If you’ve been to a few radio conferences over the last five years (at least) you’ve probably gotten tired of hearing radio executives explain or complain that radio needs to “tell a better story,” in order to increase the share of ad dollars it receives from advertisers. It leaves you scratching your head wondering how long it takes them to write this story.
Wednesday at Radio Ink’s Hispanic Radio Conference, Nielsen’s Managing Director of Audio Brad Kelly made a killer presentation about radio and showed off a nifty one-piece about your industry that every single seller should have with them every day.
Kelly explained that advertisers throwing money at digital are realizing that they are not really getting the Return on Investment they expected. “Digital is not living up to the hype. The shine is off the apple. Advertisers are saying they need to get back to the top of the funnel. They need reach.” Kelly says use this opportunity to develop a strategy and tell a better story about radio.
Kelly reeled off a long list of Billion dollar brands that do not use radio and added “radio gets 20% of the consumers media consumption every day and only 7% of the advertising dollars.” He says through at least two years of research, Nielsen has developed studies and data that prove that, on average, radio gets an 8-to-1 Return on Investment. Not bad when compared to digital which cannot prove anything yet continues to steal your dollars.
In addition to the investments Nielsen is making to increase sample sizes for ratings, Nielsen is also introducing a software platform called Rhiza where your salespeople can easily prepare presentations for their clients on a tablet making pitches as easy as a few swipes of the finger.
And below is the one-piece each and everyone of your salespeople should have when pitching radio. It’s called the 6 R’s of Radio and includes all of radio’s most important data points in an easy to deliver one-sheet for your clients and prospects.
For more information on how to get your own copy, if you cannot print it from here, reach out to Brad Kelly at [email protected]
Thank-you. This is helpful, so let’s build on this and go one step further – relevance – and in so doing, later in this post, the one question to be asked that will reveal how well you’re doing it, and what you need to do.
Relevance is found in giving our advertisers what they want – show them the money. We need to – and can –
show our advertisers *52 weeks* of documented, measured-to-the-penny, radio-attributable, advertiser sales success results that are generated in our own *local* markets; and we can – and need to – do the same with our national advertisers.
You’ll concur from reading Gord Borrell’s studies, as to what thousands of local media advertisers would welcome, and need to receive: 52 weeks of documented sales results they can measure, with those results directly attributable to the various channels of their media spend.
Gord states that our advertisers are clamoring for us (“clamouring” for my fellow Canadians) to generate documented advertiser sales results from over-arching marketing – not limited to radio – strategies that transcend our own media-centric, “it’s all about, us, Us, US!!!” pitches that are station budget focused, and not truly client-solution focused.
Hands up, please, for those of us currently doing so. This has been done tens of thousands of times, and generates greater dollars for radio by so doing. If I’ve been able to walk the talk and be part of the machine in generating documented millions for local advertisers during my times as a radio seller, owner and independent marketer who dearly misses and yearns for colleagues willing to capitalize on the unrealized marketing ability of radio (but not the stultified response to our advertisers’ repeatedly-stated needs), surely bigger and brighter folks in our most powerful industry can do much better.
How well we’re serving our advertisers is evidenced by radio’s inflation-adjusted, flat-lining revenue. ‘Would be happy to pay it forward and freely share how you can lift and measure advertiser sales, get full credit for so doing, and gain greater dollars of radio advertiser commitment and higher rates in so doing.
The one question you need to need to be asked: “Does your marketing instantly lead your prospect to the upfront conclusion that they’d have to be absolute fools to do business with anyone else but you, regardless of price?”
If it doesn’t, it’s not working right. You can fix that. It’s just a matter of how.