In my marketing class, I recently heard Bob McCurdy speak from Clear Channel Radio Sales about the radio space, an industry that has been greatly affected by the Internet (much like newspapers). Are people listening to the radio -- now that they can get satellite radio, free online song clips, or free music video online?
Since 2005, Clear Channel launched its "Less is More" strategy catering to both advertisers and listeners. First, it cut the number of commercials by 20% in order to improve the listening experience for its viewers. (Bold move of taking less profit to make listeners happy.) Second, it encouraged advertisers to buy shorter 15 to 30-second ads rather than the traditional 60-second ad of the radio industry. As part of this campaign, Clear Channel recently introduced even shorter ads called "blinklets" or "adlets," offering 1-second and 5-second ad spots. Blinklets have been used to promote Simpsons, NBC's Hero, and McDonalds. For example, the Simpson ad said: "D'oh!" quickly followed by "Tonight on Fox."
Here are the issues:
- Content-dependent ads: Obviously, due to the length of these ads, they require content with a recognizable audio catchline (slogan, tune, etc.) in order for the listener to immediately recognize the advertiser.
- Too short to be recognized?: Isn't there already enough clutter in radio? To alleviate this, Clear Channel has limited the number of blinklets run per hour.
- Too easy to miss?: Bob did not have specific data tracking radio listening habits and behavior, which would be very valuable. However, perhaps today's radio listener immediately leaves a station once he/she hears the ad begin? If so, it doesn't matter how short the ad is, the listener would have already left.
Not quite like newspapers. The interesting point that I picked out from the discussion is that people who listen to radio aren't there just for the music. Radio also gives you sports, weather, and traffic reports by the hour. The target audience demographic is definitely older than the same listeners who are perhaps using services like last.fm, Pandora, iTunes, etc. One thing is for sure -- this industry needs better ways to track and analyze how people are listening to radio. Arbitron's Portable People Meter (recently introduced in Philadelphia) is a leap forward, replacing traditional diary-based radio ratings.
Questions to Readers:
technorati tags: blinklets, radio, clear channel
Comments (3)
Time-Shift Radio?
TV is undergoing a paradigm change. Traditionally, it is broadcast in real time, and if you miss a show and did not record it, it is hard to view it at a later time. Time-shift is one of the important features of new generation TV called IPTV. You can watch a show at any later time, say in the last two weeks. Take Olympics Games as an example. There are so many competition games going in two weeks, often the Games is taking place in a different part of time zone. With time-shift, you can watch any game at any time at your choice, thanks to IPTV. That’s my own personal experience using IPTV in the last Olympics Games, when I was working at the company that developed IPTV products.
Can something similar be done to Radio?
Posted by Charles | February 20, 2007 8:09 PM
Podcasting killed the radio star. It is possible to time-shift all radio content, except content that by its nature must be timely. This residual content is the weather and traffic report, and possibly, late-breaking news of high interest/sports scores.
In Chicago, WBBM News Radio 780 http://www.wbbm780.com/ has been broadcasting "Traffic and weather together on the 8s!" for years. The concept is that the station tells you the traffic and weather every ten minutes, at a predictable time (5:08, 5:18, etc.), and then tells you the news in between. This way, you can turn on the radio for one minute and catch the pertinent information before turning it off, making the channel almost function as a weather & traffic stream.
Ideally, WBBM would just continuously broadcast the traffic and weather, so that I could tune in for a moment at any time, and then spend the rest of my morning enjoying a podcast. I hate listening to the radio (and rarely do) because of the concentration of commercials.
Posted by Adam | February 20, 2007 10:14 PM
Hey Jing, great content on your blog. Keep it up.
As far as I can tell, NPR will be around for as long as we can imagine. So many of my friends tune in to NPR daily on their drives to work or even at home sometimes.
I personally don't listen to radio much anymore. On-demand is big and radio isn't. That's my take.
Posted by Tony Chung | March 7, 2007 9:17 PM