Media Info Bureau

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering an end to the regulatory support of

We tend to tell our clients a little too much what “our unique position” in the market is. I’ll catch myself saying it from time to time. But here’s the truth when it comes to radio and TV

Here’s my business card, okay great here’s mine. Okay perfect, well nice to meet you. Oh wait what do you do for a living? Networking events. The place where we used to hand out and receive as many business cards as we could get our hands on and in exchange

The A&E Network just announced that they were lifting their suspension of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson and bringing him back less than a week after suspending him for remarks he made in GQ in regards to homosexuals and African-Americans (as I had predicted they would last week). One could hear echoes of Claude Rains’ famous quote in Casablanca of ‘I am shocked, shocked, shocked that gambling is going on (after pocketing his winnings) with the announcement. Nobody is shocked. The decision was inevitable. Duck Dynasty is the network’s number one rated show and in many ways there is no network without Duck Dynasty. This crisis showed totally the power of social media.

When it comes to the direct response television industry, the trend for 2014 will be producing commercials that are of higher quality coupled with an overabundance of toys. Great commercials center on the product. The product is king. While various reports note that the success rate for short-form commercials is 1 in 40, others have stated that it is 1 in 20. Yes, the odds are long, however, the vast majority of those failures are for products that don’t fit the DRTV mold. As highlighted in the Scimark Report (scimark.blogspot.com) week after week, companies are throwing their cash in the trash by repeating the same failures time after time. Although not a guarantee of success, following the basic rules can raise your batting average to 1 in 5 at least. My company has been batting .400 ball for the past decade. We concentrate on what we know, venture selectively in new categories like Tag Away, but always try to stay true to the rules. It makes our inventors and product scouts that we sign up happier to know at outset that there is meaningful chance of success at the end of the journey. All great successes begin with mass appeal. Television is a mass medium.

The one thing every radio advertiser wants is results. It follows then that Radio’s promise to clients must be

We all have a product to sell or represent. No matter your career, position, business, lifestyle, or skills. There is some type of product that you are selling or representing. Back in the “good old days” we sold with the thought process that if we could convince people they needed our product badly enough to go out and buy it. And it worked. There were a couple of TV stations, no internet, talk radio, and the newspaper. Product reviews were rare and the trust factor was at an all time high. The “good old days” were a great time for those in the business with enough money to convince people they needed it. The “good old days” as you might have guessed are long gone. But the good old days weren’t really here all that long. Maybe from 1900 to the dot com bust. It might have even not started until the Roaring 1920’s and ended with the dawn of the internet. So how did you sell whatever you were representing before the good old days started? I mean we are talking centuries of sales here.

Five years ago I attended a media think tank hosted by the management of the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. The guest speaker was Bill Keller who was then the executive editor of the New York Times, a position from which he stepped down in 2011 to return to becoming a full time writer for the Times. The eruption of the financial crisis facing many papers across the nation was gaining full force at the time of Keller’s talk. The Boston Globe, which was then owned by the Times (Now owned by a group of Red Sox principals) was in particular financial stress as was the case at the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and many smaller newspapers throughout the country. Draconian cutbacks were taking place in newspaper newsrooms, and those cutbacks and closings continue today. During the Q&A following Keller’s talk I asked if he felt a possible solution to maintaining strong print editorial departments was collaboration with television stations and local cable news channels in the local marketplace. Would the sharing of personnel allow for a bolstering of local news coverage and investigative reporting in both mediums?

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Newtown tragedy, and nearly eleven months have passed since Joe Biden’s much-touted