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AG News:
Friday - 4/30/2010
Radio Industry Needs "New" Now
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Apple is riding a publicity wave. The latest news is that the company is closing Lala.com on May 31, after paying $17 million for it in December 2009. Read this as a prelude to Apple moving music to the cloud, making "your music" accessible from anywhere.
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal wrote about Apple's ads in Apps. Asking price for an Apps campaign will be in the millions for those clients wanting notoriety as a first-mover Apple Apps advertiser.
My eyes focused on one paragraph in that WSJ article: "Apple is planning to charge advertisers a penny each time a consumer sees a banner ad, ad executives say. When a user taps on the banner and the ad pops up, Apple will charge $2." A little farther along comes this sentence: "Marketers also will be able to target ads to users in a general location like a city...."
Spot radio advertising buys will soon suffer if the radio industry doesn't pull something out of its hat to be viewed as "new." New programming. New ad strategies. New accountability procedures. New formats... there's a barrel of "NEWs" to choose from. Are you reading anything about any of them in radio industry trades? (I tried to give insight to the audience's use of mobile in "Looking at Mobile Numbers for Radio" on March 29.)
The creative side of radio - both in programming and how programs are sold - needs a boost. Radio still uses a clock-based format that's in desperate need of revision. Sales pitches are wrapped around units played in specific dayparts determining the value of an ad, the same pricing system used since the 1960s.
As the Wall Street Journal shows, advertising rate structures are changing - based less on a percentage of audience reached or solely CPM. An ability to show clients an ad campaign's response is gaining ground, and it's not a move that should be waíved off by traditional media.
Apple, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN all speak of targeting and accountability. Each is positioning for the attention of local advertisers, who previously had only the big three as options (TV, radio, newspapers).
Claiming to have a 92% reach doesn't mean much to a client wanting proof of ROI.
Apps are not the radio industry's savior. Crowd-sourcing for programs won't generate enough interest locally, either. What's needed is focused attention on creating something so unique that radio can claim sole ownership, or at least the birth rights.
Where are the ideas? Why don't we, at the very least, read in radio industry publications about concepts that are being tried?
The radio industry needs "new," and it needs it now.
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