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Audio Graphics - Article Archive
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Has Your Content Changed?
Is the radio industry driven to delivering content that appeals to its local audience? If so, can you explain the growth of syndicated programming and voice tracking of recent years in a way that reconciles it to fewer newsrooms or live, local hosts?
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PRA Resolution Requires Changing Business Model
In all the reading that you do, are you seeing anything that mentions radical new approaches to music selection for airplay? Is there ever mention of creating a new system for fledgling artists to get access to radio playlists?
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Radio Industry vs. Performance Royalty
You can take this argument any way you want, as evidenced by what's being written and said. Only, don't take it back to the statement that the record labels have had a cozy relationship with radio for a long time and that shouldn't change. Why not? Everything else has.
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Fading Facade in Radio
As it turns out, repositioning "performance royalty" in the minds of those attending that NAB meeting is Gordon Smith's greatest challenge.
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When Logical Arguments Compete
I'm reading two arguments in radio industry trade magazines and each seems to undercut the other's validity. One concerns the justification of radio not having to pay performance royalties. Its logic-killer is the other argument...
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CBS Radio - New Online Player
At the time, Radio.com listed web sites with little/no connection to the radio industry. It mostly served paid-for links; you can call them ads, bought by companies on a cost-per-click basis. This increases online inventory while lowering CPM. Times change.
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A New Role for Radio: Helping Advertisers
There are twelve sites in the example below. Each was picked at random and visited to view two items: 1) what happens when a banner ad is clicked, and 2) any evidence that the radio station has become involved with offering advertisers a way to improve response.
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Programming Online Radio is More Difficult Than Its Sound
Programming "good radio" is every bit as difficult today as it was twenty years ago. The difference is that the radio industry, online, needs to break from geographically-confined thinking and start offering items of interest to listeners across the nation - or globe.
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You Have the Data, Now What?
Facts are that media buyers are becoming more intuitive with using internet numbers to gauge campaign effectiveness. The radio industry is realizing that web sites are vehicles for delivering to advertisers an ability to compare cost against response.
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Radio's New Norm in Numbers
Numbers have always been the measuring stick of success. What radio industry veterans need to see is how deeply new media metrics are now delivering the total picture - from the ad campaign to sales.
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A Connection Between Kent State and Radio
There's a parallel to the action of suppressing public opinion 40 years ago and what we see happening within the ranks of the radio industry today.
The body count may not be in deaths, but it certainly has been in careers stopped dead in their tracks.
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Radio Industry Needs "New" Now
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.
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Radio and Coupons - Room to Grow
In conjunction with on-air campaigns, radio is in a unique position to send text-based coupons to its data base of listeners. These on-air campaigns can act as a call-to-action for retrieval of coupons, a means of accounting a campaign's response.
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When Credit Is Due, Give It
It's not often we hear a radio industry Captain call the cards that are actually on the table. When it occurs, as it does here, the leader needs to be told that the message was received - and he should be given thanks for having the guts to say it out loud and in public.
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Is Radio's Future Fancy or Functional?
On competitive and technological sides, the radio industry's future has been laid out in the past ten days. Now it's the job of radio executives to decide whether it's "dazzle" or "baffle" time.
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Whistling for Radio
If I could whistle, picture me with two fingers in-mouth like those folks who make really piercing sounds using a thumb and pinkie. It would be done at a conference table - with all the King's Men talking loudly about the auto dealers who have committed to HD Radio...
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March Madness, and Its Loose Radio Connection
March Madness is a six-week promotion of college basketball games. What is it we can call radio? Choose your words carefully because the radio industry is now into audio content delivery in the minds of consumers and advertisers.
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Music as a Visual Experience
As we move farther into consumers searching for online content, the radio industry is turning a new "corner." Your radio station web site will not be a player unless its "player" also shows videos.
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The Hidden Cost of "Free"
I must have fielded a half-dozen calls this week from radio people asking about learning new media. Their common thread is a desire to "upgrade my skills for a changed advertising industry."
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Four Words to Shake Radio Industry
While the Pandora offer appears limited to banner advertising, it is not the only internet radio network with the ability to place local advertising - banner or audio. Pandora just has the biggest drum.
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Moving as Fast as Change
How about for you? Has your world been filled with the excitement of inquisitiveness, or the angst of something you don't fully understand?
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The First Thing for Radio in 2010 - Change
If possible, it would be a pleasure to print something that the radio industry did this year that forced anyone connected to it to hold their head high with pride. Besides radio acting as a microphone for bad weather and California fires, I'm coming up empty.
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A Question for the Radio Industry: What?
What follows is just one of the multiple times the importance of analytics has been stressed, written in January 2008. It's also an example of the number of times that the radio industry - with Arbitron as its lead into the world of metrics - has failed to see another oncoming train.
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Small Change Can Lead to Big Results
In the competitive world of advertising today, and with the mindset of trying to pull as much activity from your radio station web site as possible, you can no longer afford to ignore the benefits of using an analytical approach to every action.
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Blinded by PPM Numbers
This clearly wasn't a room in which you'd want to bring up a line like "...this minute-by-minute accounting is being done online everyday, with hard numbers."
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Radio and Search Engines
If the radio industry is serious about all the chatter we hear it make on how "the future is online," the people pulling radio's strings should understand that search engine placement is an intricate part of this future.
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"The Best of Radio" Not Good Enough
As the NAB Radio Show gets set to open, it's apparent that this push to launch "The Best of Radio" was done in an expeditious manner ... so as to hit the spotlight prior to the radio industry's Philadelphia get-together.
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Understanding the Power of Analytics
What is it that prevents a VP of Radio Sales from diving in and demanding there be an over-the-air-to-internet relationship allowing them to assemble hard numbers on an advertiser's ROI?
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Will Internet Radio Save HD Radio?
Simple math states that 300 million smart phones have been sold. Nobody has seen sales figures for HD Radio, but I'm going to guess that it lags this figure by, say, about 299.5 million.
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Local News: Insight and Answers
That 85% of respondents claim to check on local news "Daily" or "Several Times a Week" shows how important it is for any media to have, and to promote, local content.
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Radio Performance, Fee or Tax?
This is not a pro-royalty or anti-radio industry commentary. It's presented as something to get the biased view open to the other side. For or against, we have to get some reasoning back into this discussion.
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All Sports, No Action from Radio Industry
You don't just declare yourself a sports talk station and begin raking in the money - especially in this day when your competition most probably includes online local sports-talk radio programs and even more local sports web sites.
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Radio, It's Now "Reach and Show"
From the advertiser's perspective, a broadcaster's goal is delivering the message to a large group of people. That same advertiser views new media as soliciting a response from persons that their message reaches.
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What Else Does Radio's Audience Do?
I thought today's time would be better spent if you were to see examples of what is drawing so much of youth's attention. There's more to be learned by laughing for the remainder of your time spent here than if we discuss this continuing - inevitable - slide downward that radio's found itself in.
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Looking for News in All the Wrong Places
If you are stuck in the routine of looking only at radio industry trades, you will almost never experience news stories that point out this fact: Locally focused doesn't mean the advertising service is locally based anymore.
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An Exercise in Radio Station Addresses, Online
What you'll see in the next few paragraphs is a demonstration of radio's inability to comprehend not only the power of obtaining a properly-named URL, but its lack of understanding of how important the name that you type into the address bar of your browser can be when localizing a radio station web site.
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The Rehr End and Radio
The NAB was slow moving into the technological age, trying desperately to hold on to the past. Our next NAB President must move into the future and use every means available to conjoin broadcast and internet in the eyes of the public and its lawmakers.
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Borrell: Radio Must Play Catch-up Online
Since none of the radio industry trades are carrying mention of this disparity, let's pose a question. When will radio industry leaders see that they are causing their medium, the one with the most online potential, to fail?
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The Reason for Radio Losing Local
Radio's relationship with the internet is not about telling your over-the-air audience to go to your web site. It's about maximizing web site visitors on a global scale, and offering services to your local market's merchants who want to do business nationally or worldwide.
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Sorry, Only One Radio Station Per Person
You might also explore the option of running a radio station online. I don't mean having a web site that just streams your radio station's over-the-air programming, but an internet radio station that you call your own.
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Radio Industry Math - One Formula Does Make a Difference
We do tip our hat to Peter Smyth for bringing attention to the need for an apples-to-apples comparison. But, like many other new ideas bantered about in the radio industry, this may never come to pass. Or, it will be tried for a few weeks and then quickly pass into oblivion.
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Righting Radio - Does It Sound Right?
Whether radio's programming and commercials have improved over any stretch of time is a subjective call. So let's put this another way: The radio industry has not done enough to keep the masses from spending their time with other media.
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Required Skill Sets for 2009 Radio Employee
The great social network created by a radio industry, which catered to the community, has been overtaken by an internet giving each audience member the power to become their own medium locally or on a global scale.
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Ken Dardis
Online Since January 1997
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