"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.  You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try and sell it...  and as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with 'What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?'  Not starting with 'Let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how we're going to market that.'"  Steve Jobs

As radio continues along its flat-lining revenue road, it's because it's still "Us-Us-Us focused": peddling packages, running down other stations in a race to the bottom with cheaper prices in a loser's fight for market share within our sector (rather than building the pie), and ignoring the local dealership challenge to preemptively establish dominance in the vehicles that account for half of all radio listening, yet pose the rising problem of our dial positions being ignored by the connected dashboard and our hours tuned being replaced by wifi streamed audio.

No, I am NOT down on the medium most freely accessed - so ubiquitously and easily - and so well positioned to provide relevant, local perspective, entertainment, information and companionship.  Radio gives us the preemptive advantage in the marketplace because we're well able to establish pre-need consciousness in the consumer journey.  Yet, this pre-emptive advantage remains significantly undermonetized.

The fire within and the fun in the fight comes from giving advertisers what they want: the literal experience after experience of putting money in advertisers' pockets that they can actually count; and freeing our clients and colleagues from perpetuating the behaviours that suffocate radio's power to DAILY monetize, DAILY impact - not just advertisers' finances - but advertisers' and listeners' lives.  

Who's doing that daily for our advertisers?  They're the ones who will make millions and billions in the future.  We're sitting in the cat-bird seat, folks.  The competition isn't waiting for us to get our act in gear.  We need to drive ahead of them or be driven over by them.

Back to Steve - What incredible benefits are you giving to the customer?  A low spot rate?  C'mon, that's only because you're not focusing enough on the consumer to provide value in the sales process to justify charging more for your time. More digital services just like 100 other providers are perceived to supply?  Trips?  Your advertisers don't wake up in the morning and say "I want a trip if I buy more advertising".

Each morning your advertisers are waking up with the urgency driven by that similar to "I've got a wife and four kids to feed, I've got four post-secondary educations and weddings to fund, I've got my business mortgaged against my house and I want to pay that off - NOW".  

"What do I want?" says your advertiser.  "Don't waste my time with more of your 'Radio is great, my stations are so wonderful B.S.'".  

They're saying "Build my business.  Increase my profits.  Give me irrefutable proof as to exactly how much money I'm making from throwing more of my hard earned money at you; so that I can have the confidence to reinvest greater amounts with you, rather than giving those dollars to the next person with something new and shiny and a more compelling story to tell."  

If you're not doing that, your stations aren't doing radio right.  

There's a better way, and that's by starting with what Steve says in the first paragraph, and linking that outcome, that experience to your stations' actions.  You can only do that by increasing and documenting the results you're providing.  That's what your advertisers want.  

What's the next step you can take to make that happen?

Last edited by Andy McNabb (August 16, 2016 12:38 pm)