Moving as Fast as Change
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My original thought for today was to comment on January 15th marking the 13th year since Audio Graphics went online. On this date in 1997 there was a single purpose, to discuss how the internet affects the radio industry. Admittedly, I have not always stuck to that focus due to the speed of change.
Within the thousands of articles appearing here have been emotions of encouragement and rage. Instructions were given on how to tie radio concepts more closely to the internet in a variety of areas: email, search optimization, radio station web site design, commercial delivery, exposing new artists, etc.; and many times radio industry executives did things that can only be explained as self-serving and destructive (thereby generating my rage, resulting in lost focus).
I've been lucky to witness this great migration in communication from a front row seat.
Thirteen years is a long time to be writing about a "new" media that's no longer new. It's a long time to be pointing to new concepts, and how they apply to radio online and off.
During this transitional time audience and advertiser interests and habits have dramatically changed, as well as broadcast radio's objectives and commitments. Nearly all technical issues have been solved on the internet radio side, meaning its audience will quickly grow if online radio becomes more than a jukebox on steriods. If it remains a cache of music with little substantive programming, however, growth will take much longer.
There have been booms and busts, and AG survived - for this I am proud.
Exploring new avenues has been exciting, not knowing if things were being done right because it was the first time some "thing" was being tried. Colleges don't have a course in Google (MSN or Yahoo!) keyword ad buying, technical issues revolving around the internet, or how to optimize a web page for search. At least they didn't those first ten years.
Analytics and Metrics was a discipline that media wouldn't/couldn't consider in 1997, yet you and I have witnessed how A&M is now changing advertising effectiveness and revenue. Tackling technical issues related to delivering accuracy across ad-serving and audience-measuring data buckets, I got to work with world-class programmers from South Africa, India, China, and the U.S. Life has not been dull.
How about for you? Has your world been filled with the excitement of inquisitiveness, or the angst of something you don't fully understand?
At what point over these last 13 years did you see there might possibly be something to this new media scene that could benefit the radio industry? How much effort did you spend learning, then implementing concepts?
You can be honest here. It's just you and me, which is why I'll suggest that maybe your jumping onboard came a little late in the game. There's less interest now in maintaining broadcast radio's path, which is motivating an accelerated learning and implementing. Go on, alter your goals. Bring a little excitement back into your life.
Maybe you too are tired of the smoke and mirrors that radio uses to cover inaction, or the not-so-precise positioning of concepts like Clear Channel's recent declaration of providing "contextual advertising." It comes with the claim that "...the ability to link an ad to the content around it has previously been available only to internet advertisers based on text content." Magazines and cable channels aren't mentioned, which leaves an argument that this type of chest-thumping reeks of reaching for that word "internet." Do you remember the radio industry trying to attach to the word "accountability" with its positioning of "Posting"? I'm still laughing over that one. (There I go losing focus again.)
So how fast are you moving? These next thirteen years aren't going to slow down. Past, present, and future all blur when you start moving as fast as change.
It's not too late to resolve getting up-to-speed in 2010.
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