will Your Self-Promotion Fare?

Accountability IS the future, and now that new measures are evolving to check - down to units smaller than a minute in the not-too-distant future - to see which of the things we broadcast engage/relate and which things are counter-productive to both usage and brand-building, you don't need to listen to very much radio to get very worried about our medium-term future.

We simply MUST stop talking about ourselves and what we do, and begin to sell benefits instead of features in entertaining and compelling ways.

"Content" is not where your next remote broadcast is going to be, or who the guest is going to be on next Sunday's 5:00 am public affairs show.

"Data is going to begin changing the way ... advertising is purchased or managed -- finally -- and "tune-in" is quite likely to be first in line. It certainly won't happen overnight, but the multiples involved are clearly too great to be ignored. 2% improvements won't move markets, but 20% or 2X improvements will. This is going to have a lot of impact in TV measurements, metrics, processes and, very likely, business models. It will certainly be disruptive to many of the incumbents -- and will also present many of them with extraordinary new opportunities -- but it will certainly be crazy getting there."

How many media pundits/research studies have to say this and for how long before radio starts to sound like it's stopped being narcissistic?

3 comments:

Lisa said...

Right-On!!

Braden Doerr said...

The BEST local TV ads (click on the link to see them).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/14/the-best-local-tv-ads-vid_n_296180.html

Ken Auletta/New Yorker said...

Mel Karmazin, the then C.O.O. of Viacom, visited Google in 2003, looking for a potential partner in the tech world. Karmazin was interested in Google’s advertising business, but found Google’s system to be too mechanized compared to the advertising model used at that time in mainstream media. Google search now takes in about four of every ten online advertising dollars, and last year, Google’s revenues exceeded twenty-two billion dollars, more than two-thirds of the thirty billion in total U.S. newspaper advertising projected for this year. Google has reinforced the notion that traditional media now want to combat: that digital information and content should be free and that advertising alone should subsidize it. To many, Google appears impregnable. But the same has been thought of the Big Three auto companies, I.B.M., and Microsoft.