Home//Radio Ink Magazine/November 12, 2018/In This Issue
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018BREAKING THE CYCLEIf this issue’s cover interview with Colin Kinsella doesn’t have you cheering and running to make copies of the article to send to every client on your list, you might want to consider another occupation.“One of the best things about radio is that it is real. It is there and you hear it. The fact that people aren’t talking about advertising the way they used to is the reason brands aren’t doing as well as they used to. We have to get brands to break out of the cycle. If I was in radio, I would want radio to be the cycle-breaker.”These aren’t the words of a radio “insider.” These are the words of the head of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country. Someone whose agency deals…3 min
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018WHAT SHOULD RADIO BE DOING BETTER?We all know we can always improve at what we do, whether it’s at our jobs or in our home lives. Nobody’s perfect, and it’s smart and productive to take a hard look at what we’re all doing to try to make things better. The same is true for our industry. We reached out to several of Radio Ink’s 2018 Best Managers and asked them to tell us what the industry needs to do to become stronger. Here’s what they had to say.Understanding it’s about audio and the way it fills the companionship void. Audio provides a storytelling and narrative approach that compels individuals to respond and react. Whether it’s an issue in a community or responding to an advertisem*nt, audio drives people. We have to champion our reach, but…3 min
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018LEARN (RADIO) AGAINWhen I was in high school, pod-casting wasn’t an option. Small-market stations were still deciding if they wanted to invest money to build a website. But even if the technology to affordably host audio wasn’t available yet, the underlying concept of how to use that upcoming technology was. Some broadcasters took advantage, while others held off.There’s wisdom in the strategies broadcasters use to understand their demographics and cater to their audience. It shouldn’t surprise you that this can also apply digitally. We’re now at the point of having to relearn our audience, if we haven’t done so already.Think about the demographic you’re trying to reach. How do they use a smartphone? How does that smartphone interact with their car? What are their habits when they’re not next to a radio?…4 min
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018IS RADIO’S FUTURE BRIGHT?With two of radio’s biggest companies righting their financial ships, are things about to turn the corner for radio, both in terms of revenue growth and investment? Big debt has been an albatross for Cumulus and iHeart for years, and many radio executives have been waiting for the day both companies fix their balance sheets, claiming that will make the entire industry stronger and bring more investors back to the medium.Deregulation will also play a major role in radio in 2019 — that is, if it happens. The industry is not in agreement on how much more deregulation is needed, and that could turn a very radio-friendly FCC into a no-action FCC. For a closer look at what we can expect for radio heading into 2019, we turn to three…19 min
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018WILL RADIO TAKE THE AUDIO SUPERHIGHWAY?There has been much written, spoken, and listened to in recent years regarding the communications revolution that is unfolding before our very eyes — and that is in our very ears. I’ve written about it myself, and about how radio is responding.Not too long ago, the rise of Pandora was a huge concern for the radio industry. Here was yet another platform designed to pull music lovers away from AM and FM, continuing in the footsteps of the 8-track, the cassette, the CD, and the iPod. But today, Pandora is fighting for survival with the knowledge that SiriusXM will soon be its owner, and Spotify is radio’s major rival in the world of on-demand audio. Change is in the air, as always, and the pace is only speeding up.Right now,…2 min
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018ONE WORD THAT WILL MAKE OR BREAK YOUR SUCCESSDo you recall playing Truth or Dare? Truth or Dare is a game in which players are given the choice between answering a question asked by the other players truthfully or performing a “dare” — also set by the other players.As managers, we play this game with our sales team quite often! We are in our weekly coaching session reviewing our salesperson’s performance, and we ask them for the truth about their business. We ask questions like, “What else can you do to improve your revenue goals? Are you happy with your activity level of getting in front of new prospects?”We then dare them by saying, “I challenge you to call on clients with larger budgets instead of chasing small accounts who don’t have the ability to spend the necessary…3 min
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018RADIO: IT’S WHAT YOU DO WITH ITTake any medium you can name. It’s just a delivery system. It’s only as good as what you put on it. The Internet simply delivers your morning news to your phone instead of the kid on the bicycle throwing it on your front porch — and injuring the family cat.While the consumer has more platforms than ever to choose from, the abundance of media channels has only minimally resulted in a dilution of each medium’s audience shares. Listening, viewing, and reading habits have changed, but old and new media platforms live side by side in our multi-platform world.Let’s take an example. A young, urban male listens to his favorite AM Sports station for the scores of the game he missed while out the night before with his girlfriend, who just…4 min
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018FALSE LOGIC IN ADVERTISINGEarly in my career as an ad man I encountered a business owner who was hunkered down on a bit of false logic that flummoxed me for a while.He said, “The Small Business Association says your ad budget should be 5 percent of sales. So that means every ad I run has to generate 20 times what I spend for it. Can you guarantee me a 20x return on investment if I buy what you’re selling?”On the face of it, that logic seemed reasonable, but I knew it was wrong.I’d love to say I went back and won that account with dazzling salesmanship and irrefutable logic, but I didn’t. I deeply disliked that man and I didn’t want him in my life, so I never went back. I had seen…4 min
Radio Ink Magazine|November 12, 2018SELLERS: STOP USING RANKERS AND START DOING THIS...Having just returned from another week in the field, I’m surprised again at how few tools radio account executives are really using when pitching local direct clients.The last thing clients need to see is your ratings, rankers, complicated rate cards, descriptions of your format or program, or information about how powerful your station is. If they ask for that stuff, you can always provide it for them. But what the client is really looking for are specific ideas that will help make the cash register ring.In other words, the client is looking for evidence that your plan for their success is better than their own plan. That being said, here are a few things you can say about radio/broadcast media that, combined with a killer creative idea and a calculation…3 min
