RADIOWORLD

The Resilience of Radio: Connecting Through Music and Real Personalities

"The medium continues to serve as a bridge that brings people together through shared experiences and shared love for music"

BY RIMA DAEL ⋅

PUBLISHED: MAY 1, 2024

Radio World’s “Guest Commentaries” section provides a platform for industry thought leaders and other readers to share their perspective on radio news, technological trends and more. If you’d like to contribute a commentary, or reply to an already published piece, send a submission to radioworld@futurenet.com.

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The author is CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, which has been serving the nation’s community radio stations since 1978. NFCB commentaries are featured regularly at Radio World.

For some of us in public radio, the past few weeks have been tough. The recent resignation of a veteran National Public Radio (NPR) editor who penned an essay alleging liberal bias in the network’s coverage has reignited demands from some congressional members to strip the federal government’s funding from the nonprofit media organization.

If this ever were to pass, it would definitely hurt stations in the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) membership. More than 60% of our members participate in a music licensing agreement between the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and SoundExchange, in which NPR has a critical role in administering.

Rima Dael

In addition, many NFCB stations rely on the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS), managed by NPR, to get many of their programs, not just from NPR but from American Public Media, Public Radio Exchange and others that distribute independent programs. And, of course, we all rely on the PRSS for national public safety since it is an integral part of our Emergency Alert System.

Additionally, the essay of the NPR editor conflated issues of a declining radio audience with a focus on DEI and community representation, which further allows anti-DEI sentiments to flourish in certain spaces.

This is what is most personally exhausting for me and many folks of color in radio, who have to defend our rights to be in certain rooms, and the value of centering our narratives which have been historically marginalized. For all of the above reasons, it has been challenging these past few weeks. 

So, who would have thought that the balm for my soul would come from the Jacobs Media TechSurvey?!! An actual survey with data that presented me with facts over my own perception! Yes, the survey results and data presented by my friend Fred Jacobs centered on commercial radio, but there are a ton of community and public radio take-aways as well! The following are my reflections and musings from this calming survey, and you can download the report at Jacobs Media’s website.

In a world inundated with digital streaming services and AI-driven algorithms, radio continues to hold its ground as a significant medium for connecting people to music and real personalities. The recently published Jacobs Media Techsurvey 2024 report sheds light on the enduring appeal of radio, emphasizing that at its core, people tune in for the connections they feel with radio DJs and personalities; and music trumps all other formats.

Ad Data Shows a Tale of Two Social Media Platforms

• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, Yesterday

Following President Joe Biden's signing of a bill that would ban TikTok unless it is sold to a U.S. owner, Guideline released estimates for the share of U.S. social media ad spending going to each of the major platforms in recent years.

Not surprisingly, ByteDance-owned TikTok's share has grown from just 2% during the 12-months running between April 2020 and March 2021 to 18% during the same period currently.

The data also reveals a continuously precipitous drop for X Platform -- formerly Twitter -- since it was acquired by Elon Musk.

According to Guideline's estimates, X's share of social media ad spending declined from 13% prior to Musk's ownership to 2% currently.

To be fair, Guideline's estimates are derived from a pool of actual media-buying data compiled from the major agency holding companies and big independent media agencies, so it does not reflect some of the long-tail ad spending from small and medium size businesses that may be sustaining some of the ad revenues from X and other platforms.

 

U.S. Consumer Time Spent with Media Fell for First Time In 2023

• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, Yesterday

The good news -- or bad news, depending on how you look at it -- is that consumer time spent with media continues to expand. The really bad news for the ad industry is that ad-supported media's share continues to decline, in both the U.S. and worldwide.

Those are among the findings in the 2024 edition of an annual Global Consumer Media Usage Forecast released this morning by PQ Media.

While total weekly time spent with media actually declined 0.4% to 76.69 hours in the U.S., and inched up only 0.3% to 56.15 hours worldwide, PQ forecasts it will rebound again this year and continue expanding for the foreseeable future.

“[Media consumption] will post accelerated growth in 2024 with general elections in the United States, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, India and South Africa, as well as the Summer Olympics in Paris, that will drive media usage rates in most of Western Europe that are in the same time zone or within an hour,” says PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn. “In 2026, we’ll see this same phenomenon in the Americas when the United States, Mexico and Canada tri-host the FIFA World Cup and, again, in 2028 when the Summer Olympics are held in Los Angeles.”

In terms of ad-supported media's share of time spent, the U.S. reached the tipping point in 2015, when consumer-supported media became the dominant sources for American consumers.

For the global consumer media marketplace, ad-supported media will continue to have the dominant share through 2028, but it also is on a trajectory to tip sometime shortly after that.

COMMENTARY

Predicting The Future Will Matter More in CTV Ads Than Optimizing in Real Time

• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, 2 hours ago

There’s no question the future of TV advertising will be data-driven and automated, as well as increasingly streamed and optimized at the impression level.

Many digital folks assume this “programmatic” future for TV and CTV advertising will be real-time-bidded, much like what happened over the past decade in banners, social and web video. I don’t share that assumption.

Instead, I believe that while CTV advertising -- and much of linear as well -- will be digitally (programmatically) planned, bought, sold, measured and optimized, the real-time-bidded and optimized component will shrink, not grow.

Why? Because buying ads on CTV is about buying the full-screen attention of audiences. It’s not about chasing clicks on banners, though advertisers are increasingly valuing closed-loop measurements and attributions.

Since people and their attention are fundamentally scarce, we’re already seeing the bulk of CTV ad spend shift into private marketplaces and “programmatic guaranteed” buys, increasingly done by insertion orders rather than open bids.

If more and more CTV ad money moves in “forward market” transactions (the term that The Trade Desk is giving it), here are some of the implications this will have for players in the CTV ad market:

• Fewer CTV ad transactions for real-time bidding
• Fewer intermediaries in CTV transaction
• Lower platform fees captured by DSPs & SSPs
• Higher data fees, with DSPs and SSPs fighting to capture them
• Less “scrapable” user/publisher data on open exchanges
• Growth in importance of verified identity data
• Growth in “walled garden” share of CTV ad transactions

There’s a lot to unpack in this list above, which I will endeavor to do in future columns. In the meantime, the biggest takeaway is that much of the value in the CTV ad market -- certainly for ad optimization -- will shift from real-time decisioning to forward market planning and commitments.

Predicting the future will matter more in CTV ads than optimizing the present. Are you ready for that?

 

Creative Problem-Solving Starts with Better Defining the Problem

By

 Min Basadur, Michael Goldsby, Rob Mathews

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April 29, 2024.









Albert Einstein once said, “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.” Einstein implication is that scientific advances come not so much from thinking up new solutions as from formulating problems in new ways or seeing them from different angles.

When it comes to finding innovative solutions, correctly defining the customer’s problem is the necessary first step. Comprehensive problem definition involves investigating and considering a vast number of possible new directions to explore. Approaching the perceived problem by reframing it into challenge statements will provide new possibilities. To do so, it’s helpful to employ the phrase, “How might I?” to generate a list of suggestions.

For example, imagine you’re helping your teenage son think his way through a problem without jumping into possible solutions for him. If your son perceives his challenge as “How might I get tickets to the concert?” you ask him, “Why do you want to get tickets to the concert?” (What’s the intent?) He then answers, “I want a date with Sue.” You then help him turn that answer into a broader challenge – “How might I get a date with Sue?” – to which there are now many more possible solutions to his problem.

Another example of how accurate problem definition enables better solutions comes from Min who, early in his career at Proctor & Gamble, was asked for help by a product development team that was formed in response to a competitor’s new product. Colgate’s green-striped Irish Spring was the first striped soap bar introduced to North America. With its aggressive advertising campaign emphasizing “refreshment,” the soap brand was finding ready consumer acceptance.

One of the rules at Procter & Gamble was that if it were the second entrant into a new market, a new product’s competitive advantage had to be demonstrated prior to market testing. When Min asked the team what was going wrong, they said they’d been unable to produce a green-striped bar that was preferred over Irish Spring in a consumer preference blind test. The team had experimented with several green-striped bars, all of which merely equaled Irish Spring in blind testing. It became evident to Min that the team had chosen to define its problem as, “How might we make a green-striped bar that consumers will prefer over Irish Spring?”

In applying the creative problem-solving process to the problem, Min began by developing alternative ways to frame the challenge. By repeatedly asking “Why might we want to make a green-striped bar that consumers would prefer over Irish Spring?” the group generated many alternative “How might we?” challenges.

The flash of inspiration came when a team member answered: “We want to make people feel more refreshed.” This led to the new challenge: “How might we better connote refreshment in a soap bar?” This less restrictive challenge, which included no mention of green stripes, gave them more room for creative solutions.

About 200 solution ideas were quickly generated for refreshment ideas. On evaluation, two ideas stood out. One was an image of sitting on a white sandy beach with blue sky, white clouds, and enjoying soothing, cooling breezes. The other was based on travel to the sea coast for refreshment. The eventual product result was a blue and white swirly bar with a unique scent and shape, which quickly won a blind test over Irish Spring, then soon achieved market success under the brand name Coast.

Solving this problem once it had been properly defined took the team mere hours. By leaping prematurely into solutions, the team had wasted almost six months before coming up with that problem definition.

Too often in the innovation process, people jump directly from problems to possible solutions. Successful problem-solving, however, requires them to begin the process with the recognition that they have a fuzzy situation and need to gather facts in order to better define the problem. Only after the “How might we?” line of inquiry is undertaken in a thorough fashion to allow for better insight should they move on to exploring, evaluating, and selecting solution ideas.

COMMENTARY

Is Social Now the Largest Ad Channel -- Depends on Who You Talk To

• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, 3 hours ago

I miss the days when McCann-Erickson’s Bob Coen was the default – if not the sole – ad industry bean-counter. It made life easier for an advertising trade journalist trying to understand -- and bucket -- shares of ad spending by medium.

While I didn’t always agree with the late Coen’s categorizations, at least they were an industry standard for benchmarking the ebb and flow of ad demand by medium.

Fast-forward to today, and four of the major holding companies -- Dentsu, Publicis’ Zenith, WPP’s GroupM, and Coen’s descendants at IPG Mediabrands’ Magna -- each have their own way of categorizing and calculating things.

Then add in a variety of third parties ranging from financial-sector analysts, to pure-play ad industry researchers like PQ Media, Brian Wieser’s Madison and Wall and Ascential plc’s WARC, and you’ve got quite a varied mix of apples and oranges.

That's one of the reasons MediaPost periodically publishes an industry composite of Madison Avenue's Big 4 forecasting units based on percent changes, but not absolute totals by medium.

Because, well, there is no consensus on many of the medium line items calculated in their totals.

I mean, what else can an ad-trade journalist -- much less a practicing media planner or buyer -- do? Well, if you receive a press release, as I did this morning, touting the headline above, you have to drill down into it.

"Social media is now the largest channel worldwide by advertising investment, forecast to reach $247.3 billion in 2024," read the subject line of the press release I received this morning from WARC touting the tipping point.

That WARC release, ironically seems to contradict one sent exactly one year ago touting that search, not social, was the largest ad channel -- by about $100 billion over social -- in the global media mix (see below).

COMMENTARY Consolidation in Streaming Is Coming - Small Apps First?

COMMENTARY

Consolidation In Streaming Is Coming - Small Apps First?

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, April 25, 2024

The maturing streaming marketplace is already showing signs of where some of the bigger players might be heading.

A key sign of what is to come is the prospect -- or the lack -- of new TV series, movies, and other content.

It's the latter for Chicken Soup For The Soul Entertainment. With a massive loss of $637 million in its recently quarterly release, analysts believe it is edging toward the cliff -- toward bankruptcy.

This number overwhelms Chicken Soup for the Soul's revenue results bringing in $294.4 million for the period.

A key element in the company's filing is its management's admission about its less-than-successful ability to cut costs. This includes efforts around its $370 million acquisition of Redbox, the retail box DVD business, in 2022, as well as streaming app Crackle.

More importantly, management talked up the issues of failing consumers when it comes to what they most want from a streamer: New programming, especially in a way that would increase audience usage, as well as subscription and advertising revenue.

The lack of new product means less need for advertising -- although what money there is left to spend could go toward general brand awareness of its businesses

One wonders how many other mid-to-small size streamer and direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses are experiencing the same thing.

Near term this would not seem to affect the big streaming brand players such as Peacock, Max, and Paramount+. But what about say AMC+, Fox Nation, BritBox, QVC+. Tennis Channel+, Lifetime, and Pickleball TV?

Sports-specific streamers may have a different metric to measure viewer's engagement and effectiveness when it comes to content acquisition.

But current market dynamics including possible shrinking overall advertising pricing -- as well as consumer demands for ever lower subscription pricing  -- can weigh heavy.

It isn’t just the glut of advertising inventory, but the glut of overall streamer platforms to begin with. So-called “churn” -- when consumers drop streaming platforms -- could be expected to rise in such a business environment.

In that type of marketplace, who then can survive?