A key reason for our industry's flat-lining revenue performance is put into perspective when we see that 21 TTC ticket collectors earned more than $100k last year.  Radio is in a battle unlike any before it.  Never before have we been confronted by so many challengers for our listeners' attention and our advertisers' dollars.  So, let's talk about where our focus needs to be and the solutions required in making radio a more powerful force.

If you were outside radio and given money to invest, would you do so in a flat-lining industry?  The answer that most people would give, evidences the necessity of culture change that comes from taking immediate, fruitful, and practical action in all areas of our business, at all levels.  

The need to identify, financially invest in, and build on admin., sales, and programming talent and skills has never been greater.

We see the best and the brightest minds lured by the dollars, the sense of accomplishment and the strength of the futures found in the pharma and investment industries, among others.   Even though many of those less qualified would almost pay us to work in radio, we need to restructure our thinking about administration, sales and programming to compete for the best and the brightest - at the entry level, at the mid-management level, at the senior levels, and in the local and national investor communities.  

Where unique aptitudes and interpersonal skill sets are required, the short-term thinking in choosing to "get away" with paying so many in administration, sales or programming, the modest wages of which our industry is well-known - just because we can - amounts to very costly and self-limiting churn.  We've got to focus on building a more sustainable and more profitable future for owners/investors, management and staff.  

Our industry's focus over the past years has been on acquiring assets and building scale.  Guess what?  Our advertisers care far less about our scale than they do about their results that they can only hope they get when we pry their money from their increasingly reluctant and skeptical hands.  

Our ROI selling approaches may justify our setting a low bar for expectations just to get advertisers' business, but they don't help them quantify or maximize their results.  That's evidenced in the drift of their dollars to media that can specifically quantify and significantly increase advertisers' results - and regularly report on these results.  

There are thousands of documented cases in which radio has done so - more profitably than our digital or legacy media competitors - but we in radio (no matter what wonderful digital developments we have in play) are steadfastly ignoring the very approaches that give our customers what they want.  Yet, we can so easily and more profitably change the present - and the future - of an industry that steadfastly clings to limited thinking.

Given free reign - whether you have it or not - what could you do this coming month, to begin to change the future at your company, for the better?  

Here's the article re twenty-one TTC ticket collectors earned more than $100k last year.

Last edited by Andy McNabb (March 26, 2016 1:05 pm)