Traditional media is in trouble. Outside of digital, revenues are declining, companies are downsizing and forecasts are grim. All of that is true for television and especially our industry, radio. But, the statement I made when I started my consulting company in 2019 still holds true. Radio isn’t dying, it’s changing. Yet, I fear too few groups within our industry are changing quickly enough to make the cut because they continue to forge ahead and do things the way they’ve always done them. Here are some thoughts on how those groups can turn things around.
The first step is to acknowledge the problem. Stop blaming the economy or local market trends and look at the issues within media itself. The main challenge we’re all facing is that anyone under 30 grew up not having to wait to consume exactly the kind of content they wanted and for many of us over 30, me included, we’ve since had our brains re-wired to expect essentially the same thing. While it’s impossible for radio to give each individual listener exactly what they want, we can do a much better job identifying exactly what the broader local audience within our markets wants and giving them nothing but that. The way we do that on music stations is by utilizing market level song data instead of Mediabase to dictate our music adds, something I talked about on ep 34 of Radio Influencers. Letting the local audience pick the music is a much better approach than letting one programmer choose it based on their gut and what other stations are playing. On talk stations we can fully embrace digital content to track exactly what content our audience is engaging with and focus more on that content on-air.
Our spot load issue. Audiences today are not sitting through long stopsets with tons of commercials. Running 3x four-minute stopsets per hour or even 2x six-minute stopsets isn’t going to cut it. Strategically placing those may trick Nielsen into giving a station the edge over another radio station but it won’t make us competitive with digital because it runs counter to how content is consumed today. A better strategy is 6 or 7x one-minute stopsets or 4x two-minute stopsets. If that’s not possible, stations should at least set a hard three-minute limit with a five unit limit and pairing that with great teases to upcoming entertainment elements.
Video cameras rolling anytime we’re live on-air. 4k webcams are roughly $100 now. How every radio station doesn’t have a camera on every talent cracking a mic is beyond me. It’s the easiest way to bank digital content while we’re creating audio content, and paired with AI, we can turn all of that into hundreds of reels a day to spread across social media and the internet. Those cameras should also be eye level instead of stuck high and in a corner like a surveillance camera.
Get rid of washed-up segments that have little to no value. I discussed this on Ep 36 of Radio Influencers, when talking about how talent can develop good on-air habits to replace the bad habits. One easy way to do that is to replace filler segments like Celebrity Birthdays, Today in History or National Days with segments that are topical, relevant and engaging. Then pairing that with identifying the thing everyone is talking about that day and hitting that early and often.
Don’t just say we’re a media company, actually be one that puts content out across all platforms daily. Jumping on Facebook Live once a week doesn’t make a radio station a media company. Media companies create articles, audio/video podcasts and video content daily and they push that content out to everything so it drives traffic back to the sites they own.
Crowdsource content creation, part of the reason it is so hard for traditional media to compete with the internet is because the internet crowdsources content creation 24/7/365 and traditional media doesn’t. But, we used to. We’ve just largely gotten away from it because we have so few live talent on the air. We can bridge that gap by coaching and incentivizing our talent to be interactive and engage with listeners on every platform available now and set up easy ways for listeners to engage through our websites and apps when we’re not live. We can also make up some more ground by encouraging our talent to go live on social media immediately, from wherever they are, when breaking news within our format/market happens.
Improve our streaming experience. For radio to compete with digital only platforms our streaming players have to be on par with theirs. Since we can’t, as of yet, compete with their on-demand ability, our streaming players need to at least look as good. Plus, they should allow for more listener engagement since we actually do have live people on the other end for at least a portion of the day.
Create more in-person experiences. As technology advances allowing us to do more from the comfort of our homes, that will create a void in human interaction. People will fill that void by seeking out more in-person experiences. We’ve already seen some of that post-covid as the whole world realized how important those interactions were. This creates an opportunity for radio if we get back to doing more of the great on-site events we used to do but have gotten away from because of staffing shortages and budgeting concerns. Because of this increased demand it’s likely that sponsorships underwriting these events will be easier to sell than they have been in recent years. These events also double as great places to create, share and capture digital content.
What do you think? What are some other ways we can fix our broken model or do you disagree that it’s broken? Comment below or email me at Andy@RadioStationConsultant.com.
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