The One Thing Advertisers Care About – and it’s not “Reach”

For years I’ve heard the same refrain from people in the Radio business about being an undervalued medium.  They blame advertisers locally and nationally for not seeing the value in Radio.

 The truth is the problem belongs to the Radio Industry.  We have wasted years not focusing on what advertisers truly care about.

 First, we talked about how Newspapers were dying – they didn’t die – but that industry is certainly not as vibrant as it was twenty years ago.  According to Pew Research, the Newspaper Industry was a $48 Billion business in 2000, and was just under $10 Billion in 2020. Yet Radio did NOT benefit from this change.

Yellow Pages have gone the same way – shifting from printed pages to an online model and generating revenue that has dropped by billions of dollars. Yet Radio has not benefited from this change. 

Over the air and cable television is in the middle of the same kind of seismic loss of eyeballs to commercial free options like Netflix and Hulu.  This loss of viewership is where many radio broadcaster are now focused, looking for a source of revenue growth. They believe that pointing out televisions weaknesses will move more money to Radio.

You know the definition of insanity.  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.

The radio industry is like the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene “Bring Out Your Dead,” where the character sits up and says, “I’m not dead yet.”    Me thinks we doth protest too much. Yes, Radio’s resilience in the face of new competition is great.  Yes, our weekly reach is over 90% of US Adults – greater than any other medium.  But advertisers don’t care.  We need to stop focusing on talking about where to advertise and focus on how to advertise. How to use the medium effectively.  Case studies and success stories about results from happy customers.

You are not selling a product (not Radio – not audio) you are selling a service.  The service of providing advertising and marketing ideas and solutions to prospects and customers.  The industry, and the leading companies, have got to stop looking for easy ways to fill their revenue coffers by pointing out that other industries are dying.  The focus should be on training our teams on how to solve client marketing problems with ideas and execution. Better questions, better ideas, more sophisticated solutions.

Initiatives to point out the decline in local television viewership will yield the sames results as focusing on print or the yellow page decline. Local and cable television viewership is declining.  This is true but useless.  Advertisers don’t care.

Invest more in measurement of results for advertisers and training your teams on how to solve client problems.  Clients don’t care about your reach; they care about moving their products.

 Help businesses move product.  The money will follow.