7-16-2012
By Chris Miller
Going on vacation is a great chance to think about things from a new perspective. I've been on vacation for two weeks, so I've been doing a LOT of thinking! Here are a few thought-starters from a former PD who's been on the digital side for a couple of years.
WE'RE STILL HUNG UP ON DELIVERY
Radio comes from the day when each medium got delivered in a different way. You turned on a radio receiver to hear a station. You cranked up your phonograph to play a record. You went to the theater to see a movie. Eventually, you turned on a television to watch a program. Now, you just need your phone.
This means you compete not only with other local broadcasters, you compete with media from all over the world for time on people's phone. Radio's advantage is that we have established quality brands with heritage and fans that like us. We have professional programmers and entertainers. I still hear a lot of radio people put their heads in the sand and say that Pandora, Stitcher, Spotify, and other new forms of audio entertainment aren't radio. News flash: They're radio if our fans are using them like radio. It doesn't matter if they have a transmitter or not. It also doesn't seem to matter if they have the usual trappings of radio or not.
NEW MEDIA MOVES VERY FAST
Almost every new form of online entertainment is working in a world where dramatic change is a constant. To thrive in the new media world, you can't be unfocused, unmemorable, or under-capitalized.
If online forms of entertainment cause listeners' expectations or needs to change, that would affect our industry. I'm not sure we're thinking about that. There's a saying, "Don't fall in love with your tools." We risk being left behind if we define ourselves by established practices rather than by super-serving the changing, brand-relevant entertainment needs of our fans.
THE MOMENT OF TUNE-IN
If I turn on any commercial radio station, there's a 15-20 percent chance that I'll be in time to hear commercials, and that often means minutes of content that has nothing to do with why I tuned in in the first place. Once upon a time, that was the way of the world with any entertainment, and I would just wait patiently. Now ? not so much. Online services I listen to, like Stitcher and Pandora, have changed my expectations of how long I need to wait before being satisfied.
This is an example of what I mean about new media changing the world. If I've come to realize that I don't have to wait to enjoy other forms of entertainment. I might just get on my phone and start checking voicemail instead of listening to five minutes of commercials.
I don't know what the solution is for this one. How we pay for our product is based on habits of the past, a world that was less time-pressured and media-segmented than the one we live in now. We know from PPM numbers that listening does drop when commercials come on. We don't know how much listening we lose from folks who don't hang around long enough to be measured. Our industry has a lot of great brands, but we have to figure out how to win the Battle of the Moment of Tune-In.
Chris Miller has been a major-market PD in Atlanta, Portland and Cleveland. He now operates Chris Miller Digital, which he launched. Visit his website at www.chrismillerdigital.com.
Contact Chris via e-mail, chris@chrismillerdigital.com or 216-236-3955.
For more articles from Chris Miller go HERE.
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