Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Be An Operator, Not A Trader In 2012

As both savvy Inside Radio scribes Paul Heine and Frank Saxe reported yesterday that the "deal market (is) still struggling to find its legs" and "... the radio industry is entering its fifth year since the task of either buying or selling a station became much more difficult following a reset in pricing and the exit of many media lenders," they also made the statement that "the buying and selling of stations is seen by many as a barometer of the radio industry’s health."

Really? Is that all there is?

Let's get back to business basics and rethink that

Entertaining, informing, interacting with and engaging listeners as a means to aggregating a large, loyal audience, creating memorable events across multiple analog and digital platforms, leading to the buying and selling time with those folks is an even better barometer of the radio industry's sustenance and health.

Advertising helps the whole economy.

Radio, done right, is still a terrific business.

Rather than trading in our hard assets and stick values, lets sell the thing we have a fresh new supply of every day: time.

That way, we'll still be around, creating jobs and building profits, in 2013.

1 comment:

Tom Taylor/Radio-Info.com said...

TRI wrote about the CEO’s back-from-Africa memo in Monday’s issue, and one Entercom sales-department employee says “When I read it on my Entercom e-mail, I thought to myself, Well, isn't that just great that he and his family went on an eight-
day African safari. In our station cluster, we're dealing with reduced commission rates, no sales assistant or support, more voice-tracking (even on the top billing station) and of course the usual intense meetings about increasing sales/revenue.

The year 2011 was not stellar by any means and most of the sales team just got by. With the price of
gas and no expense allowance, it meant less in the bank at year-end. I'm glad David had a nice trip, but I did not get any motivation from that email whatsoever - quite the opposite.”

This staffer moves on to another story in Monday’s TRI – “I actually see more excitement in this industry from the digital side, as [consultant] Jon Erdahl
mentioned. If radio doesn't work harder at capturing a share of that money, there won't be any extensive revenue growth for this industry. I see it every day when we are told to go get a bigger share of the ‘radio buy.’ Why not ‘get a bigger share of all the ad dollars out there?’”