Haley: Driving Auto Ad Revenue to Radio

4-22-15

Marketron President and CEO Jeff Haley looks at the issue of radio stations complaining about losing advertising revenue from auto dealerships to digital advertising. Haley says it is time to stop complaining and instead search for the proper solutions to regaining the auto dealership dollars. In a new blog, Haley offers those solutions. Read that blog exclusively below...

Driving More Radio In Auto

Jeff Haley, President and CEO of Marketron

Car dealers have long been a radio top-five advertiser. They rely on our community ties and leverage our brands to bring them closer to local customers. When you look across local community supporters it's often the car dealer and the radio station that are doing the most for local efforts. That partnership has been challenged recently by the changes in the media mix for Detroit and dealers. As Detroit has placed a bigger percentage of their tier-one dollars into digital, a trickle-down effect has created a new trend in dealer marketing -- "the all-digital dealer"

The all-digital dealer is at this point more of an anecdotal story than an actual statistic, but I have been hearing that story from a lot of broadcasters lately. It's one of those situations where I imagine sales managers and market managers feeling that they have no options when an all-digital dealer drops out of the category. In some respects this is where our share-based compensation works against us. If the dollars have left radio I don't have to worry about the station across town and I'll just wait till the dealer comes back to radio. That thinking will help us lose a lot of dollars and sell way less cars.

A staggering statistic that I came across from emarketer.com states that in 2013 adults spent as much time on desktops as they did their mobile device (2 hours 19 minutes), in 2014 mobile was expected to eclipse desktop usage with an estimated 2 hours 51 minutes, with desktop usage declining. The fact is, mobile usage will continue to grow and that is what is leading the surge in digital advertising.  It was estimated that nearly 30 percent of all digital spending in 2014 was aimed at mobile, but by 2018 that number is expected to be closer to 70 percent. These are the numbers that the decision-makers in Detroit are seeing and reacting to and can NOT be ignored. Radio combined with a mobile strategy WILL MOVE CARS!

I recommend selling the all-digital dealer what he/she wants. It's not digital, it's something new. The dealer sees Detroit cutting big deals with Google, Facebook, and others. The dealer gets pushed some of those packages down into tier-three programs. So for their own dollars they want to try a new way to market. Radio can serve this need. (And, in full disclosure, Marketron has products to help).

According to Marco Mottola, digital sales manager at  Digity, a local media, digital entertainment and event marketing company, "Geo-fencing is a very powerful product and has given us a great tool to offer our advertisers, making us more of a resource to our clients, and it rounds out our portfolio of products. It's important to have these kinds of products to compete for advertising dollars, the bottom line is that we have to deliver results to our clients and geo-fencing is doing that, and doing it well."

Radio sellers can now add the power of two-way communication on top of their broad reach broadcast. From Display, SMS, Geo-fencing, iHeartRadio, Rdio, and Next Radio there is not a single seller in our industry who does not have a tool to leverage, to sell to that dealer. In fact, radio has had these tools for nearly a decade now. My suspicion is that we have not sold much because the demand was not affecting us in our top categories. It is now. It's time to dust off those digital pitches and go back into the marketplace with refreshed ideas and new packages that serve our customers what they are shopping for.

This week I had a conversation with a small independent broadcaster in a 100+ Texas market. I asked him how his auto business was going. He said it was all up except for a Nissan/Chevrolet dealer who had left radio to go all-digital. "I would be up in auto if it wasn't for that one guy who left."

I told him about geo-fencing, which can conquer Toyota and Ford prospects with mobile display ads when they are actually on that dealer's competitors' lots. It's an amazing technology that complements but can't replace the broad reach of a radio campaign. Imagine if every radio seller could answer an all-digital dealer with a set of tools that gives them something new and keeps them in radio.

They can. The tools are there. And I know one broadcaster in Texas who is going to be up in auto this year. 

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Jeff Haley To Moderate Radio Show Panel

9-2-14
The former Radio Advertising Bureau CEO and current Marketron CEO will moderate a panel on programmatic buying trading. The panel will be made up of Jelli CEO Mike Dougherty; Brian Lakamp, president of technology and digital ventures, Clear Channel; Triton's John Rosso; and the U.S. Director of National Radio at OMD Natalie Swed Stone. The panel will take place at the Radio Show in Indianapolis, Wednesday, September 10, at 1:15 p.m.

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Haley To Run Marketron

4-5-2012

On Wednesday it was announced that Jeff Haley, who just resigned from the RAB, has taken the top job at Marketron. Former CEO Steve Minisini left Marketron just a few months ago to pursue other opportunities, and the company has been being run by interim CEO Roger Paradis. Haley starts his new job on April 16th. 

Haley said, "I've admired Marketron for their insight and work in recognizing the need for a more robust and open business platform.  And, for investing both their expertise and capital in that endeavor. I'm honored to play a role in this transformative time in the market and I am looking forward to growing revenues and business efficiency for our customers."

"We are thrilled to have the level of experience Jeff brings in his new role at Marketron," said Matthew Gormly, Managing Partner at the Wicks Group. "His proven track record in driving growth across multiple media platforms dovetails with Marketron's strategy in providing the industry with the most robust and advanced media platform in the market today. Jeff's track record speaks for itself in driving value for broadcasters and attracting accretive ad spend to the industry."

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RAB's Jeff Haley Plays The AMEX Card

Exclusively at Radio Ink's Forecast 2012, set for December 6 at the Harvard Club in New York, RAB President/CEO Jeff Haley sits down with Clear Channel's Khartoon Ohan and Lou Paskalis of American Express to examine radio's role in creating the buzzworthy movement.

Haley says "This panel will be a live case study where we will look at a new marketing campaign from American Express that leverages one of radio's strongest assets -- its connection with the local retailer. We are extremely fortunate to have Lou Paskalis, VP/Global Media, Content Development & Mobile Marketing at American Express, and Clear Channel's VP of Integrated Media, Khartoon Ohan, on the panel. They will explain not only how the program worked, but the diversity of radio tools that American Express relied on to ensure its success."

Khartoon Ohan, VP/Integrated Media, Clear Channel Communications, has more than a decade of advertising experience. During her time at BBDO, she helped the agency gain over $3.5 billion in billing and was the winner of  numerous advertising industry awards, including honors from The Gunn Report, The Won Report, Cannes Lion International Advertising Festival, and  AD AGE, ADWEEK, Creativity, and Campaign magazines.

Lou Paskalis, VP/Global Media, Content Development & Mobile Marketing for American Express, drives the company's cross-channel communications innovation and engagement. He founded the award-winning "Small Business Saturday" and has an extensive track record as an innovator in media, consumer promotions, and sponsorship.

Visit the 2012 Forecast Site and purchase your tickets for the event HERE

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RAB CEO Jeff Haley Unleashed

It was refreshing to watch RAB President and CEO Jeff Haley speak Wednesday afternoon before a ballroom full of broadcasters at the joint RAB/NAB Radio show. Haley, free-wheeling it on stage without a podium in front of him, showed confidence to an industry that may have needed a bit of an ego boost. Haley gave the impression he'd heard enough about how Radio was going to be knocked down or knocked out by up-and-comers claiming they are creating the new playground.

Haley wants broadcasters to focus on scale, live and local and mobile. And he started hitting back for Radio: "As far as Scale is an issue in media today - nobody has as broad and deep a platform as our nearly 11,000 broadcast radio stations. There are niche players who after ten years have barely scratched 20 million subscribers."

Perhaps hearing enough press hype (including here on this site) Haley then let Pandora have it, without ever mentioning them by name. "Lately there have been players out there touting duplicative "listener hours" in an apples to oranges comparison for our unduplicated long standing cume metrics. At a claim of just 3% of our reach, it may not be worthy of mention, but if we're talking about audience size, let's be fair and measure apples to apples. If you wanted to compare "listener hours", say 1.8 billion "listener hours" for 2nd quarter that claim includes duplicate reach across your user base, so it might be more fairly compared to our "broadcast hours" against the base of people who use radio. Or, live, 24/7 radio across 10,766 commercial stations x the 12 weeks of a quarter x the US population of 12+. Do that math and you get 6.1 trillion listener hours for broadcast radio 6.1 trillion - yes, that's absurd."

Haley also says the data Internet players are providing advertising is irrelevant to them. "They (advertisers) deserve better than self generated data and I urge all of us to pay attention to the hype and understand that this data is not scale. Scale is what enables Eddie Combs from Sears or Neil Golden from McDonalds to communicate their messages within well targeted appropriately formatted live and local content to every market in the US."

Every once in a while radio managers need to hear the kind of speech Haley gave yesterday. He clearly wanted managers to know radio is still here, it's still strong and we're not giving up our advertisers without a vigorous fight. And, while Internet companies like Pandora and iHeartRadio and Slacker, etc seem to get a lot of positive press they still only make up 4% of all audio listening to date. Add to that, they are still relatively new, and everyone loves to try something new. Radio, like all other businesses, has suffered a financial setback during a sputtering economy. And as we're hearing from the feet on the street from all around the country (see next story), revenue is coming back and radio is NOT being kicked to the curb.

For more information on becoming a member of the RAB visit www.rab.com

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