(By Barry Cohen) When I started selling radio
(in the Pleistocene Era), we entered into daily battle with the dinosaurs known
as newspapers. These monsters devoured the local clients’ ad budgets, breathing
fire and scorching the earth. The number one client objection we faced on a
daily basis: “When I advertise in the newspaper, I know it’s working because
customers bring my ad in. I never know if radio is working for me or not.”
All too often, prospects
resorted to tactics like forcing the radio salesperson to write copy saying,
“Mention this ad and get blah, blah off.” What do you think happened then? “No
one mentioned radio (or your station), so no one heard the ad,” asserted the
advertiser, smugly.
Where’s the flaw in this, you
ask? Well, the radio ad may very well have reminded them of other advertising
they saw, heard, or read, but as an intangible, it didn’t receive credit for
the sale. There’s the phenomenon of “last reference” — when you query the
customer, they will most often cite the last place they recall an advertising
message. Asking them where they heard about you is simply unreliable. So it’s
not a matter of whether your advertising measures up, it’s a question of
whether your measurement measures up.
Today, we face a similar
challenge with Internet advertising. The client will insist that they can track
their Internet response with online coupons, “cookies” and other analytics.
What to do? Educate the client on how to accurately gauge the results of a radio
campaign by making it more tangible.
Help them understand the need
to have more than one indicator to measure response. Viewed together, they
provide a more accurate picture.
Here are a few ways they can
do just that.
1.
Use a dedicated phone number that does not appear in any other
medium.
2.
Set up a dedicated URL or landing page advertised only on your
station.
3.
Make a special offer that does not appear in any other
advertising.
Years ago, stations had
loyalty club cards. When listeners flashed them, advertisers knew where the
response came from, without question. They functioned as “radio coupons.” In
addition, advertisers should look for changes in the geographic and demographic
profile reflected in their traffic. Advertising on a 50,000-watt flamethrower
for the first time may in fact bring in people from outlying areas that never
patronized them before, so check those ZIP codes.
Similarly, if the advertiser
sees a different age, gender, or ethnic mix that corresponds to your station’s
audience profile, it also serves as a strong indicator that their radio buys
are in fact generating traffic.
Free Lunches With Big
Paybacks
Sometimes you have to ask the
audience to do some of the work — but not too much heavy lifting. We did a
restaurant promotion where we told the listeners of the Rock station to bring
in a ticket stub from a Springsteen concert and get one absolutely free entree.
The result? With only one week of advertising on one suburban station, we
generated 856 documented responses (guest checks with ticket stubs attached).
How smart was that? Well, the
restaurant owners understood that those patrons would also buy drinks and
desserts, bring friends — and return to become regular patrons. We created
customers, not just sales, and we got full credit for our results.
Should you tell people to
show up at the retailer’s location wearing a station T-shirt? Ask them to write
their own coupon? To e-mail in a selfie holding up your call letters? Yes, if
the incentive is motivating enough. I’ll talk more about offers in my next
article.
Barry
Cohen is the managing member of AdLab Media Communications, LLC
(www.adlabcreative.com).
What Hubbard – And
Other Radio Groups – Are Really Up Against
March 30, 2017
During Radio Ink’s Hispanic Radio Conference Ed Levine’s
story with Radio Ink, (“An Argument For
More Deregulation”) where he detailed how his company is no
longer fighting for advertising dollars with the newspaper, other radio
stations, and a TV station in the market. He detailed how the unregulated world
of digital (i.e. Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) are gobbling up ad dollars
while radio continues to find itself handcuffed by FCC rules put in place back
in the ’70s. We found another example for you thanks to BIA/Kelsey’s Mark
Fratrik.
Fratrik
made a presentation at Radio Ink’s Hispanic Radio Conference this week that
included detailed research from the Washington, DC, market, where Hubbard’s
WTOP was once again crowned radio’s billing champion. Fratrik drilled down the
data to the local ad revenue level, where BIA/Kelsey says Hubbard took in
$67.5 (The Hubbard number in the chart below is incorrect) in
2016.
And to
help prove Ed Levine’s point, Facebook in Washington, DC, took in $51.5 million
in local advertising revenue in 2016. Are you sitting down? It gets better. On
top of the list was, you guessed it, Google. The online search company took in
over $244 million in advertising dollars in 2016, nearly doubling the company
second on the list (The Washington Post). See the chart below.
Perhaps
Ed Levine has a point. Chairman Pai…are you listening?
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