7-17-2013
A quick show of hands, please: How many of you Swiss Army Knife owners out there use the main blade, the corkscrew, and occasionally the Phillips head screwdriver while rudely ignoring the handy little saw blade and magnifying glass? Seriously, some of these devices have enough gizmos on them to build a minor league ballpark.
Radio?s red-hot Sports format is the Swiss Army Knife of radio formats, particularly when it comes to sales and brand activation. With plump qualitative characteristics and listening behaviors, this entertaining and compelling format can produce excellent results for advertisers and unique exposure for brands, and has the potential to yield some gaudy revenue-conversion ratios.
However, in what appears to me to be a majority of cases, it feels and looks as though we?re using only some of the tools. There?s a big opportunity here for our industry to jump to another level in the way we drive results for the businesses and brands we serve. But it takes a provocative and insightful sales approach.
It?s not news to this audience that the Sports format is hot. Stations on both bands continue to jump aboard to deliver a flow of local and national hot topics and gripping dramas that change daily. There are now five Sports networks providing long-form content and a heaping supply of in- and out-of-market play-by-play. The number of Sports radio stations sits somewhere over 700 nationally, with plenty of thrust behind the trend to get the total way past that.
I was recently involved in a project that found me traipsing through the websites of over 350 Sports radio stations in a full and fair range of market sizes. From my observation post, it was a very ordinary experience. Oh yeah, the sports content was credible. The hot sports topics of the day were there, right across the board. And many of the sites kindly offered their intense, focused readers a distraction from those weighty topics by serving up ?Babes of the Day? and all that. Many of the sites had good local content as well.
The opportunity lies in the commercial part of the experience. Most sites had the easy stuff, albeit with leaky CPMs, like small display ads, skyscrapers, daily deal options, and spots on their streams. But with a few outstanding exceptions, there was not much mining of ?above-the-fold gold.? There was scant commercial and creative use of the headline rotators or handy interaction with sponsor and content.
Looking further, the Facebook and Twitter components also generally lacked the commercial angle. We have a lot of promising runway ahead to achieve true integrated sales solutions for customers in this format. Broadcasters can play a lot more offense with pricing in a more creative integrated plan, and can yank some share away from competitive media. Here?s how...
Do you buy the concept that higher exposure generates higher brand recall? Been to a stadium or arena lately? In my work with brands that use sports to drive brand recall and sales, multiple touchpoints are crucial to the sponsorship. One client (a food product sold at retail and in concession stands) sponsors minor league and major league baseball. As an example, they?ve used produced spots (in the major league case, announcer endorsements) in game broadcasts and in the online stream, live announcer drop-ins, mentions voiced by the client?s spokesperson over rejoiner and bumper music between innings, sponsor billboard mentions, in-stadium activation every night, entertaining on-field activation. and a special price offer every Tuesday home game, video scoreboard and ribbon board graphics and animation, public address support, logo stickers on foil wrappers of every item sold in the ballpark, logos on menu boards and hospitality pavilions, landing pages on websites describing the promotion, branding on the pocket schedules and in the schedule and promotion pull-downs on the club website, branding in e-mail blasts promoting home stands, and branding in Facebook posts and Twitter tweets describing the offer. It?s important for as many of these components as possible to interact with one another. It?s good for the club and good for the brand.
It all starts with the advertising agility we have in spoken-word formats (insert radio?s creativity here). Then we move to our ?theater of the mind,? along with the various additional assets available to Sports stations now, including digital, social, and mobile media and on-site and event opportunities ? communicating with an audience that expects, accepts, and embraces sponsor brands alongside product and content. With Sports radio, we can stretch a bit more than we might on our Hot AC without a program director requiring resuscitation. We might not have a Jumbotron scoreboard available to us on the radio side (hang on, yes we do!), but just think of the ways we can leverage the ?Duralast Clutch Play of the Night? across our enterprise!
You?re creative with content. Get creative with sponsorships.
Bob Cohen is the founder of Bob Cohen Strategies LLC. Learn more at bobcohenstrategies.com or e-mail him at bc@bobcohenstrategies.com. You can also find him on Twitter @BCohenStrategy.
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