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.
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