From Christopher Rolando: I started in Radio back when the FM was just not cool. Yeah, that long ago.
The AM stations I worked for had FM stations. That is where the announcers that were not seasoned enough went to be on the air on the AM. It was also the place that sales people were asked to place ad buys, but didn’t want to.
Today Radio stations on a whole face the exact same problem. Radio people are experts at gathering data, writing stories and parsing information in small bites. This is exactly what Social Marketing needs in order to be successful! Radio ownership has been trying for nearly 10 years now to gain traction in this new sphere with limited success. Why? For the very same reasons no one wanted to sell the FM side of the station. They didn’t understand.
Its not that Social Marketing is hard, it's just different. From a management point of view, the sales people will just trade dollars. From the sales person’s point of view, it's just something else the management WANTS sold which goes against what they have been told to do for their entire career. From the production side…it’s a whole new skillset that management does not even understand!
The 12-24 Demo is on TicTok. Let them stay there. But the primary demo (females 45+ in my mind) is on Social Media and the marketing dollars are there for the earning. But… there are caveats…
For years I have preached that you cannot run the same radio ad for week after week, month after month… but some do. “The client wants it”. In radio, sales people come back with the excuse “The customer said run it another month”... which translates to “You didn’t bring me any new ideas and I don't want to think about this right now…” In social marketing a message has an impression level of MAYBE 2 and if it is an extra special ad, 3! This means copy changes at least a couple of times a week. You up for that?
I am in my 6th decade, second century and second millennium on this planet. People younger than me tell me the learning curve is too steep. It’s not. It just takes commitment to the process. Newspaper as an industry had it made going into this new media, but they got greedy and now they are all but dead in smaller markets. Paywalls added to old ways of doing business took their toll. TV is TRYING to do it but they just cannot accept the “small money” that comes from Social Marketing. Radio…. Well we are and always will be the cockroaches of the media. We can subsist on very little and we are resourceful.
You have been given a FREE transmitter with unlimited range. It takes new skills. So, what are you doing with it?
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