by Bill Pasha
Your knuckles turn a chalky white. Your breathing shallows and your eyes dart back and forth beneath your perspiration-beaded forehead. Your palms become clammy as your heart and brain engage in an epic battle between whether to look back over your shoulder in fear, or stomp on the gas pedal and revel in shattering your personal speed limit on the way to the passing lane of success on the Cross-Platform Highway. Such is the decision stress faced by broadcasters whose core skills and experience beg them to remain in the comfort zone that the ?right lane? of content offers.
In recent years to devise new business models, Radio?s content designers and product managers ventured hesitantly onto the branches of increasingly more frustrating and dangerous decision trees. The goals? To repurpose over-the-air content that invisibly integrates into digital platforms, and to create content for radio websites, mobile, and HD frequencies that result in entities ready for cross-platform marketing on partnered FCC-licensed frequencies. In many cases, if not most, early efforts failed miserably. The drive to achieve a harmonious programming merger between ?new media? digital delivery channels and ?old media? broadcast technologies seemed to sputter in the face of the lack of a roadmap.
At first, broadcasters hired ?experts? from the digital field, ostensibly to uncover shortcuts that had eluded the ?old media? employers. At the same time, digital content producers longed for the vast experience and huge audiences enjoyed by seasoned radio pros. Seemingly, no answer could be found. But history shows that Mr. Marconi spawned remarkably resilient players who know how to collaborate and invent.
Innovation has changed the operational and creative dynamics of the most intelligent leaders in both digital and programming. Together, without the bubble-inducing fanfare of the dotcom boom, these discipline specialists have quietly applied equal pressure to their respective gas pedals to join flawlessly in a center lane that travels at speeds that no one thought possible even two years ago.
The key to this new development alliance has been the acceptance of, and capitalization on, the strengths of Digital and Programming as stand-alone entities. When merged, the sum of the equation demonstrates that one plus one equals more than two. That?s the impact of the union. The smartest voices of this new emerging media platform are whispering among themselves. In quiet voices, they advise each other to look for new partnerships. Online content and entertainment platforms, like the UK?s COVERmedia, engage experienced radio programming partners to convert their multi-faceted content assets into a remarkable radio show preparation system that provides instantly promotable access to audio, video, and text. The consumable products are smarter, faster, and more comprehensive than any of COVERmedia?s competition or that of their radio client-partners. Then, by partnering with a multi-platform media company, COVERmedia provides cross-platform digital and broadcast products and services in six languages.
One especially noteworthy innovation of merged technology includes Jacobs Media?s Jacapps. The premiere rock music programming consultants in the world, Jacobs Media, saw an important need for radio to become available on rapidly expanding digital mobile devices. Jacapps jumped into the deep end of the software production pool. It had to be frightening. But it appears that the headlong leap off the high diving board has paid off for Jacobs Media, radio programmers, radio owners, listeners, and mobile device purveyors, all of whom enjoy the benefits of intelligent, bug-free, mobile applications that really deliver customer gratification. Epic Win!
In Radio Tomorrowland, we can imagine that high-definition video and film producers will join forces with HD Radio operators to create powerful theater-of-the-mind audio imagery for their visual products. Radio programmers will reinvent powerful content for immediate distribution on a large scale through listener-customized streaming radio stations. No adaptation. No repurposing. Instead, this programming is designed for consumers who will use one or more delivery device to access entertainment, news, sports, and even data backup and delivery from their home computers, provided to them in mini data blasts at times they pre-designate. Long form motion pictures, customized to specific demographic and psychographic targets of websites, will be produced digitally for seamless audio storytelling on HD Radio. In-auto web radio will be the norm, not newfangled.
Back in the present, Radio is a remarkable medium that has the capacity to play well with others and provide targeted programming to gargantuan weekly national audiences that are envied by its competition. The industry continues to attract a core of the brightest and most innovative thinkers to its creative process. But the true secret to this optimistic vision for the matrix of combined Radio and Digital success, is for both to do what they do best: In the light of cooperation, not competition, go fearlessly into the content void without preconceptions, and endlessly dream of what Digital and Programming can accomplish together.
In the new media world, a new generation of thinkers has brought us to the on-ramp. It is up to us whether we enter Cross-Platform Highway like a Smart Car, or thunder onto it like a Ferrari. Choose the correct way, and it just might be a wild ride.
Bill Pasha is founder and president of MultiBrand Media International, LLC, a concierge consulting company that produces content, represents innovative digital and broadcast products and services, and develops strategies in diverse managerial, operational, and marketing disciplines for media professionals in countries worldwide. Until recently Bill was VP of Programming for Entercom where he was responsible for over half of Entercom's 11 stations. Contact Bill at bpasha@multibrandmedia.com.
(5/31/2011 6:47:44 AM)
"In Radio Tomorrowland, we can imagine that high-definition video and film producers will join forces with HD Radio operators to create powerful theater-of-the-mind audio imagery for their visual products."
That's all you've got? LOL! Better be scared of the likes of Pandora and Slacker!
Add a Comment | View All Comments Send This Story To A Friend
