Here's What I Learned at C.E.S.

1-17-2014

Another edition of the Consumer Electronics Show is in the books and it's time to reflect on what was learned from the experience.

The show has always been a guiding point to important takeaways that can be applicable in our everyday radio life. This year, every facet of CES comes back to connectivity, no matter what brand we are thinking about.

Wearable devices seemed to be the big story this year at CES and this marked my first event that I attended that Google Glasses were semi-prevalent. I actually saw someone looking hideously weird wearing Google Glasses on top of their own glasses. Can you say ?super nerd??

This year?s show also continued the trend of being a car show where automotive companies show off their new technology. Frequently, you could hear some variation of discussion from presenters about some form of self-driving mobility coming in our lifetime. BMW was touting its "Auto Drive "Capabilities. Ford talked about its "Adaptive Cruise Control." Mercedes highlighted its capabilities around "predictive user experience."

We are not only talking about a car that drives but now the manufacturers talk about "car physics."

If you want to see the next generation of mobility, look at Zoox.com and you'll see one of the companies that is certainly seeing the future. They would make The Jetsons proud!

Here are some thoughts that, hopefully, you'll find valuable after my CES experience:

1) We need to have a thirst for deeper behavioral understanding

To me this key starting point matches the goal of many of the exhibition companies and how they pursue their business ventures. They seek, through behavioral analysis research, the best "real-life experience data" that guides them on the final creation of the product.

So, as I was privileged to be walking the convention floor with Nielsen Audio?s Dr. Ed Cohen, we both took into account our own behavioral questions: when we saw things in the kitchen-aid category that included a Whirlpool  refrigerator with Blue Tooth speakers, or the "smart refrigerators" which gave you exact readouts of what?s in the fridge.

Are these products part of an over-connected cultural fad or will they catch on and become habit? Let's see where the category of smart refrigerators is in popularity next year at this time.

If we in radio can be stronger in data interpretation, both in the raw number that Nielsen provides, and in the other metrics that matter, we can better serve our clients and customers.

2) Generosity in sharing

There is a spirit and a generosity in sharing that seems to be prevalent at CES. Maybe it?s the daze we all get in from the sensory overload that disarms us, but among attendees and journalists there appears to be generosity in sharing.

The shared experience among those in attendance is a great communal vibe of best-and-brightest experts.

As you ponder how to be better in your own job, finding ways to manage and expand your own network of the best-and-brightest is a great place to focus.

3) Make your street team brilliant

The street teams that circle CES are all fun and beautiful (male and female). Their nuisance factor is minimized and they carry the image and vibe of the brand very well.

As we fight to stand out, we have to challenge this specific point at our radio station. Do you have your full-timers on their A game when they work the street? (Do they even have an A game?)

Just as you want your street team to take their appearance (or the van?s appearance) seriously, do they take their physical appearance seriously? I didn't see one CES street-teamer shoveling food into his mouth while finishing his cigarette on his break.

4) Curiosity

Nolan Bushnell talked about how events like CES nurture your curiosity and how critical that factor is to further breakout thinking.

Wandering over 2 million-square-feet of convention space with 150,000 of your nerdy best friends, you see people of all shapes and sizes and multicultural background, all on a curiosity mission.

There is no one code to be cracked.

Just being around smart and different people with a curious backbone makes us sharper.

As Nolan said about CES and tradeshows in general, "Surround yourself in areas where your mind is being creatively challenged, and tradeshows are one of these...that represent the best and the newest of an industry. Collections of talent and creative people...they plasticize your brain just a little but."

5) Partnerships

A partnership mentality seems to grow every year at CES, the examples of which are too numerous to mention. Everywhere we look companies are finding and succeeding with integration philosophies that produce win/wins for both parties. Who can you partner with to create another product/product category or to enhance existing products? Some partnerships might have no immediate financial or strategic reward today but can or will in the future. Let's be willing to take that risk with an eye on honing partnerships for the future.

CES is all about seeing the future, and the future is in partnerships.

6) Innovation incubation

Failing fast and cheap while increasing innovation incubation is key to our long-term success. Sometimes this incubation occurs after following someone who is or has already tried something and gotten there first.

That?s okay, as long as you put your take on the project/harmonize it with your brand and make it better. Studying the Google innovation process is interesting because many times they aren't first into the category but they figure their own spin and execution and their own definable difference.

We should all be motivated from CES innovation and at the very least set small but realistic goals to grow.

7) Nurture your own professional alliances

Professional alliances grow the knowledge base of individuals and organizations and CES is a driver of this for me. Many existing relationships have gotten stronger as a result of the event, and it?s also afforded me the opportunity to create some new ones.

8) Simplicity

Going to CES reminds me that simplicity and ease of use are important for everything that we undertake with our brands. Whether it?s a promotion, a digital initiative, or a device, it has to be easy to use and easy to understand. Bells and whistles are great but if the user experience is clunky it makes for a negative experience.

Buzz Knight is the Vice President of Program Development for Greater Media and he can be reached at bknight@greatermediaboston.com. Knight was named among ?Best Programmers? by Radio Ink Magazine in 2007 and 2010. He has served on the programming subcommittee of the National Association of Broadcasters(NAB) and is currently a member of the Arbitron Radio Advisory Council and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) COLRAM Committee.

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(WIZARD) Lessons Learned From The Poor

10-28-2013

I?m 21 years old, but my thinning hair makes me look about 30. I consider this to be my greatest asset. I walk the retail sidewalks, looking in windows, deciding if I?ll go in. A peddler goes door to door unthinkingly, playing the odds, but I choose my doors carefully, looking for those little indicators that whisper, ?The owner of this business has a brain.?

I climb wooden stairs to the trailer-house office of a mobile home dealer on Admiral Boulevard. Behind me is the neighborhood of Ponyboy Curtis, an unfiltered assortment of bent automobiles, broken houses, and discarded people.

My footsteps drum the wooden deck. Behind the glass, two men drink scotch at a coffee table in a cloud of Winston and Lucky Strike. The heavier one looks up at me, then back to his scotch as I swing open the door and step inside.

?Whatever you?re sellin?, we?re not buyin.?? His eyes never leave the scotch.

?Probably advertising,? said the other, careful not to look my way.

?I came in here because you guys appear from the road to be smarter than most. Don?t tell me I made a mistake.?

Both men turn to look at me. The second one speaks again. ?What makes you think we?re so smart??

?The sign, the flags, and the angle of presentation.?

His eyes grow cold and hard. ?Explain.?

I raise a finger. ?Five sheets of inch-and-an-eighth tongue-in-groove plywood gave you an 8-by-20 sign on which you painted ?Veterans Housing Specialists? in exactly the same style and colors a government agency would use. You?re looking for that Veterans Administration ?one-dollar move-in? money that you know every Vietnam vet has available to them. You?re smart enough to paint the sign. I?m smart enough to know it?s working.?

A second finger. ?Every dealer on mobile home row uses exactly the same strings of cheap vinyl flags to get attention. Red, yellow, blue, green, and white. But you paid extra for strings of metallic silver and metallic gold. It makes your mobile homes look upscale.?

Three fingers. ?You have the least inventory of any dealer, but your customers never realize it because while every other dealer places their homes parallel to the road, you?ve angled yours so no home is ever parallel to the road. This is visually more interesting, gets more attention, makes the homes seem distinctive, and you?re creating leading lines in a V-shape that guide the eyes of passers-by to your seemingly official ?Veterans Housing Specialists? sign.?

The second one stood up. ?I?m Jim McDuffie.? Pointing to his partner, he said, ?That?s Mac McKean.? Reaching toward me for a handshake, he said, ?And you?re our new advertising guy. Tell me what I need to buy.?

I like to tell that story because it makes me look smart. There are other stories I don?t like to tell.

Jim McDuffie?s business is big enough to advertise in multiple ways. This means I have a safety net. If the ads on my tiny little radio station don?t produce results, the traffic generated by the other stations will cover me. I rarely have this luxury.

The upside of working for the smallest radio station in the city is that I can make presentations to businesses with budgets too small for any station but mine. In other words, the salespeople who work for the larger stations are limited to just one of every 100 businesses. The other 99 can?t afford their rates, but every business in town can afford me.

That?s the problem. People buy my station because it?s all they can afford. Nothing else. No safety net. If my ads don?t work, the electric bill doesn?t get paid, the kids don?t have money for school lunches, and the ad man is a con man.

When my ads failed, I had nowhere to hide because my clients could afford no one but me. I?d been given all the money they had. Pain is the teacher you never forget.

When I lost my hair at an early age, I knew it gave me an advantage. But it took a few years for me to realize that being the only salesperson for the number 23 station in a city of 22 stations gave me an even bigger advantage. No other salesperson was given a private physics laboratory in which they could accurately measure the cause and effect of each of the variables in advertising.

Thank you, Mr. Kitchell, for trusting me with your money 34 years ago. I learned some hard lessons at the expense of a lot of good people like yourself who couldn?t afford to lose what I cost them. I kept the education you bought me and helped a lot of people with it. Many of them became hugely successful.

None of those happy people ever really knew the debt they owed you. But I?ve never forgotten what we learned, you and I. The parts that worked. The parts that didn?t.

I think of you often, Mr. Kitchell, and I still regret that I was unable to take you where you deserved to go.

Roy H. Williams is president of Wizard of Ads Inc. E-mail: roy@wizardofads.com.

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(SALES) What I Learned At The Missouri Broadcasters Convention

6-3-2013

I learned about the Testicle Festival. More on that later?

Don Hicks, the outgoing MBA Executive Director of 29 years, told me Friday night, ?We wanted to have an NAB/RAB-type show on an MBA budget.? Just so you know?the MBA pays full freight and it shows. Eighty-two categories of awards as well as Hall of Fame inductees. Their goal is to give TV and radio stations recognition and rewards for giving airtime to MBA sponsors such as the National Guard. Their convention, in my opinion, is one of the best in the country. They had 320 people at their awards show on Saturday night and sessions packed on Friday and Saturday.

This was the sales 4 X 100 relay going into the MBA convention:

-- 1st leg: Brian Dodge. Amazing speaker out of Dallas. He?s hard to catch coming out of the blocks.
-- 2nd leg: Chris Lytle. The ?god? of broadcast sales training. Twenty-two hundred seminars in 30 years.
-- 3rd leg: Michael Lee. Social media sales, marketing, and trends.
-- Anchor: Sean Luce. Try bringing home that baton on Saturday morning at 9 a.m. and you?re the only thing going -- at a resort at Ozark Lake, Missouri, no less -- when you've had those three legs of the relay running in front of you! Remember, you?re only as good as your last sale.

Here are some of the things I learned from attending the convention and during my seminar. Even though you are speaking, you can polish up on the things you know and need to be reminded of; and also you?re never too old to learn some new things, even if they do have to do with testicles.

Brian Dodge: We forget that money doesn?t buy loyalty. We think by paying people so much money they will be loyal to us. I forget this sometimes also. Money doesn?t buy loyalty. Also, the 21-day re-programming came from World War 1 where it took 21 days to recondition the soldier?s minds after they had body parts amputated. They had to get used to not having their arms and legs since they didn?t have the modern medicine to help save those parts. So, if you want to re-program anything you do in life, it takes 21 days to create a new neuro-pathway or a good new habit.

Chris Lytle: In 1986, my first year in broadcast sales -- I?m dating myself now -- I was sent to a Chris Lytle seminar in San Antonio, Texas, at the Ramada Inn. I was one of the people who took one thing out of his seminar that day. I took the ?why advertise checklist? and thought??that makes sense.? Get your clients to check off what they want you to do, rather than you sell some ?package? down their throats. A version of that ?marketing checklist? is the staple in our CMPs (customer marketing profiles) that are used by media companies all over the world now. Thank you Chris Lytle!

On Saturday morning:

1) Speechless at your own seminar: I?ve never been speechless at my own seminar?ever. I was speechless on Saturday morning. Typically, in my seminars, after the first break, when people start to filter back, I have a segment where I ask the audience what is the most embarrassing thing that?s ever happened to you on a sales call. I always preempt them by saying that I can beat any of their stories. At my Bakersfield, California, 1998 seminar I had just bought a new wireless wrap-around microphone and when I broke the attendees up into case study groups, I then went to use the restroom.  I of course had left the microphone on and everyone could hear me. Try coming back into the auditorium after you did that? Nothing but very loud giggling.

On Saturday morning, one of my attendees, Shantel from Columbia, Missouri, told a story about what made her the most embarrassed on a sales call. Shantel was celebrating her first true customer needs analysis ? she'd just started selling radio. She?d also served in the military after graduating from the University of Missouri. It?s hard to describe this story without a picture of Shantel. Shantel will now be permanently in Sean Luce seminars under the most embarrassing thing ever done. I just need a pic or a video so you?ll understand the story. Shantel can really rip it!

2) The Testicle Festival: We encounter 250 to 5,000 advertising messages each day, according to "Advertising Age" magazine. What ads do you remember from yesterday? Not many! Maybe you can remember one or two? The point being that your advertisers need to be on your media consistently because people forget what they encounter every day.

I asked this question to the audience on Saturday morning. One person fired back, Kelley Foust from a Joplin TV station: ?I remember the signage on the highway driving here for the Testicle Festival. That was it?just one person could remember one ad out of a group of 80 media reps. I laughed. It was also the only ad I remembered from the day before. I thought how strange that festival must be. Though, it was the 20th Testicle Festival.

Make sure your ads rise above the clutter because, as the signage says inside the festival (complete with pictures) coming back Saturday night, ?Size does matter! ? Remember, this is the ?Show-Me State? we?re talking about -- Missouri!
Sean Luce is the Head International Instructor for the Luce Performance Group and can be reached at sean@luceperformancegroup.com or at www.luceperformancegroup.com.

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What I Learned During My CES Vacation

by Buzz Knight

"Every once in a while I find myself in the presence of purity-purity of spirit and love-and I always cry. It always just reaches in and grabs me." Those are the words of Steve Jobs about the "Think Different" Apple campaign from the Walter Isaacson Biography. This is the emotion we should all attempt to create whether we're Radio marketers or Consumer Electronics marketers. I wonder what the great inventors of yesterday would think of the Consumer Electronics Show?

How would Thomas Edison view the nearly 30 football fields of convention space filled with 150,000 inventors, entrepreneurs, business people and writers that roam for days like zombies looking for the next new thing? Other than complaining that his feet were sore Mr. Edison would no doubt be inspired to take his own ideas back to the lab and experiment and develop. CES 2012 is over and in the books and once again the spectacle here in the center of the digital universe has left me with some thoughts to distill for the radio industry at large.

VIBE AND CORE BELIEF
The vibe that presides over the event is the first element that comes to mind every time I attend. Fred Jacobs from Jacobs Media nailed it when he called it " optimistic, exciting, spirited and BIG!" There's a strong core internal belief that permeates the entire event. Unless you are here you really can't describe it. It's exciting, there are Neon backdrops , inflatables ..it's bigger than life. Radio has to always strive to be bigger than life.

We have the power and imagination to create bigger than life strategies. This has to start with a strong and passionate internal core belief that you can feel when you walk in the door of a radio station. We should  raise our level of excellence in everything we present to match that spirit (to clients and listeners) on a consisent basis.

RADIO AND CONSUMER ELECTRONICS
More radio people need to attend the Consumer Electronics Show! Those of us who attend are certainly searching for the next new thing and even if it isn't ultimately always discovered the overstimulation of the event provides a motivating perspective. In 1924 the Consumer Electronics Association started out as the Radio Manufacturers Association. Radio is part of the Consumer Electronics Industry and let's get more of us to attend and feed our brain!

CONNECTIVITY
This is the "buzz word" of this years event. Everything changed when the smart phone hit the consumer as a device to connect them to everything and everybody. The smart phone has become the funnel of digital content and services and there needs to be a seamless experience from home to office to car. Radio plays an important part in the connectivity landscape when it relates to reaching our existing and potential audiences.

The car has become a big entertainment system on wheels and radio's place in that available hierarchy needs to be rock solid. I spoke with Jim Buczkowski the Director of Electrical and Electronics Systems for Ford and he said "radio has to stay focused on producing quality content with customers having so many choices."

PARTNERSHIPS
CES teaches us great examples about the opportunity for partnerships. Ford continues to profess a strong desire to use partnerships to build their brand in particular with Sync and My Ford Touch. According to Ford CEO Alan Mullaly .."we want to collaborate with everyone." The world is changing and radio companies are seeing the value of partnerships within our industry to get things done. IHeartRadio is a great example of that. The barriers are only in our mind not in the minds of our listeners.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
There has to be billions of dollars spent on Research and Development within the Consumer Electronics Industry and there are still more flops than winners. New York Times Tech Columnist David Pogue told me he thinks the whole tablet business has gotten "way out of hand" at CES and that 99% of the new product lines revealed at CES will collect dust on the shelves. That doesn't stop this group of wild thinkers from trying new, bold and different ideas.

David's favorite this year is the new Casio G-Shock GB6900 wrist watch that communicates with your phone using Bluetooth technology. Let's get out of the "we've always done things this way" mode and try some new angles on promotions, features and listener engagement. Lab groups are a great way to try ideas out on real people as opposed to radio people. Research and Development on the good and bad case studies is an example for radio to take advantage of from CES.

RADIO
Radio has some stories coming out of CES this year that are worth mentioning. Blackberry which has its own business challenges announced the new Blackberry Curve 9360 or 9380 smartphone with a chip built in for FM broadcast radio. Bob Struble from Ibiquity showed us a phone with a built in HD chip to broadcast in digital quality that could be available in the future. Bob did emphasize that the "digital consumer experience" both on a technical level and a content level needs to at least match the other services available to consumers.

INNOVATION
"You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably make a lot of money but he didn't. He had to move on. The Beatles were the same way. They keep evolving, moving and refining their art." The words of Steve Jobs once again which apply to CES and to our radio industry.

Buzz Knight is the Vice President of Program Development for Greater Media. He can be reached at bknight@greatermediaboston.com
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