With December upon us, there will be countless retrospectives published on the last 12 months. However, Pat Welsh is choosing to look ahead. In this week’s Programming To Win column, Welsh lists a number of hot-button topics that will impact the radio industry in 2012.
Pat Welsh
By Pat Welsh
Soon enough we’ll be reading and hearing retrospectives on 2011: the top artists, biggest moments of the year, best album, song of the year, etc. But I prefer to look ahead to the new year and some of the topics that will influence the future. These are the topics that I believe have the capacity to directly affect your job in 2012.
Some of these are hot button topics in the media at large; others are much more specific to radio programmers. Being a step ahead on these will serve you well:
The Importance of Daily Cume – In the diary world, cume is a weekly metric. But in the PPM daily cume is also calculated. As we know, in reality AWTE (formerly TSL) is much lower than before and listening occasions are much higher. Tracking your daily cume is another way of looking at the same thing.
And in diary markets this translates into continuing to make appointments with listeners and being sure not to waste their time. Even though your results may look different due to the methodology, in reality, your listeners are listening in a much more frenetic – if not haphazard – pattern.
Targeted Social Media Posts – Recently, I read with interest an interview with one of the LA Times’ online editors. She made the point that the Times editors had to write different headlines for the same story depending on the platform. After all, what a reader sees in the hard copy of the paper is different from what he sees on the paper’s website, or what a smartphone user sees on her Times mobile app.
The headline is just as critical to hooking users into content on a station website or Facebook post. A recent survey of radio listeners by knowDigital made this every point. The company found that users primarily decide whether to read posts based on the value of the source & how interesting they find the headline. They quickly decide whether they will read the post based on the first few words. Posts about music, concerts & events ranked highest among music radio listeners.
A practical example came in a discussion I recently had about posting to Facebook and Twitter. It makes sense to use one of the many tools that will allow you to post the same material to both sites. The problem is that if the Facebook-oriented intro is too long, users won’t see it on Twitter.
While posting to a website or social media site is not the same as being on the air, the affect of each of these things will be maximized by simply making sure you put the benefit up front. The knowDigital survey results are really no different than what we’ve seen in PPM research; radio listeners and online users can be equally unforgiving.
Personalization – Terrestrial radio is fighting back against Pandora with its own personalization tools. Iheartradio and others are now providing listeners with the ability to creat their own custom versions of their favorite radio stations. Terrestrial radio has an enormous amount of data and history behind this effort to help listeners create a more satisfying experience. Pandora has had to develop its Music Genome Project from the ground up. I believe personalization will be the buzzword at radio this coming year.
Crowd-sourcing – Crowd sourcing is the opposite of personalization. Instead, the whole audience, in aggregate, determines what gets played. This is an inherently social form of radio. The battle now is between making crowd-sourced programming the station’s entire format, or merely using it tactically as a feature.
Doing a Daily Deal – Local online ad spending is fertile ground for revenue growth and daily deals are a natural way for radio to get its share of local online. We already have the relationship with many small businesses, we have the local infrastructure, and a big chunk of our advertising business already comes from local. Cumulus, with its SweetJack platform, is one of the leaders in doing daily deals and CBS is having a lot of success with radio/TV synergies, but I believe most groups will be doing the same, aggressively, in 2012.
Cross-platform measurement – Online and on-air ratings are islands unto themselves. They’re measured in different ways using different metrics. But Arbitron is working on a new cross-platform measuring system to combine on-air numbers with listening on other platforms. While that can only help the bottom line, it will also lead to direct comparisons between terrestrial radio and online/mobile.
Initially, this will be to terrestrial radio’s benefit. Total “radio” listening tilts heavily in terrestrial radio’s favor, but for various reasons, it gets short shrift in the press. Pandora, Sirius/XM and other platforms are a lot cooler than FM/AM radio. So far, this is a mirage, but that could be changing in a few years.
Online In-Car Listening – When online connectivity in cars becomes the exception, rather than the rule, our competition will become much stiffer. Pandora increased its reach and use dramatically thanks to mobile apps, and the next frontier is in-car access.
The recent Arbitron/Edison the Road Ahead study shows that a majority of 18-24s have listen to iPods or other devices in their cars. To date, that’s difficult to pull off unless you have one of the few cars that permit it. Otherwise you have to do it by plugging a mobile device into the car’s audio system or just lay your mobile device in the seat next to you and hope for the best. Either way, this shows that many people are motivated to access “radio” by alternate means.
Facebook’s music strategy – The average Facebook user spends an obscene amount of time with the site. In fact Facebook has pulled off the incredible feat of increasing both reach and time spent. Think about one of the fundamental principles of building a radio audience: as cume increases, TSL will decrease. This has not happened (yet) with Facebook.
In fact Facebook is doing everything it can to continue to grow the time users spend with it. A big part of that goal is the frictionless sharing principle behind the new Timelines design, and the music and media strategy inherent in building it. Instead of creating its own streaming service and music store, Facebook decided to partner with – and integrate into the its ecosystem – services such as Spotify, Mog and Rdio.
Fortunately, one of the other partners is rooted in terrestrial radio, Clear Channel’s Iheartradio. What are you doing about it? Are you enabling in-Facebook streaming of your signal? If not, why not?
What’s Next? – These are my thoughts on some of what we’ll be dealing with in the new year. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these and other topics that I might have missed. Also, keep an eye on the buzz from the CES in Las Vegas in January. While that show is driven by gadgets, if you step back and analyze the principles behind there devices, you’ll get a good idea of where media and tech will be headed in the near future.
Pat Welsh, Senior Vice President/Digital Content, Pollack Media Group, can be reached at 310 459-8556, fax: 310-454-5046, or at pat@pollackmedia.com.
