Does Radio Advertising Work Anymore?

This month I have had a couple people ask me questions about the effectiveness of advertising on the radio.  They asked specifically about advertising on WOWO Radio and traditional radio stations overall.

My answer was a qualified yes, advertising on the radio can still be very effective. 

The conversations were with potential advertising partners.  One of them is using targeted business publications and is getting a decent response according to their marketing director.

Another conversation was centered on using radio versus social media.  Someone else told me they were unhappy with the response from their television advertising and doubted that radio was the answer.  And finally, I was asked about the impact of satellite radio and the likes of Spotify and Pandora which are alternatives to traditional broadcast radio.

Let’s set the stage.  Not all radio advertising works.  Anyone who tells you differently is a liar and you should not do business with them.  What makes some radio advertising campaigns effective and others not so much?

It’s a combination of elements including:

• The radio station audience demographics
• The size of the radio station audience overall
• The actual number of people that your campaign will reach
• The number of times an ideal (target) person will hear your message (frequency)
• The message itself
• Share of voice, which is about how you stack up versus your competition on that radio station.

But one of the other elements that I mention is the mindset of the audience and their attitude towards commercials.  WOWO Radio and our local ESPN Radio stations are part of the Federated Media stations in Fort Wayne.  I sell ad campaigns on those two news/talk/sports stations.  Our other Fort Wayne stations are music based.

When you or I tune into a music station, we do it to escape.  If it’s background music or music to crank up as we are driving, it is the music we want to hear.  When the music stops for commercials, we pay less attention to what is on the radio.  Some people may even switch to another station during a commercial break on music based radio stations.

Radio stations that feature talk formats, either news talk like WOWO or sports talk like ESPN are less bothered by commercials.  The listeners are not escaping, they are actively listening to every word.  It’s like brain food.  Commercials are less of an interruption because it is all talk anyway.

The other critical element that local broadcast radio stations need to do to keep local listeners and not lose them to satellite radio services or internet jukeboxes is provide local content. In this age of world wide everything, we can get news and music from nearly anywhere.  But if you want to know what is going on in your town, you need a local source.  That is why some of Federated Media’s radio stations including WOWO have consistently attracted large audiences, year after year after year.

What about the audience of the radio station versus a targeted publication?  This came up in two conversations.  You can target using radio stations too, in many cases.  There are currently two stations in Fort Wayne with a weekly audience of over 100,000 people according to the Eastlan rating service.  WOWO & WJFX.  Huge difference is the make up of the audiences.

Adults age 25 and older make up 97 % of WOWO’s audience.

Adults age 25 and older make up less than 40% of the WJFK audience.

Want to reach business people?  Go for the audience that is at least 25 years old, not younger than 25.

But not everyone who listens to WOWO is a business person so my ads are heard by people who are not my target, right?

Yes. But take a look at the number of people that you are reaching with your targeted publications and compare that with the number of people you want to target who listen to WOWO, and see how that measures up.

Regarding the social media factor…

Yes, social media should be a consideration, but even there, the rules have changed.  For example, Facebook continues to make it more and more difficult to reach your targeted audience unless you pay.  I saw this first hand a couple years ago when Facebook changed their algorithms to limit the exposure of business Facebook content.  I managed the Facebook pages for a couple of multi-million dollar e-commerce businesses and saw the number of people who saw our posts drop by 75 to 90% unless I started paying Facebook to promote our posts.

I’m talking about the 200,000 people who already liked our pages and thought they would keep our posts in their Facebook feeds.  Unless I paid Facebook real money, only a tiny fraction would see what we shared.  And Facebook has continued to tweak this multiple times since then, all to get more money from you, the business owner.

Okay, what about television which has traditionally been a mass media to reach, well the masses?  With the exception of the Superbowl, there has been a huge decline in real time viewership for multiple reasons.  It’s hitting all generations.

The new standard for watching television is to watch on your own schedule. My wife and I do it as baby boomers as do my kids who are in the middle of raising their own young families.

Combine that with the ever multiplying number of viewing options, is it any wonder that businesses are less satisfied with their television ad campaigns effectiveness?

All is not lost.  Some people are overcoming the obstacles and using TV, and print and Facebook and making money. But back to the original question, “Does Radio Advertising Work Anymore?”  Now you know it can and why along with how to compare it to your other options.