According to James, the reason newspapers across the country are folding faster than a bad poker hand is not the national economy, but "...that advertisers have finally figured out that newspapers, in collusion with clueless marketers and unscrupulous ad execs, have been fleecing them for decades."
The writer asked a room full of newspaper writers how many of them actually read the ads that appear in their papers.
Fewer than five percent said they did.
This made me wonder, what if a similar question were asked of radio broadcasters? How much higher would our percentage be? (You do listen to the ads on your station, don't you?)
After all, radio advertising is intrusive. When the radio is turned on, the listener can't help but hear the ads. (As someone once said, God's gift to Radio is that He created human beings without earlids.)
Whereas newspaper advertising tends to be passive: ...if the reader happens to open that day's paper to the right section...and if she happens to turn to the right page...and if she happens to notice your ad...she might actually read it.
Or she might not.
James' real problem with newspaper advertising is its lack of measurability and/or accountability. Is it effective? Do you know for sure? How do you know?
The problem with newspaper advertising is that, in most cases, you have NO idea whether anyone is reading an ad, or whether that ad is driving buying behavior. And because nothing is being measured, newspapers and ad agencies have been able to artificially inflate the price of their space ads. Massively.
One way newspapers do this is to simply lie about circulation. For example, it’s not uncommon for a newspaper to claim that each distributed copy is read by 3 or 4 people. But that’s total BS. Many copies of most print publications don’t get cracked even once. And the ones that do, I’ll bet that only a fraction of the content ever actually wins the reader’s eye.
As for the ads themselves, only a tiny fraction of the circulation reads them, and the number of people who take action as result is probably in the single digits. (I’m talking the actual number here, not the percentage.)
Newspapers also cook the books is by setting the value of advertising based upon what other newspapers are asking. As if that made any difference. But it worked, in the past at least, because marketers (many of whom don’t want to be measured anyway) never asked the obvious question: how much revenue will this ad generate?
James is bullish on online advertising because click-throughs can be tracked and ad performance measured with greater accuracy. In this, he echoes Ken Dardis of Audiographics - a former terrestrial radio guy, now SVP of Spacial Audio Solutions, an authority on Internet radio, and an outspoken critic of "business-as-usual" where Radio is concerned. For Dardis, the Internet holds the key to Radio's future, which makes him either a gadfly or an augur - or both, depending on whose ox is being gored at the moment.
Ken Dardis is passionate about Radio, but critical of the status quo. His company recently gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software and hosting to displaced terrestrial broadcasters willing to start their own Internet radio stations.
In other words, he's walking his talk.
The take-away from all of this, for those of us who make our living as radio advertising professionals, is our responsibility to exert every effort to create advertising that is as effective (and measurable) as we can make it.
We do this by investing as much time and energy as needed to understand our advertisers' objectives, their customers' needs/desires/motivation/buying behavior, and the realities of the marketplace that may affect how they interact. Only then can we begin to write and produce the advertising messages that have what it takes to move people and products.
I remain optimistic about Radio's future. Terrestrial stations and online stations both have a place in the new media landscape. They may differ in their delivery, degrees of accountability, and demographics, but they will still provide valuable information, entertainment, and advertising to their audiences.
Read Geoffrey James' full article here.
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You make some interesting points about the difference between a passive advertising medium and an active advertising medium. Radio is unique in that it takes control of a secondary sense (hearing) while leaving the primary sense (seeing) intact. So people listen to the radio when they're doing other things, which makes it almost unique (although podcasting is similar.)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, radio shares some of the same problems as print advertising, specifically a difficulty in measurement. Arbitrons are a very crude measurement scheme, even if you have radios that automatically log what's being played.
Because of that, creating meaningful metrics is difficult. If you had valid listener data, it would be possible to measure at the gross level, such as by piloting an ad and running it only in a certain geographic area and looking for a spike in sales. And, of course, there's always self-identification schemes (i.e. "Tell them you heard it here")
But it's true that many companies want better measurement, with metrics that allow them to calculate the ROI on an ad spend. That's always going to be easier to do online, or through direct mail, which is the other measurable form of lead generation.
As an aside, I'm no stranger to radio, having had a weekend business humor show for three years on WRKO AM680 in Boston.
Just wanted to add one more thing. When I was on WRKO we had to do live ad reads. One of the ads that we had to read was for "veridicals" a kind of investment vehicle where you buy the insurance policy of a person with AIDS. As a joke I pretended to our producer that I was going to read it in a Boris Karloff voice, which ended up with everyone getting a little silly, making it hard to do the live read. Every time we had to do that live read, it kept getting worse, to the point where it was getting difficult to get through the read.
ReplyDeleteFinally, my producer said: "look, we have to be professional about this and it's not professional if we're cracking up on the air while reading an advertisement. So I'm going to give you a different ad to read, and going to clear the studio, so that you can read the ad without cracking up." So he handed me the new ad copy, set the board on auto, hit the mike button, and walked out of the studio.
So I'm all alone, ready to do the live read, and really intending to do a good professional job at it... and grateful that nobody was around, so that I could proceed in a professional manner. I look down, and the first line of the new ad is -- I kid you not:
"Do you have bugs crawling up your grass?"
@Geoffrey - Enjoyed reading your article and commentary. I'd like to know your basis for ascribing to sight "primary" status and to hearing only "secondary" status.
ReplyDeleteI'm well aware that people - advertisers, in particular - seem to have a bias for the eye, but when that bias is scrutinized, it's often deemed superficial. (Consider: if you had to live the rest of your life being completely blind or completely deaf, which would you choose? Why that choice?)
Trout and Ries ("The Eye vs. the Ear"), Roy H. Williams, and others have argued persuasively that when it comes to communication, the human mind actually favors the ear over the eye. The spoken word enters the mind more quickly and hangs around longer than does the written word (this has been measured and documented).
Print is an analog of speech. The mind "translates" the word-symbols on the printed page into speech in the process of interpreting them. In other words, we typically "hear" what we read!
Perhaps because humans have been speaking to each other (at least when we're not miffed at someone) far longer than we've been writing, and seem in many cases to prefer speech-driven conversations (telephone) to print (letters), all other factors being equal. That last qualification is thrown in to address things like IM and texting, that have recently been thrown into the mix and muddied up the waters.
That said, it's evident that advertising increasingly is being held accountable for its performance, which ought to inspire true professionals to rise to the occasion, and incompetents to seek another line of work.