Tiers of Attention for Radio Industry
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For over three decades I've made a living by making things bigger than life for millions of people. It's not a boast but a fact used to show the reason for advertising being sold.
Using this concept, consider that the essence of radio advertising is to capture audience attention and deliver a message that's bigger than life to millions of people. Until a few years ago the model was simple; the radio industry gathered audience, the advertisers bought reach and frequency. Over the past few years, though, companies that advertise started including "have that person respond" in their requirements to buy.
The act of response is where a lot of confusion seems to start. What it is, measuring it, and who responds can be told when using new media. But, let's point to response in another way. It is not measured in the radio industry.
What is it, exactly, that radio advertising is doing for an advertiser? Can you explain how to tie it into the internet so that a measured response is offered by your station? What if you found out that all the tools needed to measure response are free, and you can access them from your desk at the station?
Google Analytics isn't something that only techies should use. Managers need to know how to interpret the numbers tracked in advertising. It helps one make better decisions, and gives more options on what to sell - like response, which is now bigger than being bigger than life to millions of people.
Instant gratification - give-it-to-me-now thinking - isn't a phenom that suddenly took over the masses. It came from an over-proliferation of media vying for attention. Instant gratification for an advertiser evolved from them being satisfied to hear their commercials air, into verified response, which is now acute. The shrinking economy demands it. The internet makes it possible.
To increase advertising revenue in today's advertising market, the radio industry needs to prove that it sells response. Google Analytics lets you do this, and an example follows. (You must have Google or another analytics program installed on your station web site.)
Create a radio campaign with the objective of driving people to an advertiser's ad on your station web site. Your goal is to get people to move through this ad to the advertiser's landing page. Your method is to capture audience attention, and control their descent as they drill down to that landing page. All are measurable actions which you capture with an analytics program, and can use as proof that the advertising was effective.
If the advertiser has a measurable action (for ex., a pizza chain offers a discount to people who print a downloaded coupon, or an auto dealer counts people who click through to their web site from your station site), you have a way to prove results. If the advertiser does not have a measurable action, then use the numbers of people tracked in your web site-to-landing page funnel as a measure of response. These analytic numbers provide confirmation for an advertiser that their dollars deliver results.
It's the radio industry's job to capture attention. Now its job is to also prove that attention was captured. In the above examples, you're funneling people from a vast broadcast audience, through a web site, to a landing page. The statistics generated by an analytics program will create actual numbers you may carry to the client, melding the benefits of broadcast with the internet.
We are dealing with nothing more than measuring a tier of attention from people, one at a time, and delivering them in groups to an advertiser. We still make things bigger than life for millions of people, but now we're required to measure response to the attention we've attracted.
The essence of advertising is to capture attention from a person who didn't know you were there.
If you've reached this sentence, I've succeeded in capturing yours; and, I can prove it by looking at average times spent on this page. When read correctly, time-spent-on-page shows the tiers of attention an audience gave me.
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