Media Info Bureau

A mobile-TV viewer pays closer attention when viewing video on a smartphone as opposed to a larger device. This may not surprise you. What may surprise you is just how much we have been able to learn about the attention the viewer pays to that smartphone.

Recognize your talent and ask the world of them. The top sales people on your team can smash budgets and move relationships from dead to remarkable in a few short months. Don’t hold them down but rather build them up and let them grow. Great sales managers and outstanding leaders of the future will not manage by fear or negativity in this industry. Rather they will recognize the true talents and do everything they can in their power to let them grow, both for themselves and for their companies.

I attended CES recently with 150,000+ others including an estimated

Over the last few years, consumers have increased, not decreased, the time they spend watching television content. This might sound like good news for advertisers, save for two important caveats. First, while attention time dedicated to TV content has been rising, this is not the case for people actually paying attention to the ads on the screen. Second, when consumers are watching TV they are increasingly dividing their attention between the TV set and other devices, particularly tablets and other mobile devices. A 2011 Nielsen Co. survey showed that as much as 40% of time watching TV is spent on such media multitasking activities, and it’s likely that this behavior has accelerated over the past three years. While many advertisers are rightly nervous about multitasking, there could be new opportunities to benefit from this trend. My recent working paper with researchers Jura Liaukonyte and Kenneth Wilbur tries to pinpoint what, exactly, these benefits might be – and how they can be achieved.

John Poray, Society of Broadcast Engineers Executive Director, presented a paper at the NAB in 2012, which cited the “age bubble” as one of the greatest challenges to the broadcast engineering profession. In his paper titled, “The Shortage of Broadcast Engineers – is there, or do we just need to know where to look?” he compared 2001 SBE membership statistics to 2011. Poray’s paper indicated that in 2001, 33% of SBE members were between ages 45 and 56 while only 16% were between ages 55 and 65. At the end of 2011, 32% of SBE members who were currently employed were between 45 and 56 years of age. SBE members between 45 and 66 years old made up 65% of membership at that time. Only 8.4% were under age 36.

While it may appear to be to some I don’t believe that marketing is convincing someone they need what you have. Marketing is about being a human and letting people know that. Marketing is about letting people know about the unbelievable product, venture, idea, or business that you have. Nothing more, nothing less. I think we fall into a realm of confusion at times about what it really is. Marketing is not convincing others that they need you. If you need to work so hard and so tirelessly on your marketing to convince people to buy something you have it’s not the right product.

With the number of natural disasters and other large-scale emergency situations on the rise around

In a sign of the times, the 4A’s just recently announced that they will no longer publish their “Television Production Cost Survey.” The survey originated in 1987 and the last published report represented the twenty-fifth year of this continuing project. For those twenty-five years, the report provided the industry with a method of benchmarking the industry average cost of producing television commercials, providing data including:

It’s been over eight years since I entered the brave new world of radio sales. Being a young pup at the age of 22 I remember

In the 1970’s and 80’s, the company I worked for employed a programming consultant for our major market AM radio station. He was considered a top consultant in the industry at the time, with many years of experience advising the top stations in the country. Similar to other top consultants of the day, he was very precise on music selection and rotation. His strategies on music programming however, were based exclusively on his experience and perspective. For years, (when the competition among radio stations was much less than after the popularity of FM Radio exploded,) he helped many stations achieve great success. Predictably, he became quite confident that he was expert in knowing what audiences wanted from a radio station; in fact, he became quite cocky and inflexible in his direction to stations. This hubris almost destroyed our station. Here’s the critical lesson we learned that is especially relevant today for radio sales departments.

We would all prefer in a perfect world that every single one of our clients would be open to sitting down and having a true conversation about their marketing strategy. Telling us exactly who they wish to target, in what time frame, and what we can provide for them both from a marketing side and an advertising side to reach those goals. We also wish all of our clients paid their bills after 30 days so we didn’t have to track them down, the ones who year after year ask for so many extra free spots that maybe one of these years they will ask for a few less, and the ones who are so hard to deal with due to their grumpiness would suddenly become your best friend like a few of the clients that you have. It’s not going to happen…and you can’t change all of them, and you can’t be everything to your clients!

For broadcasters who worry about advertisers complaining that their advertising “just isn’t working” on your station, here are some simple fixes you can suggest:

Answer my quick quiz… Who are the two US Senators from your state?