Marketing Promotion: Media’s Blackhole

Every business school student knows that marketing promotion’s singular objective is getting customers to pay full-price. Driving down that price is not success. Newspaper companies like to sell newspapers but the real money is ads, so far. Television and radio broadcasters like to show audience growth, or at least a “buzz” to attract media buyers.

Marketing promotion directors search far and wide for clever new incentives. UK newspapers seem to be stuck on DVDs. Gentle Rupert Murdoch has politely suggested the idea has run aground.

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It’s lonely at the top; all that authority and so little control. Top media managers in America and Britain have suffered dismal fates of late. On those very bad days, when all you hear are the footsteps in the hallway bringing the platter to carry your head, remember one thing: there is an answer. Fire the DJs.

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Brought to our attention, quite late it seems, was that the turn of the new year did not produce an American radio person of the year. At least this was the judgment of a tip sheet for US radio broadcasters.

Local Station has Budapest Talking
While the big national Hungarian radio networks play music local Budapest station Klubradio talks and has the city talking.

The Format Radio Brand The Format Radio Brand is a product with a name on it. Function and structure work together to define the benefit. The choice and placement of program elements is systematic and consistent. As competition for audience and ad revenue becomes fierce, producers adopt the Format Radio Brand to separate theirs from the vague General Radio Brands. Brands names and positioning become shorthand for consumers; saving time, effort and minimizing risk.

Incentives have a nasty way of appearing to do the job. Radio station managers about a generation ago were addicted to give-aways to drive up audience. Cash being “the best” scared the accountants because it was, of course, cash. Giving away automobiles made sense, being the primary radio listening location. One car was not good enough; go for “a six-pack of Porches” or “a Corvette every year for life.” Anyway, hard goods can be bartered, to an extent. Later the accountants figured out how to “bet” against the contest through insurance policies. Genius, it was. The newspaper people of today have nothing on these bean-counters.

Only much later did the radio people realize that giving away tee-shirts, cinema tickets CDs and other small items could have as much if not greater audience impact than the big, expensive stuff. The trick was regularity and context. If the little competitions added to the overall content, the prize mattered less than the ability to participate. Oops, are we now talking about the beginning of user-generated content? On the radio? Before the web?

Marketing promotion for radio intended to affect diary response, a separate experience only related to audience response. The learning, of course, is that less than 5% of a stations audience is affected by the prize in big give-aways. And, people looking for give-aways are people looking for give-aways – not necessarily prospective customers. Oops – again!

It was as if the cost of having extraordinary content was far higher – and less able to affect audience measurement – than big give-aways.

Passive audience measurement effectively kills marketing promotion designed to affect the recall of diary keepers. The Nielsen set-top measurement system ended any thought to television brand strength. Radio exposure will be measured electronically soon enough, along with outdoor and cinema. For newspapers the ideas floated for electronic measurement are truly frightening.

Each medium has its particular marketing need. For most broadcasters, this is audience. For newspapers, it’s circulation, usually but not always paid. For an increasing number of broadcasters, it’s subscriptions. This is a trend and not a fancy.

Every radio programmer knows the first immutable law of media marketing: program for the customers you’ve got, promote for the customers you want. Radio practice being far beneath the radar of old media people, it’s a concept lost through ignorance.

The next trend in media marketing has nothing directly to do with audience or circulation. From today on, every content-based medium needs to use what it has to drive eye-balls (and other body parts) to their websites. Websites have the metrics advertisers love: pay per click-through. It doesn’t get easier.

Presenting the CEO with detail on audience or reader acquisition is left to the very astute financial manager – and very brave. These are normal and regularly reported figures in every other business. Media CEOs facing boards and investors hate that number.

No better example of both brilliance and stupidity comes from the American satellite radio operators. Using automobile dealers to market the satellite radio subscriptions has been a stroke of brilliance. The financial incentive is built into the price.

Marketing Promotion: Media’s Blackhole

Tired of hearing about newspapers giving away DVDs and still losing circulation? Of course; their marketing people are about a generation behind the times. There are radio lessons.