Forecast Summit

I'll be speaking on the Radio's Battle for Relevance in a New Media World panel at Radio Ink's Forecast Summit in New York City on December 2nd. The attendance is quite limited (it's at the Harvard Club) so if you want to go, sign up soon.

Analyst: Radio CEOs In Denial

Re-Blogging Radio Ink

NEW YORK -- August 19, 2008: CL King & Associates analyst Jim Boyle says the RAB is likely to report a 6 percent-7 percent revenue decline for July - worse than Wall Street projections for a 4 percent decline. It would be the 15th straight month of down revenue for radio.

Boyle writes, "Radio has entered and seems stuck in a new, discouraging territory with the combined challenges of a secular slide and cyclical recessionary times."

Boyle notes that the "gap has remained very wide" between small-market and larger-market radio, with smaller markets consistently outperforming. In the July data he's seen, he says the average big market was down 7 percent and mid-markets were off 5 percent while the average small market was up by 2 percent.

"What are radio leaders doing to change direction?" Boyle writes. "Not much, it seems to us. The industry's larger groups do not appear ready to institute revolutionary changes yet in sales, programming, promotion, or station clusters. There is a notable sense of denial of how harsh the prospects have been and continue to be for radio."

He continues, "The classic CEO reply is [that] radio is not bleeding as badly as newspapers. We concede there is too little radio ad demand, but there is also too little rate card integrity and too little investment in radio's product and people for the long term. It very much looks to us as all rear-guard counterpunching."

Yup, he's correct.

Setting Up at Radio Ink Convergence

More Travel

I'm heading out to Silicon Valley tomorrow. Thursday and Friday I've got a bunch of meetings with VC's, technology companies, and some of my old valley cronies. Then next Monday and Tuesday I'll be at at Radio Ink's Convergence conference with Nic and Jon Sinton. Foneshow will be exhibiting and I'll be presenting. Stop on by our display and get a demo of our new publishing tools and our nifty new publisher dashboard.

From California I'm going straight to Washington DC to Radio and Records Talk Radio Seminar.

We'll have a stack of LOI's at both of these events and we'd love to get you signed up to publish with Foneshow.

Accountability

The daily email news from Eric Rhodes at Radio Ink magazine included the following passage:

The Big Enchilada: Accountability
Just as innovation in radio often comes from smaller markets (necessity is the mother of invention), advertising trends usually emerge from big markets. What Madison Avenue does trickles down to Main Street. And advertising trends are alarming for radio. Accountability is what advertisers want -- and guess where they find it? Online media. National brands love the idea that you can track how many clicked, what they viewed, and what they bought. It's the ultimate seduction for advertisers, and they are abandoning traditional "non-click" media at a rapid pace.

Major brands are making statements like, "TV, newspapers, radio, and outdoor are no longer attractive to us unless they can offer the same accountability and data tracking offered by online media." This, my friends, is the big enchilada. This theory of advertising has hit Madison Avenue in a big way, and it is already starting to trickle down to the local level. That's why radio, a local medium, needs to heed the warning to become an interactive medium. It's not because we're losing listeners (we're not); it's because advertisers at the smallest, local level will demand the ability to measure data.

Detailed metrics were built into Foneshow from day one, we can tell you the demos of who listened to your ad. Not an estimate, the specific people (minus names of course). Furthermore, our CPC advertising (cost-per-click, or in our case cost-per-call) provides the ultimate in accountability. Advertisers pay only for demonstrative results.