The Talk Radio Advantage

The Talk Radio Advantage

Are you annoyed by ads?

Most of us are, and that creates an interesting conundrum for businesses that need to invite potential customers to spend money with them via advertising.

In the early 1980’s when I was a top 40 rock and roll radio disc jockey on WMEE, I remember when we introduced “20 minute commercial free music sweeps” and even though I was all about the music and not really caring about advertising, this bothered me.

This was the beginning of conditioning our audience to perceive advertising as bad, as undesirable, as something to avoid.

Radio stations that played music would stop the music up to 4 times, maybe 6 times an hour to play a couple of commercials.  These commercial free music sweeps were to prevent listeners from changing stations when the ads played because the ads played less often.  The problem was that many stations still played the same number of commercials per hour but now instead of two in a row, they would play 4, 5 or 6 commercials back to back.  I recall about 15 years ago when a local music station promised to only stop the music once an hour.  I listened and counted 18 ads playing back to back to back for over 10 minutes.  Yes, they played 45 minutes of music back to back but all of those ads back to back created so much listener annoyance that people either switched stations when the ads came on, or they mentally tuned out.

Television suffered the same fate as ads became an irritant and people spent money on ad-skipping devices such as VCRs so we could record a show and play it back later and fast-forward past the ads.

What’s that have to do with Talk Radio?

Last month I was meeting with a new advertising partner and she was telling me why she believes Talk Radio is the best play for her ads.

To paraphrase what she told me, her perception is that when people are listening to Talk Radio, they are wanting to hear what is being talked about and they are more engaged than music radio.  When a commercial break comes on as she is listening to music radio, she’s no longer invested in that station because they are not playing music and whatever song they play after the ads, she may or may not like.  However when listening to Talk Radio, the conversation that she’s listening to will likely continue after the ads and she continues to be invested in that conversation.

There’s also the less annoying factor of ads on Talk Radio.

The theory is that I’m already listening to someone talk so when the talking on the commercial starts, I’m already accustom to talking on the radio.

I’ve got fresh radio rating data that I’ll share in a few weeks that show me the listening habits of listeners of all the 20+ local radio stations here in Fort Wayne, Indiana. This data doesn’t tell us the why behind the ratings, but combined with my personal antidotal research over the years and some other studies, we can understand the Talk Radio advantage for advertising.

By the way, I can help your business reach Talk Radio listeners now on three radio stations…

News Talk WOWO continues to be my primary station, and I also have Sports Talk radio, 1380 The Fan that is filled with live play by play and commentary for sports enthusiasts. There is also one more radio station that has a 4 hour talk show every morning, 98.9 The Bear, home of Jason Lee and Kluck in the morning until 10am.  The other 20 hours a day The Bear is a rock music station, but those morning drive hours are an excellent spot for your business to connect with Talk Radio listeners.

More in the future…

 

 

Generational Changes and Media Use

Generational Changes and Media Use

Frequently I’ve pushed back against generational stereotypes with the simple premise that activities and behaviors that are being assigned and labeled according to what generation a person is, are really due to lifestyle and life-stage.

And while many of that is still true, there are some big swings in media consumption that still can be broken down by generation due to the technology changes the past couple of decades.

Even the past 10+ years that I’ve worked for WOWO radio have seen a shift that should not be ignored.

MarketingCharts.com released an article on social media use that actually has a misleading headline: Most US Weekly Facebook Users are Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.

However looking at the actual chart and data from YouGov, the headline should have been Most US Weekly Facebook Users are Millennials, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.

Those three generations make up 84% of Facebook users in the United States.  The Silent Generation, which are those still alive born before the end of World War 2 make up 1% and the youngest Generation, Gen Z account for 13% of Facebook users.

Overall, Facebook still is king with more users than any of the other social media platforms but it appears YouTube is close although many of us “older folks” don’t consider YouTube to be social media.  But with the popularity of video content verus still photos or no graphics, YouTube should be included even though they were not listed in the survey and article

So I decided to do a double check on the current ages of Gen Z and as of right now, 12 to 27 year olds are Zers.

The youngest most marketers usually target is around 12, so Gen Z is a real, viable target market for companies that produce products and services for teens and young adults.

To put that in perspective, 10, 11 years ago when I joined WOWO radio, some of them were still in diapers and none were old enough to vote yet.

IF that’s the age group you want to reach, you should dig a little deeper into social media and the various platforms and targeting potential.

However, here’s a reality that is back to the lifestyle and life-stage argument….

Most significant purchases are not made during the teen years or even by 20 year olds.  Look at age 35+, or even older like 45 or age 50+.

Gen Z is inching to that age but for the next decade, unless your consumer is in their 20’s and younger, you need to really continue to focus on older adults.

I call them “grown-ups” . They’re in their late 30’s, 40’s and 50’s making significant purchases for themselves and for their families.

My primary radio station, WOWO is a news talk formated radio station and we’ve seen wonderful results for our advertising partners.  I’m not arrogant enough to say that traditional radio ads are all you need to do.  I usually offer a number of items off the menu of messaging options that include traditional AM/FM radio ads, streaming, emails, texting, and social media including Facebook.

Do you want help sorting all this out to help you decide where to invest your ad dollars?  Want to talk with someone who’s got the experience in crafting solutions that are appropriate for your business and that sometimes includes connecting you with others that I trust?  Let’s talk.  Email Scott@ScLoHo.net

Are You Too Close?

Are You Too Close?

Last weeks Sound ADvice newsletter was too good to only share via email:

You’ve heard the old expression about being too close to the forest to see the trees? As a business owner, it’s easy to fall into this trap. You have a lot going on and a lot of different things to think about, every day!

Some spend so much time focusing on mending their weaknesses that they neglect to promote and capitalize on their strengths. Still, others are so caught up with their strengths that they neglect the weaknesses that are driving customers to their competitors.

And still, others lack the objectivity to candidly assess their strengths and weaknesses. Regular objective self-analysis is crucial to the success of your business. Learning to be your own devil’s advocate can help you uncover many things that can help improve your business in many areas.

In our top seven Devil’s Advocate Questions for self-analysis, question number three asks, “Why should someone drive past your competitors to do business with you?”… “No, really, Why?…..and prove it!”

If your answer is something like, “We provide better service”, “We have friendlier people”, or “We have been in business for 57 years” quit tickling yourself to hear yourself laugh. When you try to promote “better service”, “nice people”, “years of service” or any other “generic cliché”, the skeptical consumer believes you are simply trying to take the focus off your higher prices. It’s either that or your ads become so bland that no one pays attention to the message.

For the most part, better service, nicer people, or years of experience are marketing strategies that are only effective once your customers experience them. Unless you have a way to substantiate those claims, promoting them simply sounds like another hollow advertising claim.

If you need a little nudge to help you become your own devil’s advocate and become more objective in your strategic thinking, click here to see the Devil’s Advocate Questions and discover how they may apply to your business.

You too can get this type of Sound ADvice emailed to you nearly every week, it’s free when you email me, Scott@WOWO.com

And helping you and your business create a solid marketing campaign complete with ads that aren’t filled with cliché’s is what I can help you with if you’re in the Fort Wayne, Indiana area, reach out to me, Scott@WOWO.com

Stop the Ad-Speak

Stop the Ad-Speak

The dictionary definition of cliché is, “a hackneyed or over-used expression which has literally become meaningless over time.”

Why would anyone invest their hard-earned advertising dollars in an expression that has literally become “meaningless?” In fact, clichés can literally kill any chance an ad has of creating a positive impact.

There’s an old saying in media, People don’t dislike ads, they dislike bad ads. Bad ads, typically, are filled with clichés. 

The average consumer today receives in excess of 3,600 advertising messages a day, including radio, TV, newspaper, packaging, signage, internet, and more.

Before today’s cluttered and competitive world, many advertisers succeeded with clichés and by simply keeping their name in front of the public. Today, it’s much more competitive, and simple name recognition and repetition are not enough to ensure a return on your advertising investment. You need to brand your business before the consumer is in the market for your products or services.

Branding, by definition, necessitates differentiating yourself from your competition. Being different cannot be accomplished by saying the same thing as your competitors or using the same tired clichés used by other marketers.

Whether in your advertising or when having conversations with customers, make sure the words you use aren’t the same words that all your competitors are using!

The bad news is that there are way too many ads both national and local that are filled with too many clichés. The good news is… they are easy to fix!

We have developed a list of clichés that should be avoided if your advertising is to stand out among the crowd and be remembered. To see the complete list of clichés, click here.

The Danger of Relying on Facebook

The Danger of Relying on Facebook

Last Tuesday, the world freaked out because of a glitch in the internet.

Specifically Facebook’s parent company Meta, and most of their affiliated social and internet related sites and features became inoperable starting around 10am eastern time.

I am actually writing this on Tuesday March 5th, two hours later and it’s still down on laptops, but currently working on my phone via the app.

The ramifications for the ordinary, everyday user is just an inconvenience.  I can live without Facebook, Instagram, Threads even though I post daily, it’s not like a primary source of marketing or making money for me personally.

However, for others, this kind of thing is costly.  Imagine not being able to do business because people could not reach you.  It will be interesting to see if there will be an estimate of the millions of dollars lost due to the Meta platforms being down for a few hours.  Considering the size of Facebook alone, I imagine over a billion dollars in lost revenue.  

I pulled some numbers from the website, The Social Sheperd that say there are over 3 Billion monthly Facebook users world-wide. 2 Billion people are on Facebook daily.  In the United States, over half the population has a Facebook account and 7 out of 10 Americans who use the internet are on Facebook too.   I have a couple of coworkers that fall into the category of internet users but not on Facebook.

From a business standpoint, I had a client a few years ago that lost at least a weeks worth of revenue what Facebook decided to shut down his business account.  He was spending $20,000 a month just on Facebook ads and getting a 4 to 1 return.  Fortunately he was able to scramble and rebrand his business and build it up again with money he had saved up, but many business people that place such a heavy emphasis on marketing platforms they can’t control are stuck when that platform fails like Facebook did

My advice has always been to create your own spot on the web, something you own.  Your own website, not just a social media page.  I know it’s tempting to just rely on the easy way but if it’s also a lazy way, you could be sunk.

One more success story to share with you, and this is about an HVAC company that has been around for 10 years without a website or social media.  I met with the owner recently because he is looking to invite WOWO radio listeners to become his customers.  I asked him the secret to his successful growth over the past decade without the usual online presence and it came down to having good relationships with a few key people in town that have kept him and his company busy.  The good old fashioned trusted word of mouth that you earn when you run your business right.

Now in order to invite our listeners to become his customers, he’s going to invest in a basic website which we can direct listeners to and will give his company credibility to those that don’t know him yet.

What about you?  Are you needing some guidance and help on how to market your business?  Contact me and let’s talk.

Reintroducing ScLoHo

Reintroducing ScLoHo

Last week, when I was recording the podcast version of my weekly update I mentioned briefly what a ScLoHo is. Today, that is the focus of both this article and podcast episode.

If this is the very first time you’ve listened to the Scott Howard Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast, welcome aboard.  If it’s the first time you’ve read an article I’ve published on this website, come on in.

Today I’m reintroducing myself, Scott Howard also known as ScLoHo.

I’ve been podcasting nearly every week since March 2017, so this is the beginning of my eighth year hosting a podcast.

I also checked my blogging history and I launched my first blog in 2004, 20 years ago.

The ScLoHo nickname began even before that as an email address because there are many Scott Howard’s out there and I needed something unique.

ScLoHo is a mash-up using the first two letters of my first name, Scott, first two letters of my middle name, Louis, and first two letters of my last name, Howard.

When you take those 6 letters and try and pronounce them, it becomes two syllables because there are only two vowels. Sclo (Sclow)- Ho (Hoe).

In 2004, I launched a couple of blogs, one was a personal blog, the other a media and marketing blog using Google’s old Blogger.com platform and eventually launched a few more blogs, all of them under the ScLoHo online persona.  At one point, for a couple of years, I was posting over 30 times a week on all of these blogs and this was not my fulltime job.  I was working for a group of radio stations from 2003 thru 2011 and blogging was just an unpaid side passion.

However, the ScLoHo name became pretty well known both locally and online.  I have used ScLoHo as a Twitter or X handle, along with nearly all my other social media profiles.  My personal email is @ScLoHo.net; I own the ScLoHo.com and .net domains and basically it use to be if you Googled ScLoHo, you’d find me.

Interestingly there were some people who knew me as ScLoHo and others who only knew me as Scott.  In the  summer of 2010, I was walking at the Tincaps baseball game, taking a lab around the stadium, when a group of friends from an advertising agency saw me and shouted my name.  Except, some yelled ScLoHo, and the others shouted Scott.

In 2011, I left radio for 10 months and worked for a website development company where a friend of my challenged me to merge the two and launched the ScottHoward.me website.  The dot me domain was not due to my ego, it’s because both the dot com and dot net domains were taken by other Scott Howard’s.

I imported over a thousand stories to this website from my blogs and eventually scaled down my updates from several a day to one a day to once a week.  The only time I’ve done less than a weekly update was a few months in 2022 and 2023 when my duties at the radio stations as a sales manager overseeing 4 stations and 8 salespeople needed my attention more than this. At the time, I also figured after 300 podcasts and over 1500 articles, I pretty much had shared everything there was to know and media and marketing.  I did monthly updates.  My focus was to help my team grow and to take the spotlight off me and on them.

However at the end of last summer, things changed.  I decided to step back from management and rehire myself as a member of the WOWO radio sales team.  With that change, I decided to return to weekly updates and to get back out in the community again instead of behind the scenes like I had been doing for nearly 4 years as a manager.

What’s my backstory?  Well first of all I never wanted to do sales.

In high school, my first venture into radio was on the air.  After graduation, I was on the air at radio stations full time in Marion and Kokomo Indiana and then returned to my hometown of Fort Wayne and was on the air at WMEE.  WMEE has always been owned by Federated Media and in the 1980’s WOWO was our competition, owned by another company.  WOWO was the big dog, the radio station that had the highest ratings and most listeners for decades.  However in the early 80’s I was part of the WMEE air team that finally beat WOWO and became the most listened to radio station according to the ratings.

Next stop was back to Kokomo and Indianapolis before taking my growing family to Detroit.  Up until I moved to Michigan at the ripe old age of 26 with 10 years of on-air experience, I had only voiced radio commercials, but never wrote and produced advertising campaigns.  The company I joined in Detroit was different and awakened a curiosity in me to figure out how to communicate and motivate people with a radio commercial to spend their money with a particular business.  I learned how to create ad campaigns that were distinct and unique, and most importantly, created top of mind awareness of a business so that consumers would eventually need them, those businesses were already Top Of Mind.

While in Detroit at Crawford Broadcasting and station WMUZ, I grew our production department, did a stint as fill-in host and eventually hosted the morning show for awhile and also took my first advertising sales position.

In my mid-30’s, we moved my family back to Indiana, I returned to working on the radio at WFWI in Fort Wayne and then took a hiatus and worked outside of media.  Finally in 2003, it was back to radio full-time for good, all most.  Eight and a half successful years with a group of Ft. Wayne radio stations, followed by full time at a website development company, another radio station and as the Social Media Guru for a multimillion dollar eCommerce company and then back to Federated Media in 2013.

Nearly 30 years between my first time with Fed Med as a WMEE Disc Jockey to my current position on the WOWO Sales Team.  I also spent close to 4 years as the General Sales Manager of WOWO and a year on an interim basis as sales manager of 3 other stations.

I’ve been a guest speaker with Huntington University a couple of times, Ivy Tech Fort Wayne, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and this year will be making my second appearance speaking at Trine University.

I’ve worked with over a hundred companies and organizations and consulted around a thousand in both formal and casual settings to help them become better with their media, marketing, public relations and internal sales and marketing.  Just in my 10+ years with WOWO have won a few achievement awards, called Feddies for Federated Media and even my own website won a best of contest by a competing media outlet.  Awards are nice, but what really motivates me is to have the opportunity to help others and share the wisdom and knowledge I’ve picked up over the last few decades and I’m continuing to learn as a life-long student.

Teaching, Training, Motivating and Encouraging has been a lot of what I do.  Helping people make wise spending decisions with their advertising and marketing is my bread and butter.  Being a dad, husband and grandparent keeps me grounded as well as my Christian faith.

There’s a philosophy about marketing and advertising that I call using Human Relationship Principles that I’ll review in the near future, but for now, you now know a lot more about this Scott Howard aka ScLoHo then you did 10 minutes ago.