Google & Facebook's Marketing Does This - Does Yours? Advertisers Tell Radio How To Make That Happen
Does your stations' marketing lead your advertisers to the upfront and instant conclusion that they'd be absolute fools to do business with anyone else but you, regardless of price?

If it doesn't, it's not working right.  The good news is that radio's advertisers tell us exactly what we need to give them, and there's a number of ways to make that happen.

Google & Facebook's providing their own brand of overwhelmingly compelling propositions corrals 72% of online ad dollars outside of China; and stateside, nearly 85% of every new dollar of online advertising.

The word "compelling" sums up why ​G & F are perceived as must-haves by national and local advertisers.  There's ways for radio to be as ubiquitously preferred, and I'll get there in a minute.  All this, while top national advertisers are embracing the "Dynamic Duo" as digital media missionaries - living and working among them - as G & F strategists take proactive, embedded roles at clients' offices in developing and executing their clients' solutions.  

Instead of radio's next trying to be a bunch of "me too, wanna be" missionaries, it's far more profitable, practical and quickly implemented for radio to take the lead with national and local advertisers.  

How Does Radio Take That Lead?  
Not by leading with the same, old - yet vitally important - lines from reach, frequency, and ROI/sales lift studies that do little to first capture the hearts of our advertisers.  Just like any selling, first connect with the prospect's most intensely held, emotional hot buttons - straight from the heart - that are the foundation of their most intensely held buying parameters; and only then, validating the proposition with logic.  

We've got to first capture advertisers' imaginations about what they can accomplish, by doing things that are so unique and compelling and RELEVANT to prospects' most intensely held emotional hot buttons, that G & F and other media are perceived as role players vs radio's taking the initiative as the central catalyst and leader.

Unlike other media, radio has the under-utilized resources, that can be monetized immediately, taking us well beyond our taken-for-granted edge in making a heart-felt, emotional connection with our audiences, every minute of every day.

That means going beyond our formats' mood services that induce emotional responses every time audiences hear a song, and can also do so with every news story, and every talk show.  That means going beyond our advertising's leveraging those emotional connections on behalf of our advertisers, engaging consumers, and going beyond having our clients' advertising giving our audiences unique and compelling offers/directives (what most of our advertising needs to do, but does not do) to take the next step in their decision-making process.

The Opportunities Are In What National/Local Advertisers Say We're Not Providing - And What They Want From Radio/Media "Professionals"
Documented, measurable, attributable results.  

Their rationale?  Advertisers perceive a high degree of risk in advertising, and are most always uncertain about the true outcomes and attribution, because they can't pin them down with accuracy.  Our local advertisers spend more on their advertising than they invest in their RRSPs, and they'd fire their financial planner if they didn't get a monthly statement of ROI.  

Yet they continue to spend with us (often feeling that it's a necessary evil), without being able to validate their logic with irrefutable, attributable, dollars and cents evidence.  

This isn't sustainable in a hyper-communicated, media-saturated, focus-fractured, attention-deficit-disordered world; where both attention and attribution is increasingly tough to achieve.

Radio's Roadblocks In Responding 
Although there's a number of ways to do it, and there are radio people (incl. yours truly) who have delivered 52 weeks of documented, measurable, attributable results, nobody in radio is doing this at the moment, because they're

1.  Scared to depart from the status quo and be called to greater accountability, amidst legacy media's upheaval.  
2.  So drawn to developing digital dollars for radio's share of the remnants left by G & F, that they're doing so at the expense of paying attention to what advertisers tell us they want most - which, ironically, would also accelerate radio's digital dollar development and increase spot rates.

Polarizing Vs Profitable
One of Canada's highest-earning radio sales managers told me that at his company, giving advertisers what they want (vs what radio wants to give them), would be - and I quote - "polarizing".  Others would choose the term "more profitable".

In contrast, having been employed by, having worked with, and having employed radio people who have delivered on the above, plus doing so on my own to earn a living, I stand witness to the facts.

What Advertisers Want = Proven, Practical, Profitable 
You can recreate your own wheel or do what others have done in providing advertisers with 52 weeks of documented, measurable dollars and cents results they can attribute to their radio spending, and trumpet the specifics of those dollars and cents successes to every advertiser and have growing numbers of advertisers be part of the process.  

Beyond being our advertisers' embedded missionaries and acting as media evangelists, regardless as to ratings or readership, it only takes weeks for a media company to take command of media spend in their market, when you take first position in offering proven, overwhelmingly compelling (not price-based, but results-based) propositions with documented outcomes.  

Week in, week out, when we provide what advertisers tell us want, we'll establish radio in the position of preference, as the primary, "must have/can't do without" resource.  

 

Last edited by Andy McNabb (October 19, 2016 11:31 pm)