by Pat Welsh
Pat Welsh
Radio is in the midst of a technological revolution, with HD Radio and the PPM, but in the larger world of new technologies and new platforms, radio has been falling behind. Being a multi-media brand is important because that’s the way that consumers look at and consume media. The brand is what they remember most. It’s what they know, what they use, and most importantly, what they trust.
Radio, for a variety of reasons, has been slow to adopt new technologies, even though it’s positioned well to take advantage of them. Old media can’t hang onto its old business models forever as we’ve seen with the newspaper and record industries. Meanwhile, TV and film are scrambling to stay ahead of the game.
My goal here is to show you what’s possible today. I also hope to make it clear that these technologies should not be feared as either competitors of radio…or as being too difficult to use. Each of these technologies is already in use somewhere in the world. In the interest of full disclosure, some of the companies listed here are clients of the company I work for, Pollack Media Group, but all of them have exciting new ways for radio to become a multi-media brand.
Creating New Profit Centers
How much money can you make with new media? Consider that U.S. radio advertising revenue for 2007 is expected to be just over $20 billion… about the same as 2006. In the meantime, online advertising revenue surpassed radio, hitting an estimated $22 billion for ’07. This means that there’s as much money in your market for online advertising as there is for radio advertising.
The good news is that it’s not a zero sum game. Overall radio revenue was up, due to NTR, and much of that was due to radio’s online ad revenue sales. So considering the strong reach of radio (which, according to the PPM, is much greater than we thought) and the content that it produces, radio should have a leg up on attracting advertisers and audiences with new media.
Increasing Web Traffic
Many radio stations have Web sites that are nothing more than brochures for the station. Building Page Views and Monthly Unique Visitors are the important things for selling Web advertising, although time spent on-site is now also becoming more important. The way to boost these numbers is simply good content. How many of the following are you using?
- Blogs
- Chat
- On-demand audio and video
- Podcasting/downloads
- Gaming
- News
- Listener loyalty programs
Meeting Listener Expectations for Interaction
Here’s the fun stuff, a list of technologies and companies that are creating essential new technologies.
- SMS Text Messaging
Texting is the best example of how U.S. radio has fallen behind. Millions of people text every day, yet most radio stations (in the U.S.) still don’t use it. Companies like Hip Cricket have built robust systems for radio to use texting for contesting, giving traffic or weather alerts, updating sports scores and much more.
- Social Networking
A radio station or popular personality is a natural focus for a social network. Both have large audiences with something in common, the key element to creating a vibrant community. Instead of jock pages on MySpace or Facebook, we should be creating and promoting our own social networks.
Pollack Media Group client, Skyrock, the #1 radio network for 15-24 year-olds in France, has created more than just a great radio social network. Skyrock is the #1 most visited Website in the country. But the goal doesn’t have to be knocking off MySpace or Facebook, nor building a social network from scratch. There are off-the-shelf solutions for creating branded social networks, such as Kick Apps, a Web-based social networking platform that includes video, audio, photos, blogs, forums and comprehensive user profiles.
- Interactivity
Consumers are used to getting entertainment, information when they want it and how they want it. If you can’t deliver that for them, they’ll get it somewhere else. And the younger your core audience, the more demanding they are about interactive tools. Twitter, which received a lot of press last year at the South By Southwest music festival, is a messaging service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of messages.
Meebo is an online instant messaging platform that Websites can use to facilitate instant communication with or among their users. It includes the ability to instant message a company representative from the website (like a DJ), to host multimedia-enabled chat rooms (which can include on-demand or streaming video or audio) for multiple users, and to send out live instant messages to site users as they visit the site.
- Video
The visual element should mean more than photos of jocks and promotions. The incredible popularity of YouTube is not that it was the first video service, but the first one to make it easy for users to create and post their video. Radio stations can do much more with technologies such as Kyte, a personal publishing platform that sends out video, text, and audio messages instantaneously to both online and mobile.
Users can create any kind of content, post it to their channel, and then it is instantaneously available for viewing across the Internet and mobile. Kyte is also interactive, allowing viewers to provide video, audio, and text-based comments on channel content, in real time.
- Mobile Streaming
Radio’s immediacy has been surpassed by the mobile phone so the next frontier for radio is mobile streaming. Liquid Air Labs has developed a technology called Spodtronic, a mobile phone application that allows streaming over a cell phone directly, bypassing cell phone carriers and most hardware limitations. Mobile audio should not be just left to mp3 players or other audio services.
- Gaming
For some time the gaming industry has been a bigger business than Hollywood. So why isn’t every station involved in gaming? Stations can set up their own fantasy sports leagues, hold Guitar Heroes 3 tournaments or run other types of game leagues. GGL (Global Gaming League) organizes electronic gaming leagues and matches for fans of 20+ electronic games.
Recommendations
Here are three recommendations for making new media work:
- Do something – You can’t do everything at once, but you have to start somewhere. You should come up with a plan to implement one or two of these important new initiatives for the first half of next year. In the US, this often means SMS, which is already a mature technology.
- Create a separate sales staff – Sales must be done by dedicated Internet sales people or the regular sales staff will end up giving it away as value added. So even if it starts as just one person, keep them separate.
- The best technology is the technology that’s easiest to use – If only the IT director can upload content to your Website, you have the wrong technology. Website updates should be a part of the job description of many people, not just one or two.
Finally, even if you don’t consider yourself to be a tech person, you need to participate in the decision making. In fact, people who aren’t immersed in every detail about the latest technologies are the perfect ones to decide which ones are designed for real people to use.
Pat Welsh, Senior Vice President/Digital Content, Pollack Media Group, can be reached at 310 459-8556, fax: 310-459-8556, or at pat@pollackmedia.com.
