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Radio: The End is Near – Unless you heed Bob Garfield

Bob Garfield is the ad critic for Advertising Age and the co-host of one of my favorite public radio programs, On The Media. He is also the author of a forthcoming book called The Chaos Scenario about the collision of traditional and digital media and the collapse of familiar marketing structures. 

Bob’s take on what he calls “The Chaos Scenario” is one of the most important pieces you will read this year if you are in the radio trenches – or in its corporate boardrooms. 

Read on. And share it with your peers. 

Here's the full and unfiltered interview I conducted with Bob.  You should listen to it.  What follows is an abbreviated and edited transcript.

MP3 File

Bob, what is “The Chaos Scenario” that media face today? 

The Chaos Scenario presumes first, that all of our existing media structures built on the symbiosis between mass media and mass marketing are collapsing - that we’re in the middle of an apocalyptic episode in our industrial history, equivalent to the industrial revolution. And because of the digital world, all of the old structures are shrinking, fragmentation is calamitous, and the yin and yang of media and marketing are flying apart, never to be rejoined. So that’s the first part. 

The second part is that the new digital universe does not entirely replace the old world as we’ve come to know it and cherish it and count on it and believe it’s our birthright, and that while the digital revolution promises us more content than has ever been imaginable in all history of man and great opportunities to market and to forge relationships between marketers and consumers, that it will not give us new episodes of Lost and the Howard Stern Show. 

So you’re saying that the new advertising structures may not finance the premium content we most desire and have grown accustomed to receiving for free. That’s because ad inventory expands exponentially in the digital space, but advertising supply is finite so prices fall and as a result, a lot of things that used to be sustainable aren’t anymore; is that the gist of it? 

Yeah, that’s 50% of it. The other 50% is that radio is an industry that is built using a lot of electricity to transmit radio signals into the ether, a technology that is almost hilariously obsolete in the digital world.

There are only two reasons radio makes any sense at all right now: First, that we are not 100% broadband penetration, and second, that localization is still very, very important - although, many broadcasters have effectively squandered their localization advantages over the years by cutting costs. 

So between the obsolescence of the technology and the means of distribution and the supply/demand problem on the advertising side, broadcasters may face a very bleak future. 

But when we talk about radio, the definition you’re using, the definition most of us use, is “that thing that comes over the air from the tower.” Would you acknowledge that the way we define the four corners of “radio” and what it can become is relevant to our determination of its future? 

Oh absolutely. 

If you think of yourself as being in the business of sending radio waves through the sky to remote receivers, forget it. It’s all over but the shouting, because that’s not your business. You think it’s your business, but it’s not. It’s just how you used to distribute your product. 

If you can get past that and understand that not only are you not married to radio waves anymore, but you might not necessarily even be married to an all-audio platform anymore, then you can start imagining how you can find your place in the future. 

I personally believe that those who will survive in the existing media are those which become multi-platform and become the news, entertainment and cultural hubs for their communities. A lot of local media companies and third parties yet to be conceived are all going to be fighting for that same territory, to be the central repository of everything in their communities. 

If you win that race, good for you, you’re well positioned. The bad news is you’ve got to be prepared to do more things than morning drive. 

Well then, let’s talk about what that list of things might include. Give me some examples. 

I’m talking about all formats of music. I’m talking about real time news, weather, sports, headlines and traffic. I’m talking about cultural events in the community, concerts and what have you, maybe broken down genre by genre. I’m talking about all of it and more. 

And the media that survive locally will be those that are full service – they will survive and prosper. There are plenty of companies that are going to hang on by their fingernails for a while, but all of radio’s competitors are putting audio on their websites now and text and video, too, so the radio side had better be prepared to deal with text and video as well. 

Otherwise, they’re just going to be pushed to the side. 

So we should no longer consider ourselves “a radio station with a website” but instead a “local media company” with endless monetization potential driven, for the time being, by our over-the-air loudspeaker.

I have a public radio show. And what I am telling my colleagues and management all the time until they are sick of hearing it is that at the moment we are a radio program, but we have to start thinking of ourselves as a website that also happens to have a 60-minute audio portion to it. 

We have to completely re-imagine what we mean to our audience, and the longer we think of ourselves as a program, and not as a source of all things that our community of listeners care about, we walk ever closer to our own doom. 

It’s very difficult for people to move beyond the status quo. It’s very hard to get them to do anything more than the most incremental little changes. Incremental change is fine, and maybe that’s the only way to get large things done, but if you’re too slow in accomplishing them, the race is over before you get to the finish line. It’s a tremendous frustration for me. 

We are not talking about an incremental technology step. We are talking about the difference between living on a planet where men did not make fire and now a planet where man does make fire, where there was no agriculture, now there is agriculture. 

It is revolutionary and it has already changed human behavior on a grand scale. Industries are falling like dominos and the media are one of them. It’s not just a question of weathering a little transitory storm; it’s what happened when the Industrial Revolution overnight made cobblers unnecessary. 

On the commercial radio side you are also saddled by these mountains of debt that were accrued for the purposes of acquisition. Even if for the moment you have operational profits, you’ve got these debt payments coming at you like a cement truck going the wrong way on a divided highway. I’m profitable before my debt payment, but I can’t afford to make that payment. That’s one reason station values have been driven down, down, down, down. 

Now, I know a lot of your forthcoming book is about solutions, not strictly a description of the problem. One of the words you’ve coined is “listenomics.” What is that and why is it a solution for us?

“Listenomics” is simple. It says that the power pyramid has turned upside down. Everything used to be dictated and distributed from the apex of the pyramid down to the base. 

But in a digital world filled with digital connectivity and one in which content creators and entrepreneurs have very, very low barriers of entry and your customers and the groups formally known as your customers, your audience, the electorate, the hoi polloi who large institutions have always had to deal with but mainly by just telling them what they had to say and just assuming the audience would listen – it has flipped upside down. Now the power resides at the base. That’s true for all institutions, whether media or marketing, industry, government, political parties, what have you; they're faced with the fact that they’re no longer in control. I mean literally, this isn’t just some PowerPoint presentation slide; it’s true, you have lost control of your message. 

So you can fight it and continue to operate in the old analog way and soon you will be completely irrelevant. Or you have two options: Grudgingly accept it and try to operate with that fundamental knowledge, or happily accept it and start using this very disruptive fact of life in a digital world to your advantage. 

You see, the hoi polloi have much to offer you. They can be idea generators for you, they can be evangelists, they can be your defacto marketing team, they can create for you, they can do product development – just because they don’t pay attention to your advertising anymore doesn’t mean they don’t care deeply about your product. They’re a community that you have painstakingly built and they care about you. And instead of just treating them like wallets with circulatory systems, you can start embracing them, exploiting them and having conversation with them, and it can yield enormous, enormous, enormous dividends. 

You can even do a little advertising to them, although you better make sure that you’re making it available to them so they can control what and when to consume it and exactly how much at a time.

What about the structure of commercial radio makes this more difficult for us? 

I think one sort of structural problem is that commercial radio has become so format-based as opposed to personality-based over the years, and the future that will probably not be format based, I think. Successful audio distributors (as opposed to “broadcasters”) will be multi-format so that you can choose from a pallet of options every time you click. 

If you’ve built your relationship with your consumer based on being Top 40 Country or Album-Oriented Rock or Urban and you’ve got robo-playlists and no big personalities who have come to create a relationship with your audience, you’re starting at a disadvantage. 

But it’s never to late. People do care about your frequency more than you know. Some people, for whatever reason, regard themselves as 104.1 people and that’s worth something. It behooves 104.1 to leverage that latent emotion and turn it into something more. I don’t think the solution is necessarily giving out concert tickets for guessing Dionne’s first #1 hit. 

Bob, let’s pretend you get your own commercial radio station. The wheel is yours. What are you going to do now? 

I’m going to flip it and I’ll try to make some money on the arbitrage. I need a radio station like you need rheumatism; you know what I’m saying? 

Let me re-frame the question. You can’t flip it, you have to actually manage it. What will you do? 

I will make sure that I invest in talent. 

I will make sure that I exploit every last ounce of value out of localism. 

And I will create the most robust website ever that is ready for the world of mobile, wireless and automobiles - ready for a world in which the technology really does obsolete radio waves. 

I will try to become more of a full service platform. 

I will reduce – not add – the number of ad slots, because apart from the fact that clutter drives away audience, it has caused so many stations to go off a rate card and just cannibalize their own business models. 

I understand that it’s an investment and that the cash flow that I’m going to generate is going to be a lot lower for quite a number of years, but if I survive the shake out that is coming, I will have tremendous market share. 

Bob, what you just described is a full service platform. I think it’s worth noting that that’s not what we call radio but that is what you’re calling the future of radio, right? 

That’s what I believe.

Social Networking the Obama Way

Barry Libert is co-author of a timely new book called Barack, Inc.: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign . He’s also Chairman of Mzinga, which is a leading provider of social software solutions. 

Here's my complete interview with Barry, which is well worth listening to. What follows below is an abbreviated transcript.

MP3 File

Barry, everyone always talks about the success of the Obama campaign’s social network strategy (my.barackobama.com); Can you talk to me about the three or the four areas that you think are the key lessons for business from the Obama campaign. 

Absolutely. One was “Be Cool.” Barack was a master under pressure to be able to contain himself and maintain his humility, despite attacks that were being levied against him. 

The second was building an online community with constituents that empowered his people and captured their hearts and mind. 

And the third, probably the most exciting, was that he espoused a platform of “Change You Can Believe In.” And if you think about that last point, it wasn’t change I want you to do for me; it’s changes that I will do for you and that’s why you will believe in them. 

Let’s talk about the online community portion, which is really the heart and soul of what your company does. Assess for me the flaws in what you saw with the Obama campaign. How could it have been better? 

I’d love to say that I think there were flaws in his social strategy, but I don’t think there were any. In fact, I think he was flawless in his approach. 

And what did he do really well that neither McCain nor Clinton did is one, as a leader, he embraced these social technologies. And that’s the most important thing. 

The second is he put real resources against it, which means he responded to peoples’ wants and needs and stuck with them by putting resources against them in a meaningful way. 

And the third thing he did (which I think was brilliant) is he responded to everybody’s capabilities and requirements. So on Twitter, which is one of the tools he used, he responded and stayed in touch with everybody that stayed in touch with him. So it wasn’t just about the technology; it was about his actions that showed people that if you joined my social network, 13 million of you, I will help and respond to every one of you as individuals. 

Barry, I work in Radio. Why is it so difficult for broadcasters to understand and comprehend what you just said, even when they see it played out in front of them in such an incredibly effective manner? 

Think about the words you just said – I’ll call them your peer group called broadcasters. That defines who they are and what they do, they broadcast at us. And if you think about it, the concept of receive-cast (I’m not sure if there is such a word), that I’m going to be the recipient of the content from the users, from the viewers, from the listeners, from the readers – that fundamentally changes their mental mindset about how they think about their business. And if they think that their editors are really the producers of the content and the recipients are just the receivers of it, then this model doesn’t work. 

So I think what happens is broadcasters continue to think of themselves as being in control of the content. I don’t think broadcasters remember that they were originally community broadcasters and their job was to serve their constituents. 

Increasingly, you're seeing that broadcasters don’t like the fact, but the recipients are becoming their own broadcasters, their own source of editorial control, and those that embrace it are going to win this new media war. 

Then put yourself in the shoes of those broadcasters right now and your obligation, as you just highlighted it, is to serve your constituents and to make a little money at the same time. How do they go about embracing these technologies in order to make that happen while still being relevant? 

I think they're going to become more relevant, not less relevant by embracing these technologies and embracing the content of their constituents. And here’s why: 

If you think about a local newspaper, one of the ones we serve, a well-known metropolitan newspaper that has 50 editors, it’s in a top-10 metropolitan area. They have some freelancers as well, but they have about 500,000 readers. And I was trying to explain to the publishers that they need to reverse that business model. They need to think of their 500,000 readers as future editors, letting all of them publish content, and the 50 editors are nothing but the facilitators, the motivators, the catalyzers or the organizers of that group of people who want to put up content, and even in some cases, editing and vetting the content. 

The result is they go from having the switches of their newspaper in the “turned off” position, to the “turned on” position, and that will allow them to have more readers, more viewers, more interactors, and I hate to say it, therefore more advertisers as people spend more time on their sites reading, editing and participating with the newspaper and its online environment. 

I think it’s their future, and if they begin to realize that the future is getting people engaged with them as a business, they’ll make more revenues and therefore, more profits. 

That’s a key point, getting the audiences engaged with them. Now you’ve put it in a context of a newspaper or in the broadcast world, we could say a news station or a news-talk station, but most radio stations are not that. Many radio stations are music utilities, music brands. Isn’t it a harder translation when your business isn’t current events? 

I don’t think so. I am a smooth jazz fan, and I love smooth jazz. And believe it or not, there is no smooth jazz station in my hometown, Boston, which is interesting to me. I have a home in Florida and there are two smooth jazz stations there, and we’re a lot bigger in Boston. 

And so I look at it and say how do I engage with any of these radio stations in Boston to explain to them I’m not unique in wanting a smooth jazz station but more importantly, learning more about these smooth jazz artists, talking to other people about smooth jazz, interacting with these smooth jazz artists – I want it to keep going to shows and hearing these smooth jazz artists. I can't do any of those things right now. There is no way to participate with other people like myself in Boston around this particular music genre. 

And so I think, wow, the major owners of radio stations in Boston are losing my business; they’ve lost it to Sirius XM because they’ve not interacted with me yet on a personal basis, and neither has Sirius XM, for that matter. 

So what you're describing could be applied to any format. It could be applied to Rock, applied to Country, applied to anything. 

But the way you frame this is from the perspective of what you (as the fan) are looking to get, not what they (the radio station) are looking to provide. You framed it as “I’m a jazz fan, I’m a Rock fan, I’m a Country fan,” not a “I’m a WXXX fan, a WYYY fan, a WZZZ fan,” right? 

Absolutely. So I’m framing it in the context of exactly what Barack did. His position was change you can believe in. He could have been like any traditional business leader of any broadcast medium and said I’m going to change my station, my music, my talk because it’s the change I believe you're going to like, but it’s basically because of what I like. George Bush would have said I tried to make some changes, but I’m still your Commander In Chief. 

He was “the decider.” 

I would argue I have not heard Barack say that yet. He may one day say that during difficult times, but he doesn’t see himself as the Commander In Chief; he sees himself as the facilitator. When he said yesterday on the train ride “I love you back,” tell me the last time you heard a President say that. That’s like going home and saying to my wife one of two things; “Honey, I’m your Commander In Chief, you take it the way I give it,” or “Thank you for saying ‘I love you’ and I love you back.” 

But every radio station is trying to leverage these opportunities. And your message is that that’s fundamentally selfish because it’s not about you; it’s about the value you provide and that which I, the listener or the fan, expect to get out of that value, which is why I don’t care if it’s WXXX, I’m a smooth jazz fan and I want the context to be about that, not about you, the radio station. 

So correct. You have to give up control to your constituents. I don’t care if it’s your employees, your partners, your customers, your investors – it makes no difference to me. 

What your job fundamentally is in the flat and connected world is to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and begin to mimic and replicate their wants and needs. You need to put yourself there in their shoes and give them what they need, because they can get it from everybody else no matter what. It’s no longer about traditional strategies; it’s about fundamentally serving the other person on their terms. And I don’t think businesses have understood that meaning fully yet. 

Well, Barry, of all the businesses that should understand that, I would think media would be near the top because of what's going on in the mediasphere right now. 

You obviously see it in TV. American Idol is doing a really good job in engendering their entire fans, and we have other media properties as well that we work for, including Sports Illustrated and ESPN who really do get it’s all about their fans, what can they do to engage them, I mean, on every single dimension. 

But I am surprised that some of our newspapers still don’t get it, are still trying to broadcast at them with a single medium. Even if they're online, it’s still a broadcast mentality: “I’m going to publish content that I think is right for you, all the news that’s fit to print.” 

That’s an impossible message, right; because that would suggest The New York Times knows what's fit to print. In today’s world, I know what's fit to print based on what I want to print and that’s not me, The New York Times; that’s me, the reader, who is the future editor. I’ll write what I want to write to whom I want to write it on whatever terms and conditions I want to write it with and whatever medium I want to use. That is a fundamentally different mental mindset than what most newspapers have. 

What is it going to take for broadcasters or media icons to recognize that control has changed and the torch has been passed? 

You're seeing it all the time. In companies like The Tribune going bankrupt – that’s just the beginning of it. You're seeing the drop in readership, you're seeing the falloff of advertising dollars, and you don’t see the changes of the business leadership changing much, except for Murdoch; I’m a big Wall Street Journal fan, and I’m absolutely blown away by what he has done with the Wall Street Journal online. Next to every single article are two more things, discussions and commentary. And I don’t mean by the editors. 

So he has understood that even at the Wall Street Journal, every piece of content that is produced by the Wall Street Journal should be surrounded by, amplified to, added to, and edited by the readers. And so it’s not only online pieces of content, he has also added community as a separate distinct tab. So maybe the fact that he owns MySpace and has experienced the power of people making it their own allows him to understand the power of applying it to such state organizations like the Wall Street Journal. 

So I think what will happen is leaders like Murdoch will show more traditional leaders, like Sam Zell, what it takes to be successful in today’s user generated and user controlled world. They have to change, not “the customers have to change;” that they have to change to accept the fact that their listeners, their readers, their writers – and I don’t mean their internal writers anymore – their recipients of the content are now the producers, publishers, and editors of the content. 

And they only own the platforms for which to facilitate the transmission of it from one listener, one writer, one editor, one reader to another. 

That’s their job.

Opportunities for Radio in 2009

Yesterday I had the opportunity to join Country radio consultant Jaye Albright as the guest on one of her regular conference calls to benefit her programmer clients.

Jaye is one of the best in the business, and I am grateful for the opportunity to rant and rave about radio's future every chance I get.

Thanks Jaye!

Find out more about Jaye's company, Albright & O'Malley , and visit her Breakfast Blog, too. 

Enjoy!

MP3 File

Adding Value - the Key to Radio's Future - an interview with Branding Guru Tom Asacker

Tom Asacker is a highly regarded marketing and branding advisor and the author of a terrific new book, A Little Less Conversation: Connecting with Customers in a Noisy World.  I spoke with Tom before he addressed a meeting of brand managers in San Diego (Visit Tom's website here).

What follows is an abbreviated transcript.  For the full interview, click here or download the MP3 file (Note:  You can also subscribe to hear2.0 Podcasts at iTunes)

MP3 File

Tom, A Little Less Conversation….  What are you trying to say?  What should we be doing more of, and what are we doing too much of?

Well, the title is two-fold:  First, it seemed to me that people think that the best way to connect with customers in this new, very competitive marketplace, is to create conversations with them.  So let's take everything we're doing now, and let's go create social networks, let's try to figure out how to listen to what people are saying and connect with them in that manner, and that kind of makes sense.  I don't have a problem with that — that's why it says A Little Less Conversation, right?  What I think we need to do more of, however, is a little more action, please. 

So instead of figuring out how to communicate and how to persuade and how to be clever in our approach to the customer, how do we actually create value and make our customers happy and improve their daily lives, whatever that happens to mean. 

Look for people in their routines and say to yourself, "How do we inject us, our passion, our dollars, our spending, into their lives and improve them?"  Not, "How do we communicate better with them?"  How do we actually do something that will improve somebody's life? 

So what are some practical ways of doing that?

There are various components of marketplace value.  I've identified ten components - everything from saving time and saving money to connecting with people based on the aesthetics of the product and the service - even of the communications.  There are social connections that you can allow people; you can facilitate that as a brand.  Meaning:  How do you create more, deeper meaning?  You see the whole green revolution, right?  That all has to do with that.  So there are value components that you can use to weave into your brand; it's how you creatively do that that differentiates one brand from the other.

Take, for example, Wal-Mart and Target.  So Wal-Mart is "Save you time and save you money."  That's in essence what it is, so what's the "feeling"?  The feeling is, "Hey, I'm smart.  I saved a lot of time and a lot of money by going down to Wal-Mart and loading up the trunk with stuff that's good enough."

What did Target do?  Target said, "Well, we want to play in that field.  We want to be a save-time-save-money type of value component.  How do we do that?"  Well, you've got to weave in another component of value.  So they said, "We'll weave in aesthetics.  We'll make sure that we're providing a certain environment that makes people feel different about their engagement with our store than they do with the Wal-Mart brand."  So that's how they did it.  I mean it was very clever, tough to execute - all these things are about execution.  But as a brand, if you look to adding value, if you say to yourself, "Where's the value in this activity to the customer?" that's the mindset shift that's so hard for everybody.  Because they're thinking, "What's the value to us?  Oh, we'll persuade more people; we'll get our name out more."  No, flip it back around and say, what's the value to them of creating this, whatever this is that you're thinking of doing.  If you can't find the value, it's probably not really there.

Do brands need to understand their own DNA – who they are – before moving on to add this kind of value?

Well, Nokia was a wood pulp manufacturer; they were a rubber boot manufacturer before that.  The only reason that they extended into cellphones was because the toilet paper market in the USSR was collapsing with the fall of the country.  Right, so they said, "We've got to get into something."  You can expand into what you have the ability to expand into, not necessarily what you have the history of.  What do I have the ability to expand into in order to create value for customers? 

The hardest thing about what radio is trying to do is they're trying to appeal to a broad audience.  The bigger, the better.  And that's what fails them, because they have a hard time understanding what their customers want - and by customers, I mean listeners and advertisers.  What their customers want is a sense of connection, trust, and interest built around them as a collective, whatever that collective is.  

So for example, if I'm listening to this radio station and I'm a bike enthusiast or whatever, and I know that these guys connect with me deeply, when they run an ad about something having to do with extreme bicycling, I will pay attention and listen because they've developed and trust and interest in what I'm interested in.  All right, now they don't have to go that narrowly, right?  They could be the people that are out there looking for certain genres of music, and I trust them on that.  So now they clue me in to anything that has to do with music — stereo systems or portable music players — but until I have trust, right — it has to go beyond attention.  They've already got my attention.

For whatever reason, I get in the car, I push this button and I listen because I like the music.  So they've got my attention; now they've got to get deeper and say, "Okay, how do we keep people interested?  How do we make what we do desirable to them, not just as a listener of music but as someone who's also listening to the content between the songs?"  What are they doing to tell me that they care about my interests between the songs by talking about things that interest me or that are valuable in my life during that time?

And then from the advertiser's standpoint, the flipside of that is, "Hey, we have this community of people interested in what you are selling, Mr. Advertiser, so let us connect you with them more efficiently.”

Exactly right.  Exactly right, because once we do broadcast to them, they will tune it in.  They will be consciously aware of what we're talking about because they know we're the people to go to to find out about whatever that value is that they're trying to provide.

Now, does this imply that I need to focus on niches?  Does it mean that I need to appeal to smaller groups of people?

Well, think about what "niche" means.  Local is a “niche,” right?  If you have a local environment, you need to understand what’s on listeners' mind from a local standpoint.  So you're a radio station, and you're saying to yourself, "How do we add value to our listeners' lives?"

Yeah, we have this medium that we can use, but we also have feet on the streets; we have budgets, we have connections with advertisers, right?  How do you use all of that to help local people improve their lives?  Maybe socially they want to connect.  How are you allowing listeners to connect?  Maybe I would build a bar, and I would put the call letters on the bar and I would broadcast from there, and I would say “Come on down,” and I would figure out how to get sponsors in there to be giving people things. 

Just look at your brand and say to yourself, "How do we use what we are — our resources, our connections, our influence — to provide value to people?”

So are you suggesting that maybe we as an industry are too dependent on the argument: "We're top-five-ranked, and Mr. Agency, please get us on the buy"?

No, I'm saying a lot of media has looked for "value" in this thing called “awareness” — eyeballs, attention, whatever you want to call it.  And they've stopped there, and they said, "Okay, we have the value," or they say, "How do we grow this value bigger — this one component of value?’

"How do we get more listeners?" in our case.

Right.

Instead, why didn’t they say early on, "Wait a minute.  There are other components of value."  A big one is social connection.  Why didn't radio have the first social networks?  When they saw this coming, why didn't they say, "Whoa, let's grab that.  Let's connect these listeners like crazy; we'll connect them to each other all over the place."  Because that adds value to the relationship.

But many ad agencies aren’t interested in anything beyond what's top-five ranked.  They're not interested in any other dimension of value besides that one.  Is that going to change or is that not as true as it's made out to be?

You know, there are buyers who buy based on spec; then there are the forward-thinking people who say, "What is the depth of this relationship that we're trying to create between our message and the consumer?"  And they're going to start going deeper rather than broader.  That's why a ton of money is flying to the Internet — because it's measurable.

Right.

Okay, it worked.  I've got a click.  But even the Internet guys are saying, "Wait a minute; clicks aren't enough anymore!" The advertisers say, "If you really want our money, we want a purchase, or we want engagement.  We want you to stay on our site — we don't want somebody just clicking and then going away.  Every media brand is being forced to show that it can drive desire, trust, interest, engagement, and eventually sales.  That's the name of the game.

In your observations, how well do you think radio people in particular are getting this message and adapting to it?

It seems that we've got a catch-22 on our hands, right?  We need to get out on the street and keep selling in order to keep revenue coming in, so nobody wants to slow down in order to change the way they're doing things, to really rethink it, because that might take away from sales time.  I mean we're putting out fires, and nobody wants to step back and say, "Wait a minute.  Is there a better way of doing this?”

It's a difficult thing with an industry that's been around this long, with people that are well entrenched in relationships up and down the chain.  It's tough to get people to change — to just say, "Put on the brakes, and let's rethink radio."  But I think that that's what needs to be done:  Let's rethink radio.  Just like Steve Jobs said, "Let me rethink the MP3 player."  He didn't say, "Well, we can do the MP3 player and slap this thing on it"; he said, "Stop, and let's rethink the MP3 player." 

That's a tough thing to do.  It takes guts.

You've talked a lot about value.  It’s interesting that you haven't used the word "content."  Where does content come in in your conception of the way radio needs to rethink itself?

That’s a good question.  I was actually with 15 vice presidents of marketing at a large company, and one was really confused about what to put in a brochure he was writing.  So I asked, "Where's the value in a brochure to what you just got done telling me was a very busy client base?"  And he said, "Well, what do you mean?"  I said, "Well, tell me:  If you hand somebody that brochure, are they gonna thank you?  I mean is there something there that is going to either improve their life, make them more knowledgeable in their job, engage them, make them laugh, or allow them to share it with others so that they got some social currency?"  I said, "Is there any value in that brochure that you know of?"  He said, "I can't think of anything."  I said, "Well, then don't print the brochure.  Come up with another way of doing what you're trying to do that allows other people to see the inherent value in it.”

Content inherently has no value.  It has to provide value in some way.  It has to provide engagement value or growth value in that through this content I improve myself in some way, I become more knowledgeable, I'm a better cook, I'm a better husband, whatever the heck it is.  Or it must provide some kind of social value where I use the content to make connections with other people, people that I want to be interested in me, people I want to connect with. 

So is this the key to creating a larger audience?

You can't create larger audiences by trying to create larger audiences.

You can only create larger audiences by trying to get deeper with smaller audiences. 

Think about how to get deeper and make more relevant, valuable connections with individuals in a culture or a subculture. 

Don't think about audience size.  Think about the depth of the relationship and how important it is and how valuable it is.  The more you do that, the bigger the audience gets.

“Individual” is the ultimate “local,” right?

That's it, that's it.

Exclusive: Seth Godin updates his take on Radio's Future

This will be one of those interviews you print out and remember long after you first read it.  You will want to pass this around.  And for more from Seth Godin on Radio, pick up my new book, Making Waves: Radio on the Verge.

What follows is only a partial transcript.

For the full audio, click here:

MP3 File

Seth Godin is a well-known marketing thought-leader and author of the new bestseller Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us . Seth previously wrote Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable , Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers , The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) , and so many more. Here, Seth updates his take on Radio’s future in what may be the most provocative interview about our industry you will read this year. 

The new book is Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. What is a “tribe” and why do we need you and you and you and you to lead us? 

Well, a tribe is not a crowd. A crowd is what radio program directors and marketers and people who make Tide detergent seek. A crowd is a bunch of people who you’re able to somehow grab the attention of. 

A tribe, however, is a group of people who share something, a common culture, a language, a goal. They often have a leader. At their best they are part of a movement - and tribes are incredibly powerful. They are hardwired into us. We want to be a member of a tribe. We seek them out. Different people want to be in different tribes. When we’re in one, it becomes a key part of our understanding of life and gives us a sense of meaning. 

And the reason that there’s an opportunity today is because marketing as we know it is fading away.  Average products for average people advertised incessantly at the masses - that’s not working like it used to, and we all know that. At the same time, the Internet has connected people like they’ve never been connected before and rather than homogenizing the world and making everyone the same, we’ve discovered that it has allowed people to connect with like-minded others. So witches can get together, and Ukrainian folk dancers, Hasidic Jews, and people who are into Star Wars. They can find each other and amplify their mission. 

So what’s missing today is not that we don’t have enough tribes, it’s that we don’t have enough people to lead them, and that is the opportunity I talk about in the book, particularly to people who already have a platform, who already are speaking to numbers of people, who already are trying to make something change. 

The opportunity is to realize that what you do for a living now is not interrupt the masses but instead lead and connect a tribe. 

This book opens with a discussion of tribes and then it moves very quickly to become almost a primer on leadership. 

Well, if marketing is now the act of leading a tribe and people say, okay, what are my tactics? What do I do? What’s the “dummies” version? The answer is: The only thing you need is the ability and the willingness to lead. This choice of leading is actually a marketing tactic now because if you’re not willing to lead, no one’s going to follow you. If you try to manipulate, no one’s going to follow you. If you don’t understand what the tribe needs and wants, no one is going to follow you, and so I set out to write a marketing book, but I ended up with a leadership book. 

That was my sense as I read it. Now one of your points is that getting more fans should be the goal, not getting more traffic. If I translate that to radio terminology, you’re implying getting more fans is more important than getting more Cume, more audience, more reach. 

In fact, the worst enemy of a radio station is the Arbitron ratings because they force you to abandon the tribe. 

They force you to not have insiders and outsiders but instead to try to make everyone an insider, to homogenize and go for the lowest common denominator because big numbers are what you’re after. But what you really want is this: If your station changed format or went off the air for an hour, how many angry phone calls would there be? Who would miss you? 

And it’s not very often that an author gets to gloat after a presidential election but I need to because all the stuff I wrote about is exactly what happened on election day in the United States. If you can connect to people in a way that they will miss you if you’re gone and in a way that they will feel missed if they are gone, then you have created a tribe, and tribes are always more powerful than the alternative, which is yelling at the masses. 

And so radio has this interesting opportunity - the FCC has gifted you a priceless platform and for generations it has been misused to yell at people who didn’t have anything else to do in their car, but now we have something else to do in our car. Now we don’t ever have to listen to radio again. There are plenty of people who have every song ever recorded on their iPod. That iPod is hooked up to their car. They can listen with no commercials and with no one prattling on about traffic in a place they are not located. 

But what they can’t get out of their iPod is the sense of connection and belonging. What they can’t get out of other forms of media is the sense of being in a select community, and the mistake that so many radio stations have made is they abandon that in favor of another point on their Cume. 

Well, the radio station’s argument would be, look, you’re saying that a deeper relationship with a smaller audience is in the long run better for us than a shallower relationship with a larger one, but how do we sell that deeper relationship with a smaller audience when all the models are built around reaching as many ears as possible? 

Well, the models are built that way because that’s what advertisers think they want. And you can persuade an advertiser to advertise once with you based on the numbers but you only get them to come back because they made sales. You only get them to come back because they moved product. 

We know that when the Catholic Church runs a fund drive, they never fail. We know that National Public Radio raises more money more easily every year than ever before. Neither one of those groups succeeds because they’re big. They succeed because they have connected people, because people care about each other and the organization. 

So if you’re an advertiser and you have a choice between reaching a ton of people who couldn’t care less, and so you have to talk really fast, yell, and make obscene promises on the radio to get them to show up at your dealership, or reach a smaller group of people about something that they’re very interested in in a very connected way, in the long run advertisers are going to come back to the smaller, more tightly knit group. 

Where you need to have leadership as a station owner is to realize that you can teach advertisers to do business in a way that works for them, but you will only succeed at doing that if you are able to create this tribe. 

Under the new Arbitron methodology, PPM, stations have anywhere from two to three times as many listeners as they thought they did under diaries, and of course those people are listening for shorter durations than they were under diaries. So the spin at the industry level is: “We’ve got reach that approaches television. Let’s sell radio as a reach medium.” Now correct me if I’m wrong, that’s exactly the opposite of what you’re arguing. 

What we know is that not one major consumer brand launched in the last ten years succeeded because of TV or radio. Not one. Go down the list. The Amazons, the Apples, the Starbucks of the world, that’s not how they came to be. And for marketers today, especially given where the economy is, the easiest way to make your numbers is to cut your TV and radio budget - and they will. So to go out and say “we’re more like television, except we don’t have pictures” doesn’t strike me as the way to sell local advertising to people who are measuring what is happening. 

True or false: You can more effectively create tribes and rally them around your cause because you’ve got their contact information. You know what they’re interested in. They have trust in you. You have a relationship with them and you have a relationship with the advertisers that have services or products that they need, right? 

Exactly, but one thing you left out is they have to be looking forward to it. So if you create a tribe within your station of people who live within four miles of my house and are single, and you connect us to each other, and once a week we get an email about which bar to go to and what the playlist is going to be at that party, and you start connecting us to each other so that we look forward to that email, then you can go to ten bars in the area and auction off that site and whichever bar pays you the most is where you’ll have the party. 

You can do that with 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 tribes just on top of one radio station because the radio station is the beacon that sends out the message to everyone that says this is a gathering place, a totem pole. And then you use the web and email to connect people and to make them feel wanted – it’s what I’m doing that with my blog now. 

My blog is sort of popular. I posted a note in August and I said, “If you buy a copy of my book sight unseen (which is crazy) three months before it comes out (which is crazy) I’ll give you a free invite to this online tribe I’m starting.” And 3,400 people did it in 48 hours - and then I closed it. Now it’s still closed. It’s going to stay closed, but now I’ve got 3,400 people – well, I don’t have them. They have each other. I show up every once in a while to make sure order is kept but they are writing ebooks, consulting each other, connecting, meeting each other, having coffees in Washington, D.C. and lunches in San Francisco because I built a place for them. 

And if I wanted to I could build a new place like that every week on different topics using the blog as a way of announcing it. I’m not trying to make money from these online communities, but if I was, what could be better than an online site where at 4:00 in the morning on a Sunday there are 40 people there, and a new post goes up every 15 to 30 seconds, and there are hundreds of groups and thousands of posts. This is their place. They like to connect with each other there. That seems to me to be better than running a commercial between two Beatles songs. 

Now a lot of stations have had spotty results in creating social networks for their radio stations on their websites. To some degree their listeners say “I’ve got Facebook. I’ve got MySpace. Why do I need this?” 

Well, of course they’ve got spotty results because they don’t really care, and they’re not generous. They’re selfish, and it’s not a useful social network because anyone can join. There’s no curation. I don’t feel special when I’m there and it’s clear they did it to sell me something, right? 

I mean here’s the thing, Mark, and you and I have talked about this before. If you hadn’t gotten that gift – your frequency - from the FCC 20, or 40, or 80 years ago, whenever your station got it, what would you have? Because this has all been about leveraging that. 

Everything radio has done has been about leveraging a rare piece of spectrum, and the thing we have to acknowledge is that spectrum isn’t rare anymore. So the one asset you built your whole organization on is going away really fast and instead of putting your head in the sand and complaining about that, take advantage of the momentum so that when it does finally disappear, you have something else. 

Because even now radio stations have relationships with many, many, many listeners that would be the envy of Amazon in any local market, relationships with many, many, many advertisers that would be the envy of even Google in local markets, right? 

Right. I mean my wife gets in the car, she hears a DJ from her youth still on the radio, and there’s a connection there, a tenuous one but a connection. And then there’s three minutes of being yelled at about used cars. If the radio station was smart, they would know my wife doesn’t need a used car and she has never bought a car because it was advertised on the radio, so the obvious thing to do is to change the station. You took that great asset you had and you wasted it for what? Because the car dealer gave you a tenth of a penny per person. What a waste, and you keep wasting it over and over again because so many people in the radio business are stuck and unwilling to realize that they could take that and leverage it to a new place. 

And my provocative statement is that five years from now the only profitable radio stations will be the ones that have vibrant, connected tribes of people who want them to succeed. 

In the past year especially, stations have been finding revenue off considerably compared to the same time last year, and thanks to what’s going on now economically, especially as it affects the auto industry, we expect that to carry into 2009, compounding effects related to technology and iPhones, and so on. What do you say to the broadcaster who says, look, all this digital media stuff is great icing on the cake but my cake is shrinking! I’ve got to rebuild my cake and work harder to sell more spots at higher rates. Forget all that icing! 

My answer is in industry after industry we’ve seen that you can’t defend the fortress because the fortress goes away. 

AOL is a fine example. AOL said let’s defend dial-up. Let’s defend the walled garden because the web was too hard for them to understand. They lost billions and billions of dollars. 

Consider the FCC’s ruling recently about the white space spectrum. What white space spectrum is going to mean is that in five years every car sold is going to have an infinite number of radio stations on it. Not 100 or 1,000 but more radio stations than you could listen to in your lifetime, and if that’s true, tell me again why you’re going to win? Tell me again how defending that fortress, how propping up that cake can lead to anything positive? It can’t. 

On the other hand, do you want me to tell you what station I’m going to listen to? I’m going to listen to the station about me, the station that’s filled with my friends, the station that connects people like me with other people like me, because my favorite person is me – like everybody else. 

Now the idea of getting more fans rather than more traffic requires people at the helm who have a passion for what they’re doing, and that requires creativity. It requires art. It requires inspiration. It requires really deeply caring about what you’re doing. Those people are being drained from the radio industry. How important is that kind of passion and spirit among the creators, the programmers, the content-makers? 

Well, I think you just said it. It’s everything. The one thing I would add is you need people who are passionate about their listeners, people who are passionate about making their listeners’ lives better. 

I want you to think about the last time someone in your station had a meeting where, in the middle of the meeting, someone said “but that’s not good for our listeners.” That never happens. They say “well, that might not be good for our ratings,” but that’s different. The question is who is going to step forward and shake up the status quo and lead, and it will happen, but how much damage and havoc will be reached before that? Given the history of most industries that are under stress, the answer is a lot. 

If we look at how the music industry melted down to nothing, it happened because the people in charge kept firing or disempowering the people who actually could have done the right work because they cared, and what a shame, because they had everything going for them. It was the perfect business with the perfect medium, and over the last ten years they systematically dismantled it because they kept trying to preserve the status quo by bringing in “yes men” rather than challenging the status quo and building something better. 

Seth, Tribes is another great book. I really enjoyed reading it. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Seth Godin is one of the most popular bloggers on the planet and the author of one great business book after another. Thank you so much, Seth. 

My pleasure. I’m a fan. 

Get your Radio Station "Tuned In"

David Meerman Scott is the co-author of one of my favorite books of the year so far, Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities that Lead to Business Breakthroughs. He’s also the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. You can find out more about David here.

Check out the entire Q&A audio below. What follows is only a transcript of some highlights.


MP3 File

Before we get into Tuned In, where do you think radio fits in to “the new rules of marketing and PR?”

Well, every time we go through the development of a new medium the old medium doesn’t go away. It may change a little bit, but it doesn’t become obsolete and disappear. When television came around radio didn’t disappear. It changed a bit, but it didn’t disappear. And I think the same thing is true with the advent of the web as another form of communication.

And here’s what’s really different about the web in my mind, particularly from the perspective of a marketer, which is how I talk about media out there. The web is an amazing opportunity for anybody to publish anything. And that’s really, really good. And for many people that also can be really, really bad because it means that anybody can push stuff out without any editorial idea necessarily being involved. And the market will determine who’s good.

So radio has its place and it’s an important medium. And the idea that you can develop shows and station personalities and all those things is a really good way to break through the clutter of what many people perceive parts of the internet to be.

You mean develop shows that live both online and on air?

That’s another great way and so many people are doing that. Participation can be so different when people can be listening in and participating if they happen to be in a place where they’ve got a computer or wireless capability available.

You talked about TV’s effect on radio. Radio, in fact, changed quite a lot when TV came in. So how dramatically do you think radio will change in the wake of the Internet? I think the very definition of radio is evolving as we bring in digital media.

Consider something as simple as show notes. If you participate on a show the host or producer will put together some notes that will be on the site on the web and then when people need to learn more information about the guest or about the subject that was discussed or related resources they know they don’t have to write it down as they’re driving. They just go later to the station site or the show site and bang, there all the links are sitting there. That, of course, becomes another potential advertising vehicle for the station.

It becomes another way that the station can market because every single one of those show notes is now search engine marketing fodder. And people can find it when they’re doing a search on a particular subject. “Oh my gosh. Well, they just did this particular show. Maybe this particular show next week is going to cover something similar. Maybe I ought to tune in.”

You’re talking about using the Internet to get deeper in to the experience of radio?

Absolutely. Absolutely right.

I participated in a radio show - an online radio show, but the concept’s the same. There were maybe 100 people logged into a chat room during the time that the radio interview was on. And it was really cool because I was one of the guests on the show.

And before the show even started I was able to gauge the tone of the room, if you will, the tone of the airwaves. I did my thing for ten minutes and then I participated in a little chat afterwards. I thought that was pretty cool and it was the first time I had personally experienced it. But there’s a lot of room to make more use of that kind of thing.

It makes you wonder why every talk radio station, every station with a talk program and a guest, doesn’t have a chat room running concurrently for sidebar conversations and for people to get involved whose voices may not be on the air.

I would think so. And I mean you would know certainly better than I how extensive it is. But it was the first time I had been involved in it and I’ve done a bit of radio. So it was a really interesting thing. And, again, around that particular page was advertising. So it’s a potential revenue opportunity for the station as well.

That brings us to Tuned In. What does it mean to be tuned in?

We interviewed 100 CEOs and looked at a lot of different companies to try to get at the essence of how businesses get breakthroughs. And what we concluded was that it’s pretty simple: The businesses that are what we call “tuned in” are the ones that succeed. And being “tuned in” means they are focused on their potential customers and the problems that their potential customers face - as opposed to what most organizations do, which is dream up products and services in their comfortable offices or just create things that they think would be interesting, and then market that

What most “tuned out” companies do is to create their marketing and simply talk about what their products and services do.

So contrast that with the companies that do it right and who are focused on understanding the unresolved problems that people face in the marketplace and how a well-placed product can solve those problems and then become a breakthrough in the market.

But most businesses feel they already do that. How is your approach different?

It literally requires talking to potential customers, potential buyers in the marketplace, not about what you might produce for them, but about what their issues are. I know it seems obvious. And people say, “Well, we do that all the time.” But they don’t. And then an upstart who does ends up being successful.

Here’s a great example that we use in the book. A company called Zip Car. They’re in the rental car business. Now, for years the rental car business has been virtually the same. They have offices at the airports and then a few other spots. People would go and rent a car. It’s almost a commodity business.

And if you had asked people from Avis and Hertz and Budget and National, the big car rental companies, “Is there room for another competitor?” They’d laugh at you because the market is already so crowded. Yet, all of those companies focused on their existing marketplace. They focused on people who rent cars at airports and people who rent cars in the suburbs. They totally ignored the market of people who don’t have access to rental car shops where they live or don’t live near the airport and they don’t want to rent a car for a full day or a week.

So Zip Car created an online reservation-based car system. You get a member card, which looks like a credit card. It has a magnetic strip on it. You swipe your card against a car that’s located physically in parking spots around the city.

You jump in, and drive for a two hour run to Home Depot or Costco or to go pick up Aunt Millie and drive her back in to have lunch with you in the city. And so they’ve built a hundreds of millions of dollars business as a result of literally tuning in to a group of people who had an unresolved problem that a car rental company could fix. But it wasn’t the same old car rental company as everyone else had.

So let’s apply this to radio. Instead of focusing on what your current audience wants, you’re asking the market “What’s wrong with your experience now? What problems do you face now that a radio station could resolve?”

Exactly. And the only way to do that is by literally talking to these people. And I don’t just mean your existing listeners. I mean talking to people who have unresolved problems who aren’t yet served.

I don’t know that much about your business, but maybe ask people who don’t listen to the radio or people who only listen to the radio in the car, but never at work, “Well, why is that?” And see if you can get at issues that they’re facing that can be solved with something that’s interactive and combines with the broadcast or some type of show that isn’t being offered yet. And the surprising nuggets are the ones that you learn when you dig like that.

You have a particular phrase that you use repeatedly to describe strategies done inside-out from the marketing conference room.

Yeah. We say, “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.” And it’s a good one isn’t it?

It’s so common for managers to think “Hey, I’m the vice president. I’m working hard. I’m making a good living here at this company. I’m a smart guy. I know what my buyers want. I’m just gonna make it or I’m gonna tell the R and D guys to make it.”

And the truth is that we’re just one opinion, and we’re not the market. The only way to truly understand the market is to get out and talk to representatives of that market. And that’s when the surprising breakthroughs come.

Your second step is "understand buyer personas." Can you just touch on that briefly? Because in radio we’re accustomed to dealing with demographics and ethnicity. And that’s about the extent of it in terms of what we look at and what we offer advertisers.

In the book we talk about how you can understand the people who are actually buying your product. And that might be different, by the way, than the user of your product.

Consider tricycles. The person who buys a tricycle for the three-year-old is not the three-year-old himself or herself. It’s the grandmother or the mother or the father. Yet there are also tricycles made for senior citizens where the person who buys it is also the person who uses it. Now, radio is created for listeners, but the people who pay you money are the advertisers. And the way that buyer personas come into it is how can you understand in really great detail the nature or the archetype of the people that you’re selling your products and services to.

And the companies that do this really well then can develop products and services specifically for their individual buyer personas. I would imagine that there are different buyer personas of advertising buyers at radio stations. There’s perhaps the local advertiser who happens to be in a small demographic only advertising in one station and then there’s perhaps the large advertisers who are the national brands and consumer brands.

Now, we would argue that it’s quite possible if you went out and interviewed representatives of those buyer personas you’d find out that in aggregate the profile for the small company that only deals in one city versus the national advertisers are different. And a smart radio station would develop product - advertising programs for example - for each one of those buyer personas so that you’re offering them something that’s valuable to them and you don’t treat them as a one-size-fits-all commodity: “You want 30 seconds. This is how much it costs.”

I heard just yesterday, in fact, a radio station general manger telling a story about how in a small community in Texas the US Army approached them and laid out what amounts to a buyer persona. They said, “These are the people who are likely recruits.”

Yeah.

“They’re a certain age and a certain gender, but they live here in kind of rural east Texas and they like to work on their cars. So what can we do together?” In other words it was richer than demographics alone.

Right. And now all of a sudden imagine if you really focused on understanding a great deal about that buyer persona, how much more likely it would be that you could then sell advertising to the people who wanted to reach that particular buyer persona. And it’s an interesting way to market and sell offerings as opposed to this generic one-size-fits-all. What this does, the understanding of buyer personas, is it allows us to stop talking about our products and services and instead talk about how we can solve people’s problems. And that’s a really big difference. It’s a fundamental difference.

In fact you actually say in the book, “It’s not about what you do. It’s about what problems you solve.” Right?

That’s right. And you really can’t understand that unless you can understand what it is that you do solve for people and what problems they have. This is simple stuff. It’s just that so few companies are doing it, we felt compelled to write it down in a way that jars people into thinking, “Wow. You know, you’re right. I don’t really do that.”

This entire book is a formalization of common sense and yet so few people do it. Why?

Well, that’s right. People don’t do it because they’ve been focused on the wrong things. They run these businesses and they think that, “Well, I can just invent a product that everybody’s gonna want.”

Well, no you can’t. You can just get lucky and create something. But more often than not you’re going to fail. But if you’re “tuned in” and you understand these concepts you’re more likely to be successful.

We noticed three things that companies tend to do who don’t follow these ideas.

One is to focus way too much on the bottom line. They obsess way too much on revenue and believe that all they have to do is hire more sales people, bring in more revenue, and their problems will be solved. That’s one of the main problems we saw.

Another problem is this blind focus on innovation for innovation’s sake. That’s where people in their comfortable offices dream up products and services instead of focusing on buyers. And then they just create widgets that nobody wants.

And the third thing that we see often is that they focus too much on existing customers and not enough on the overall market. So many companies just talk to their existing customers. Yet for almost every business, if you think of your entire market as a big pie, your existing market is a tiny slice of that pie. And if you’re only talking to that tiny slice you’re missing a tremendously large section that potentially could be your new market.

Your Step 4 is to "create breakthrough experiences." Can you give me an example of what that process is to create those experiences? Obviously in radio you’re dealing with “air” so experiences become really important.

Once you understand - truly understand - who it is that you’re reaching and what their problems are and you create something essentially to solve those problems, you can create not just a widget, not just a product, but something that so perfectly solves somebody’s problem that it’s seen as a breakthrough.

Lots of other people have talked about the iPod as an example, but I think it’s a fascinating one because there had already been MP3 players before the iPod came around. So they didn’t create the category. They didn’t do it faster, cheaper, smaller, or any of those other things that so many me-too competitors do. Instead they had the brilliance of understanding that it was about the experience.

And the experience relates to simplicity and ease of use. The existing MP3 players were too complicated, so Apple combined iTunes with the iPod and made it really easy to buy music legally and then put it all together so it’s dead-simple. Even my father could do it. And that was the breakthrough experience.

So it’s not a product, it’s an experience. And we believe that companies that are “tuned in” can create breakthrough experiences.

David, as you know, radio has been around for a very long time. Revenue is down now. Time spent listening is down a little bit. Competition is flaring. And people really are wondering what’s next in this industry. If you were in a position to make the decision, what do you think is the most important thing the radio industry should focus on right now?

Well, it may seem obvious and cliché, but I’ll say it anyway. Focus on the people who are out there listening today and those who aren’t listening, but should be. And just understand from their perspective what the industry is doing right and wrong and also what individual stations - individual markets - are doing right and wrong.

As a marketer in radio you can’t just assume that you know better than the people who are going to be listening to you. And those are the people you need to talk to. You can’t assume you know better than the advertisers, the ones paying money, and those are the people you need to talk to.

The slow pace of Podcasting growth

From eMarketer:

Nearly one out of five (19%) Internet users in the US say they have downloaded a podcast, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew's researchers said that was up from 12% in August 2006.

However, podcast downloading is still a niche activity. Even among those who said they downloaded podcasts, only 17% did so on a typical day.

That translates to just 3% of internet users who download podcasts on a typical day.

This does not strike me as particularly strong, given especially that, says Pew, 34% of American adults and 43% of internet users report owning an mp3 player or iPod - up markedly from 20% and 26%, respectively, in April 2006.

When you factor in the youthful, male, and tech-oriented skew of podcast usage, you have to wonder what's holding back this trend.

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. iPod owners don't sync up daily. You can only download content as often as you sync. Then again, if the content doesn't drive more frequent sync behavior, then what does that say about the power of the content in the podcast medium?

2. The right content is hard to find. As lovely as iTunes is, it's really best for finding exactly what you want, not exactly what might be best. There are a zillion podcasts out there. How do I know what I'm even looking for? Sure, I can search - but for what? And how do I know what I find is worth the trouble? A podcast, unlike a song, doesn't have a "hook," so it's impossible to sample a few seconds of it and appreciate it. So is it worth investing the time to hunt down and subscribe to shows on spec? As those of us in the radio trenches know, it takes months or years of repeat exposure for a show to "grow" on an audience.

3. If you don't sync daily or don't listen daily to what you sync, the value of daily podcast content is reduced, thus creating a vicious cycle: I don't listen, I don't sync, so I don't sync and I don't listen.

4. iTunes is fundamentally destination-based. That is, you go there for something, not for anything. Radio and the rest of the internet provide a ready platform to expose music content which is easy to pluck off iTunes with very little trouble. Not so for podcasts, which receive relatively little "horizontal" promotion across media, thus guaranteeing any individual podcast is likely to remain a relative niche. You don't know what you're missing until you hear what you missed. How do I know this or that podcasts on sports or cooking is better than any other? A podcast could be all about car repair - or it could be as entertaining as NPR's Car Talk. How do I know the difference?

5. Lots of non-music audio entertainment is consumed passively; that is, I am in the right place at the right time to hear it on the radio - and if I miss it today I'll catch it tomorrow. It is not destination programming the way the latest chapter in a TV series is. This means the content available for download should be "must-hear" or "must-see" or it won't be heard or seen en masse.

So where does podcasting fit with your bag of tricks?

Well, considering radio produces audio entertainment we would be foolish to avoid podcasting.

But the fact that podcasting has not swept the audience the way other trends have should give us pause. Some trends become phenomena. Others remain niches.

The larger question is: What, if anything, does this say about your ability to create and leverage brands online? Repurposing for podcast is all well and good, but there's more to leveraging digital media than that.

The "Death" of Podcasting?

Valuable piece from the influential blog Mashable about the decline of podcasting and the rise of videocasting...But it really makes the point that it's not really about things declining but rather about choice rising.

And there's a sharp point here relevant to the mother-of-all-podcast-sources, radio.

It’s an evolution towards choices. If you’re out to start a popular online show, you can’t just make an audio version - you’re going to fall by the wayside....Hell, nearly every podcaster told me that a successful podcast needs a successful and consistent blog.

Being able to offer your viewers, listeners, and readers multiple options to take in your work, your opinions, your interviews, and your personality is becoming more and more apparent. You need to complement your video show with not only podcasts and blog posts, but live streams, twitter conversations, and even mobile video. Think about how many sources you have for your news - TV, blogs, newspapers, magazines, RSS feeds, and email lists just to start.

So podcasting is far from obsolete - it’s just become an integral part of larger campaigns to reach current and new users. In the end, it’s about engaging your audience. But since users take in information from different sources and different mediums, the best podcasters and videocasters must do the same and spread their message across multiple platforms.

So the evolution of podcasting is towards engaging the audience via more media tentacles at the center of which lay the brand itself, not the channel of distribution.

Shouldn't this apply to radio as much as to podcasting?

"Radio," after all (in the current vernacular) is a distribution channel, but what you have on your radio is the brand (or at least should be).

So where's your brand's podcast? Your videocast? Your twitter feed, etc?

Stop analyzing. Just do something.

What are you doing to engage with your audience across all platforms?

How to create an "Accidental" Radio Brand

David Vinjamuri teaches at New York University and is president of Third Way Brand Trainers, a marketing training company whose clients include American Express, Starwood Hotels and other leading consumer brands. David formerly was a brand manager at Johnson & Johnson and Coca Cola. Here we discuss David's new book, Accidental Branding, and what it means for radio.

What follows is a brief transcript of our conversation. Click below to hear the entire chat.


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David, what is an “accidental brand,” and if it’s accidental, how do you create one?

An accidental brand is one that’s started by somebody who doesn’t have a background in marketing and who’s solving their own problem. I call them “accidental brands” because it’s usually some kind of a fortuitous accident that gives you the idea for the problem that you can solve. A good example of that is Gary Erikson, the founder of Cliff Bar. Gary was a very avid cyclist, and he was on a 120-mile ride, which seems crazy to me, but apparently for elite cyclists, that’s not unusual. Now the physiology for elite cyclists requires them to keep eating while they’re biking to replenish their body’s store of energy.

Gary had eaten five Power Bars already on this day, and he went to eat a sixth when he realized they had another 60 miles to go and he wasn’t going make it without more energy. He told me he actually started to wretch. He physically couldn’t swallow it down.

And it’s nothing against the Power Bar, because the metaphor for Power Bar was “fuel.” But Gary thought, “Wouldn’t it be nicer if the metaphor was ‘cookie,’ and this tasted like actual food?” And he realized he was in the unique place to solve this problem because he knew a lot about bicyclists, he knew about manufacturing, and he also had a little entrepreneurial business that had never made any money on the side that was supplying baked goods to San Francisco area bakeries.

And so he created the Cliff Bar.

Well, it’s interesting that you say entrepreneurs like Gary set out to solve a problem that they themselves had - that they essentially were the consumer. It wasn’t that they were targeting some group of people. They were the consumer. This is interesting first because it illustrates the importance of having a brand that actually solves a problem.

Yes, absolutely.

And second it seems to me that the entrepreneurs who solve these problems are passionately devoted to that solution.

Yes, I feel like having talked to many of these people that the passion comes the more they investigate the solution and the more they experience the problem. I think it’s important that they actually experience the problem they’re solving and it’s for the two reasons that you said. One is because it gives them the right instincts as a consumer. There’s a lot of controversy over this issue of following your gut instinct. You may have read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, and he’s been criticized because a lot of people rightly see in their life that there’s been a number of times where they’ve made bad decisions based on gut instinct.

What you see in accidental branding is that your instinct works when it’s something you know intimately, that you’re connected to. And that’s why I think being an entrepreneur who’s solving his own problem is important. Now the second thing you mentioned, which I completely agree with, is that it has to solve a problem because entrepreneurs are already up against a steep challenge to begin with. Not being known, not having resources – all of those things.

The additional challenge of not solving a problem puts too much of a burden on you. You need to do something that somebody hasn’t done before or do it in a way that somebody else hasn’t done before. Because if you don’t have that insight to something that’s not there and needs to be there, really – I would say go work for somebody else.

You say do something that somebody hasn’t done before. That sounds like your Rule No. 2, “Pick a fight,” which really means doing something different from what the other guy is doing.

When I say “pick a fight,” I mean taking a step beyond that and using somebody else as a way to define what you stand for. So if you don’t like the way that Starbucks treats people by their long lines or the flavor of the coffee or whatever, you say, “Well, I’m not Starbucks. This is who I am.” And by picking a fight with them and pointing out your differences you’re defining your own values.

Is this something that would be literal in the branding – in the messaging?

It can be. You know, a good example of an entrepreneur who has done this very literally is Steve Jobs at Apple. He originally made IBM the enemy, and if you remember that iconic 1984 spot, it was actually focused against IBM when it looked like they were “Big Brother.” And years later when Jobs came back to Apple, he picked Microsoft as a target because they represented the things he didn’t agree with.

How is asking consumers what they like different from actually being the consumer and creating what you, yourself, like?

Sometimes when you ask people what they like you don’t get the right answer. Look at Herman Miller, an office furniture maker. In the late ‘90s they came up with a new design for a chair, and it was radically different from anything they had created before. It used see-through fabric. It was breathable. It was more ergonomic. But it looked very, very different from anything anyone had previously done. When they initially came out with this chair, the reviews were horrible.

People thought it was ugly. It didn’t make sense. It looked ungainly, and it really didn’t sell.

But Herman Miller did not give up. Instead they placed the chairs into some of the right environments - places that had more modern and futuristic furniture – design firms, for example. And eventually, a culture of acceptance grew up for this product, the Aeron chair, which has been their number one selling product of all time.

So when you ask people whether they would like something and the answer was no, is it because they didn’t really understand it? What if they not only saw it but actually interacted with it?

One of your rules is to be “unnaturally persistent.”

Yes, one of the things people assume is that it all proceeds at a sort of a normal pace – that you sell $1,000.00 in year one, $2,000.00 in year two, and $3,000.00 in year three, and so on. But that’s rarely the case. Most of these entrepreneurs went for five or ten years at fairly low levels before they suddenly got a burst of awareness – they hit that “tipping point” that Malcolm Gladwell talks about – and then they exploded. But during those early years you get some progress, and then there’s a dip.

And you actually have a setback for six months or a year, and you have to figure out at that point whether you’re doing something that people really need and want. And if so, you have to be very persistent with it. It was interesting talking to J. Peterman, who created the J. Peterman catalog. I remember him very clearly telling me how he had been involved in this wacky venture to popularize beer cheese.

He said, “You know, I got to this point in that venture where I just didn’t think it was going to work.” It was a year into it, and he stepped away from it. And then when he got to the same point with the Peterman catalog, he realized he owed too many people money to get out of it. So he kept persisting at a point where he normally would have given up, and that’s what made the catalog a success - that he didn’t give up.

Another rule is to “build a myth.”

Yes, and when I say “myth,” I mean something that explains the world around you, but also imparts values – something authentic, not false. A great example of this is Roxanne Quimby, the founder of Burt’s Bees. Now, there is a Burt, and Roxanne actually met him in 1984. She was living in Maine in the woods in a tent by a lake with her five-year-old twins, and things were getting a little desperate.

She had seen Burt on the side of the road selling honey from his bees in used gallon pickle jars. And he picked her up when she was hitch-hiking to go to the Post Office and they started up a conversation. She convinced him over the course of the next couple weeks to let her learn how to tend bees.

Eventually, Roxanne suggested they package the honey in cute little containers and sell it at craft fairs. And that was the beginning of Burt’s Bees. But instead of talking about herself or about how natural her products were, Roxanne instinctively realized that by talking about some aspects of Burt, which were all true, she could explain to consumers in a much more powerful way what her brand was about.

And so she created this mythology of “Burt, the Beekeeper” that was about something that exists within all of us, which is the desire to return to nature, to live a simpler life, to uncomplicate our lives. And that was really what her products were, too.

So you’re talking about the creation of a “story,” which is bigger than the attributes or the benefits or features of the brand.

Right, it’s not about features and benefits. What she was really trying to do is convey the brand values by telling a story, and the story was true.

As a radio listener, as a brand expert, and as a guy who literally wrote the book on accidental branding, how does the brand of radio or the brands of radio strike you?

I find radio fascinating. And I think that’s why some of the things I learned from these entrepreneurs in Accidental Branding actually apply very well to your industry. The book talks about being special and unique and differentiated, and ironically the more specialized you are and the more unique you are the more people you’re going to attract.

We’re always afraid of not wanting to offend anybody and not wanting to limit ourselves, and yet look at some of the most powerful personalities on radio and you actually see that they do quite the opposite.

Well, that’s an interesting point, because yes, a lot of the people in radio circles are trying to hedge their bets and be as conservative as possible. But you’re saying that if you take some smart risks there’s more audience there for you than for someone who’s taking none.

And the moment that you don’t take those risks, you’re probably not being genuine either, and the most important aspect of a successful brand, from my perspective, is authenticity. That’s what people are always looking for.

If I’m going to buy a pair of boots, I want to buy the boots that construction workers wear that are indestructible. That was Timberland twenty years ago. I want expert brands, so when you start to say, “well, I also need to please these people, and I also shouldn’t be too controversial about this,” you’re not really being yourself, and that’s not going to help you.

So what would be your recommendation then for a radio station or the radio industry looking to bring that authenticity to the station? It’s an odd question because I’m really asking you how can I be real.

No, it’s a fair question because you can’t do it in a vacuum. You actually have to look at the people that you’re trying to reach. What do they have already? What needs are already being met? And is there something that’s true about me that I can turn into a set of offerings for a radio station that would fill this unmet need?

Is there a way you can step into a vacuum somewhere or deal with something that nobody else is doing? I think that’s what I would look for. And be very focused about it; that’s the key thing.

In radio we focus on formats, which are one way of defining the differences between the brands , but ultimately when you’re talking about authenticity you’re talking about human characteristics which may not be as narrow as any one “format,” yes?

Yes, and I would argue that your same consumers are engaging in various formats anyway. They may be listening to talk radio. They may be listening to play-by-play commentary. They may be listening to music – all of those things. What you really want to do is to stand for something that they believe in and deliver something that’s unique to them.

When people are really focused around that, it’s very appealing, and that’s also when you get publicity and attention for what you’re doing.

You mean because it stands out to them, it’s interesting to them, it’s original to them, and it feels authentic to them.

Exactly.

Radio Trendspotting - an interview with marketing guru Richard Laermer

Richard Laermer is president of RLM Public Relations, a columnist for the Huffington Post, and the author or co-author of numerous marketing bestsellers, including Full Frontal PR, Punk Marketing, and his latest bestseller, 2011: Trend Spotting for the Next Decade.

Listen to the complete webcast of my conversation with Richard below. What follows is only a brief excerpt from our conversation.


MP3 File

Richard, why did you write this book?

Well, right now, we’re in this decade of mediocrity. There’s nothing going on – everybody knows this. It’s just a ton of stuff happening, but no bolts from blue, nothing to connect. I wanted to look ahead, just like I did with Trend Spotting, the first book I did on this subject in 2002. But now I wanted to show people how they could take a deep breath and start the new decade, which I call 2011, with a clear head and a positive outlook and realize that we can learn a lot from what we went through in this unnamed decade.

So give me a sense of what some of the most critical trends are. What do you think are the core themes of the next decade?

Well, for one thing there has been a kind of inflexibility in the air - people have their arms folded, and they’re always looking for somebody else to clean up their messes; it’s always somebody else’s fault. People lack the power to get things done.

I invented a word in this book called “Gumby-tude,” which is based on the green character, Gumby – not the one Eddie Murphy played, but the real Gumby.

And the idea is, “Gumby-tude” is utter flexibility. People will realize that they’re responsible for “getting it done,” by hook or crook, as the old saying goes. And I think people are going to learn to look to themselves. And what I’m saying is, look, let’s not pay attention to all the great futurists out there. Let’s pay attention to ourselves. Let’s go out and find the trends that we need to know about so that we could either make money or make more money. I want folks to learn how they can be their own trend spotters.

My new book is a guide to “do-it-yourself trend spotting,” if you will.

In the radio business today a lot of people are waiting for the leaders at the top to do something that makes a difference in their everyday lives that is a positive difference rather than a negative one. I don’t get much of a sense that people are feeling this self-reliance that you say will be critical for the next ten years.

Radio, which has been around forever and will probably be around forever, has a problem: There aren’t a lot of people who are willing to take risks.

In a lot of the work that I do, I’m always trying to get people to think about what they’re not doing, and whether or not they’re just doing what they’re doing because they were told to do it.

Radio has to think about the way they communicate its message. Radio is stuck in this thinking of, “Well, listeners will have to pay attention because we’re repeating our messages over and over again.” You and I are both marketers, and as we both know, communication is everything. And there’s no worse communication than a kind of stodgy group of people who are just going, “Huh, what do we do now? I don’t know. Let’s talk about the greatest hits of the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.”

You work across many industries. Is radio different from some of these other industries? Or is radio typical of an industry this big and this mature?

Well, it is different. I work with a lot of technologies. What I find is that radio seems to always be fighting a battle against somebody, as opposed to saying, “To hell with you guys. We’re gonna do things our way, and we’re gonna change.”

In the last fifteen years or so, radio has felt beaten down by so many other types of radio-like experiences, like satellite and Internet radio, etc. And I think that radio always feels like they have to be on the defensive. And that’s tough – that’s a tough way to market, when all you do is think about how, “Oh, God, we’re so old fashioned. We’ve gotta do something.” It’s not a real strong way to fight for customers.

And I think that most people in radio are not thinking about how to create the radio fan – not the new listener, not the person who doesn’t listen to radio – but how to get their current customer to think about radio as being that one thing for them – that one communication device for them. As opposed to all this craziness where people are marketing this HD stuff and trying to get kids or people who have just dropped away back into the fold.

When I turn on commercial radio, I feel like I’m listening to the same promotions and ideas that I’ve been listening to my whole life. You know, I mean, we’re evolving human beings.

So give me just a couple of the ways in which you advise people in the book to spot trends, as opposed to fads.

Well, for one thing people have to be much more alert than they are today. Thanks to the Internet, most people use a kind of personalized way to get their information. They only go to what’s interesting to them, and that’s really a failing.

The real trend-spotter doesn’t do that. Being interested in something, only those things, doesn’t make you an interesting person. And in order to be a magnet for information, you have to know a little bit about a lot of things. But the truth is, people today only know about the entertainment world or they only know about radio, or they only know about sports, or they only know about yoga. But they don’t know about a lot of other things out there. And you have to be that person that people want to connect to because you know what’s going on.

So to be a trend-spotter, get a little bit of everything from everybody and pull it in.

I’m always surprised, Richard, that in Radio, for example, folks will go out of their way to go to a radio convention, but will rarely attend any gathering focused on new media, when that is the industry Radio is now a part of.

Well, people don’t think about what their customers do. They think about their own industry, but they don’t think like their customers.

Radio stations are doing less research today, not more. Why is that? That drives me crazy. Why aren’t they looking at what their customers want out of their own lives, you know?

Just because your station has listeners doesn’t mean you’re connecting to them. In the book I talk about auditing and how you can find your listeners, users, or whatever, and get to know them. I mean it’s so easy to do that now. And I mean real audits – ask the hard questions, like “Why do you hate us?”

Let’s talk about the recent re-branding efforts of Radio, which I know you’re aware of. When you’ve got something like radio, an industry that big with that many tentacles, what is the best way to “re-brand” it, if that’s even the right thing to do?

Well, I saw the re-branding of the logo and the slogans. It’s yet again an example of people not realizing that this kind of wasted money never really helped any industry. I mean it’s been a long time since “got milk,” you know.

If you’re going to re-brand radio, you have to do it in a way that makes people feel that it’s not a slogan, but it’s real, that something is happening – there’s a revolution brewing that the listener wants to get involved in. And you have to do that by getting the listener involved with the re-branding effort.

It’s definitely not about slogans and logos, that’s for sure, because I saw the slogan and the logo, and it’s not good. It has to be a lot messier than that.

I’ve said this to you in the past, but I’m always surprised about how little radio stations get really involved in their communities. And I don’t mean sponsoring softball teams and going to the local bakery, but I mean really getting involved – taking over whole neighborhoods and commandeering streets and just showing people that – you know, these are the public airways, right? It’s not just “Yes, we have the airways, and yes, we keep changing our call letters. And we hope that one day you like us.” Instead, “We commit to this, and we commit to you. And we’re going stay on this line of thought because, like any good marketer or seller, we believe in the mission of who we are.”

Mark, we have known each other and been friends for a long time – and I never see radio commit to anything. Most consumers and listeners are so smart – remember, these are the people who invented hype, so they know when they’re being hyped to death. And radio is a victim of it’s own hyping – not it’s own hype, but it’s own hyping – that it’s constantly saying things, constantly changing, and it’s like a whirlwind. People roll their eyes and are like, “Oh, look, that radio station is now X instead of Y. Big whoop!”

What you seem to be describing is a “re-branding” that comes from the inside out rather than from the top down or the outside in by slapping a new label on something.

If I ran the world, I would put all the branding companies out of business because I don’t really think they’re actually helping people. I mean they make a lot of money, and they say a lot of cool things, and they do great PowerPoints, but it’s a joke now.

Branding is about connecting with people and knowing what you want to say to them. Pandering is deadly, and I see radio doing a lot of pandering. But if you’re actually resolute about who you are, then prove it without a shadow of a doubt. Do what you think is right, because you’re the station that wants to be different and wants to prove its value, and you promise you’re going to stay like that.

Put it in blood!