Thank You, Supreme Court

There are two kinds of consulting clients and A&O&B has our share of both, thankfully.

1.  Those who are aggressive and always want to know the latest tactics and strategies that will help them gain an "unfair/stealth" advantage over their competition.

2.  Management who does a great job selling marketing to others but believes radio is a terrific marketing medium which doesn't require any money be spent on external marketing beyond the "free" word of mouth that can be created by great over-the-air content and social media.

We love them both and have hundreds of case studies where both groups have been very successful doing things "their way."

Both #1 and #2 tend to believe that everyone else in broadcasting is like them.  #1 always wants to know what secret things their competition did to make their numbers rise and #2 tends to deny that anyone else spends the kind of money that marketing can take.

I hope both of them saw this:

So, many thanks to the highest court in the land for their decision last week.

It's great to know that calling someone and inviting them to try a new radio station is not the same as attempting to sell them anything.

As a bonus, we now have legal proof for those #2's among us that their competitive managers at the Rotary Club who deny ever doing it may not be telling them the whole truth.


(Now, if only Canada's regulators would come to a similar conclusion.  

I won't hold my breath...)

Your 2014 Marketing Priorities In One Info-Graphic

Thanks to ExactTarget for putting it so clearly.  (click the link to download their complete report on the data behind it):

No matter the size of your marketing team or programs, you need to decide what 2014 holds for your strategy. Use these recommendations to help lead the conversation in your radio station over the coming year:

1.  Focus on listener/user/customer engagement.
• Map their journey to understand at exactly what points your customers, online users and listeners engage with you.
• Develop a plan around how you manage those engagement touchpoints and think through how you could improve each.

2.  Develop a clear data strategy.
• Take inventory of the data you have today and the data you need to collect.
• Create a plan to collect that data over time and across multiple listener interactions—because asking for a lot of information at once can be a barrier to engagement.

3.  Consider your channel options.
• Use this report to compare the channels you’re using to the channels other marketers are using.
• Form a strategy around your presence on those channels—whether you flock to the most common channels or you choose to stand out by using an underutilized channel (like mobile).

Only Seven

According to Christopher Booker, there are only Seven Basic Plots: 

1. Overcoming the Monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth 

His convincing book is really much more than that hypothesis, making it very much worth a careful read.

He explains how and why we are all programmed to imagine stories in these ways and also why storytelling must be a part of your bits, ads, newscasts, branding, marketing and social media. 

As you read it, you'll ask yourself:  does our radio station and its personalities consistently make full use of every one of them for maximum impact?

Daily prep should begin by evaluating everything you "could" engage the listener with through the filter of how can we make sure today's "show" has all of them woven into it and which character on the team is best suited today to bring one or two of them alive authentically and naturally.

The more believable characters living through and coping with them, the more viral you'll be!

Catch A Ride On The "Inbound" Train

Inbound marketing is "the next big thing" and there's no medium as well positioned to take advantage of it like local radio.

A great example, thanks to Newcap/Moncton GM Dan Fagan and PD Adam McClaren's XL96 team.

McLaren:  "Check out the hashtag #XLSuperFan on Twitter.  It’s pretty impressive watching people share their memories and feelings related to the music we play."

Here's the incentive that made it happen, starting the conversation on both Twitter and other social networks as well as on the station.

Finding The Best Listeners

"Not all listeners and advertisers are created equal.  And when you learn how each individual uses and perceives your uniqueness - based on their uniqueness, you can actually increase your profits, without having to increase your share of the market."


“Customers have different needs from a (radio station) and they represent different valuations to a (station).  Today’s information technology allows us to tell our customers apart and remember them individually.  From there, we can use technology to customize products and services for each one.”

Sound as cutting edge as today?

Not really.

Those quotes come from DonPeppers and Martha Rogers' 1997 book “Enterprise One To One:  Tools for Competing in the InteractiveAge” (Currency/Doubleday)

If you're not segmenting your listener database, you're more than 16 years behind.

Don't feel too smug if you are "using microchip technology to make it possible to know your listeners better than ever."  You still may be more than a decade in back of a competitor who has been learning from the people formerly known as the audience since these concepts were introduced. 

It's never too late to start. 

Negative Advertising

If you haven't checked out the Houston country battle lately, it's time to do some listening and thinking about what you'll hear.

For several years on KKBQ/Cox PD Johnny Chiang has been saying things like:  “We play the most music guaranteed in Houston, KILT plays the most commercials, up to 15 just last hour! We are the new 93Q.”

Now, something new on KILT/CBS PD Mark Adams' imaging:  “Did you know the other station talked about KILT 28 times yesterday? [Various mock announcer voices] Yesterday, in the 12 noon hour, Kilt played… In the 4 o’clock hour, Kilt played… Friday morning, Kilt played… Kilt played… Kilt played… [V/o] Wow. WE don’t even talk about us that much!

It's a political year.  Barack is already talking about Mitt and Romney is responding in kind about Obama nearly every day.

We all say we hate negative ads and yet, admit it, just as I do, you love watching Frank Luntz conduct focus groups for Fox News which will take what real people say, whether factual or not, and turn them into effective messages which get votes.

The difference, of course, is that an election is one day when a candidate needs specific people to be passionate enough about an issue to take a specific action.

Let's watch the Houston numbers in the coming months and see what these new tactics do to real listening, in addition to perceptions, which drive elections and diary ratings but do they impact actual usage, 24/7 too?

Obviously, Johnny and Mark appear to think they do!

Maybe I’m Missing Something (Or, Are YOU?)…

I just heard from a GM of a dominant cluster whose multi-format non-duplicated cume reach in this large market is as close to 100% of the area’s total population as you can get.

All of their radio stations have been nurturing email databases since the late 1980's/early 1990’s when they were faxing to businesses from an at-work database, built with direct mail and telemarketing.

They've done it all, over the years.

Now, in an effort to jump-start a “daily discounts” revenue program in hopes of competing with Groupon, Living Social and others locally, they are buying a mass email list that reportedly contains every email address in their metro.

This list is several times the total metro population.

Unless the initial contact with this huge list is extremely well-designed it’s going to be seen as just more spam by the vast majority of the folks who receive this invitation to sign up for a second or third daily deals email on top of the ones they already find in their spam folder.

Assuming that each of this company’s stations has 20% of their cume in their email and at home/at work address (perhaps even txt databases) and they’ve been consistently maintaining those relationships both on air and in regular direct relationship/loyalty marketing over time, they have an active relationship with some one-fifth of the area’s population.

These folks (hopefully!) know their brands, their personalities and welcome the communication when they receive it. 

Doesn’t it make more sense, albeit to a smaller group of people, to offer deals and discounts to our friends rather than just adding to the volume of spam that anyone else who buys those same total market email lists are sending out too?

Won't our radio stations get measurably better response rates from our "fans" than the competing deals programs will?
 
If the need to buy that big email list comes from a dollars-driven desire to quickly get up to speed because the station’s databases have been lying fallow and unresponsive or, even worse are next-to-nonexistant and are only a small, single-digit percentage of the total unduplicated cume of the cluster, maybe the marketing managers of these radio stations have been missing something that can't be fixed by buying a list, no matter how well-targeted.

If, by now, you don't already have an active, responsive database which can't be quickly cloned by someone else, you are suffering from a widespread mass media disease: a lack of engagement, no carefully-constructed reputation among your listeners for compelling content and attention to much more that just trying to hawk the radio station’s latest attempt at making money from them without first adding true value that builds true affinity.

Increasing the volume of spam in your city, attaching your brand name to it, without tending to content-based relationship and loyalty marketing first probably can make you a few bucks in the short term, but you better have another scam to sell next year and the year after that, because your radio station brand will mean less and less each time you do it.

The Very Best Medium For Marketing Your Radio Station

The top two quintiles of radio users (heaviest users) are all reached by radio (100%) in an average week, more than TV (94%), cable & TV networks (74%), daily newspapers (75%), weekly newspapers (46%), Sunday newspapers (76%), shopper newspapers (37%), magazines (75%) and outdoor (68%).

The best way to tell your heaviest-users about your product - both in terms of strategic benefits and recycling existing audience - is ON THE RADIO. 6 am to 6 am, heavy radio users spend 68% of their media time with radio. 6 am to midnight, the figure is 56%, compared to 34% for television.

29% of heavy radio users say they do not have a radio at work. 71% do. The heavy radio users, not surprisingly, also spend more time commuting than the average person - 59 minutes per day and 94% of them listen to a radio while commuting.

In car is the CUME sampling location for radio and AT WORK is the AQH-BUILDER location, the data on radio's heavy users clearly indicate.

Like someone said on Facebook the other day: "the good news is the bad news changes every day."

I think you're going to want to understand these trends, looking at them locally, and start thinking about their implications for your future.

Morning television is advertising on radio trying to get our morning audience to listen to TV at home as they start their day. There's a message to US there.

Tell your usage story compellingly, on your own radio station.

Continuing The Conversation

Last week Tucson-based Jessica Northey really impressed A&O clients on our latest bi-weekly client conference call, as she shared her expertise, taught us a lot about the "do's and don'ts" of Social Media Networking for Radio.

There's no doubt that country radio is playing catchup in this fast-emerging social economy as new "do and don't" lists seem to appear almost daily.

It's easy to mistake all this sharing and blogging as absolutes instead of what it really is, an ongoing dialog where new rules are constantly trumping old ones.

In that light, allow me to toss in the possibility that Jessica is "86% right" in our very enlightening exchange.

Two things she suggested raised caution flags for me.

1. Videos of the morning show (unless its compelling) can be an issue I'd try not to do. Of course, if it's truly incredible, there's nothing like Facebook to take something absolutely worldwide, but "broadcast" sparingly in social media, and engage generously. Don't find yourself with two million "likes" for all the wrong reasons, none of which grow your radio audience locally.
   
2. DO NOT update "Status" hourly on Facebook. It is self defeating. You won't make your target's news feed, since over posting drives down your score. If you want to post hourly or more often on Twitter, that's fine, since it usually leads to nothing.

It's not that I think Jessica is absolutely wrong, really, but it's just that I worry about folks taking this advice too literally, feeling that they have quotas to meet and thus damaging their efforts.

Sadly, most of the online content produced by the average radio station doesn't compete very successfully outside their current, small, group of 'friends.'

It's not that "less is more," it's that better is better.

"You Never Phone Me"

That's not just your mother saying that. It might be your listener too.

Telemarketing to homes (to reach men and build cume) and to businesses (to reach women and improve TSL) continues to have impact for radio, even in the age of PPM and social networking.

Just like throwing darts, done right, it works to find heavy users of radio who enjoy giving their opinions 75-80% of the time.

Tip: develop and clean your database every six months.

A&O has seen recent telemarketing to station databases that found between 40% and 80% of those who joined the database six months ago still consuming the same radio station - 20% to 60% had changed stations and needed to be encouraged to come back, tactically.

If you don't reconnect personally and re-engage in a meaningful way, your Facebook fans and your email list - and even those who agreed on the phone months ago to sample your radio station in hopes of winning a prize - becomes less and less effective, increasingly incestuous.

Growing and maintaining a real relationship requires reaching out, personally on a regular basis.

Just ask your mom.