(By Buzz Knight) I just attended for the first time Radio Ink’s Forecast 2018 Event held in NYC and from a Programming and Content perspective I have some thoughts and takeaways that are relevant for consideration.
First and foremost Forecast is important due to the focus that the event has regarding the business conditions that we face as managers and content providers for our companies. We are at a critical time where with the rapid advent of the smart speaker/Alexa rage we have a unique opportunity to find new audiences for our content. With our business facing more new disruptive competition we have to be better every day developing and nurturing great sharable content. Forecast for me reiterated the importance of programmers raising our game for our respective companies. My boss Caroline Beasley who was part of Forecast reminds us of that fact on a regular basis.
Secondly the fact based nature of Forecast opens our eyes even more widely of the challenges we face in the critical sales process of our business. Programmers should know the economic state of their markets and their companies and they should be aware of the perceptions and realities of the day. Gaining a better understanding of how the advertising pie is broken up in a market in TV, Direct Mail, Outdoor, Internet Yellow Pages, Digital and Radio is helpful as we all strive to become better business operators.
The need for us to be more driven to hone each of our industry talking points as we positively sell the virtues of our business is patently obvious when you attend the event. At Forecast we heard about the challenges TV is facing with “cord cutting” and we also heard about the digital challenges around “Brand Safety” and it makes me feel we need to be more proud and on the offense when we position who we are. If we allow the perception of radio not being the “sexy medium” to be the lead story we have ourselves to blame for not speaking up!
Gaining different types of perspective is one of the great advantages of attending Forecast. Hearing from a wide range of speakers with different voices and talents gets us thinking with more openness and this becomes more critical now more than over. As Programmers we must meet the new challenges and opportunities by finding more clues to the best methods of collaboration.
Buzz Knight is the Vice President of Programming for Beasley Media Group. He can be reached at [email protected]
