Media Info Bureau

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?

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.