ScLoHo’s Collective Wisdom | The Genuine ScLoHo aka Scott Howard

What Not to Expect from your Advertising

by Scott Howard | Aug 5, 2024 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

There are a lot of misconceptions about advertising that I find myself addressing repeatedly especially with new business people who ae taking their first steps into an advertising investment.

Last month I read a column in Radio Ink by Pat Bryson that I’m going to use today because her examples are spot on and very much in line with what I’ve been preaching.

First off, let’s define Advertising. Advertising is paid messaging that usually includes a call-to- action, and or branding message. I can simplify that further and tell you that advertising is a paid invitation from a business to a potential customer.

That’s it.

When you send out invitations, you are attempting to communicate a message to potential customers.

What happens next is entirely in your hands. Here’s the words of wisdom from Pat:

What factors determine if a warm body makes a purchase? Several important factors must work together to complete the sale and turn that prospect into a customer that returns again and again:

Personnel that are well-trained and friendly

Value: price related to perceived benefit

Parking that is convenient and accessible

Seasonality

How does the store look?

Are the floor displays attractive? How are goods packaged?

Are the restrooms clean? (a surprisingly big factor especially for restaurants)

Where is the store located? Easy to get to?

What are consumers wanting to buy?

Competition: today both bricks and mortar and virtual

Is the store known for good service after the sale? How’s their reputation?

Advertising (finally!)

All of these factors must work together to produce a sale. Unfortunately, many times we get potential customers in and the client doesn’t sell them.

This is true no matter what form of advertising you buy. There is only so much that that ads can do and the rest is up to you as a business owner. Now I know that most advertising sales people don’t take the time to work with you to help you understand the consumer journey that help you improve it so your ads are more effective. Wait, let me rephrase that. It’s not making your ads more effective that I’m talking about, but the buying process that follows once the ads do their job.

Again, what’s the job of advertising? It’s not to sell your stuff. It’s to invite people to you so you and your team can help them buy your stuff.

Advertising is a simple paid invite.

If you want help with any or all of this, let’s talk.

Older and Wiser

by Scott Howard | Apr 1, 2024 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

Facts are facts, right?

Yes and no.

When you look at numbers or other facts, it’s often not enough to just look at the raw data. We can learn so much more by digging deeper and being curious.

Curiosity is a term that came up in a recent conversation with a friend this year and we both agreed that it’s essential to understanding something and avoiding assumptions and dispelling certain biases.

I titled this article Older and Wiser because it’s often the experiences we go through that we learn from. However there are exceptions to this concept of becoming Wiser as we get Older.

The thirst for knowledge that we have as kids can be squashed if too many grown-ups tell the kid to stop asking questions and just conform. However conformity does not bring new and exciting ideas, it keeps us stuck in the past.

I know some people my age who are always wishing for the “good ole days” and while it’s fun and interesting to reminisce, it can hold you back if you’re not willing to also look at the future opportunities. I also have a bunch of grandkids and one in particular that I’m thinking about today has always had a thirst for knowledge. This person has no limits to their learning and fortunately has grown-ups that support their curiosity.

As we age, some of our values change and today I’m specifically looking at relationships with brands and products and how we as consumers change.

Marketing Charts released this study that revealed generational differences in buying decisions. When asked, “which of the following are more important than price when making a purchasing decision, the options included:

Quality
Convenience
Customer Service and Support
Brand Reputation
Brand’s Ethical Values
Consistent Digital Experience

None of these 6 options scored higher than price for Gen Z and there is a sharp contrast between the older generations and Gen Z for Quality, Convenience, and Customer Service and Support.

The last option, Consistent Digital Experience is the only option that Gen Z outpaced the other generations.

It could be easy to assume that Gen Z only cares about buying cheap stuff on their phone, but let’s dig deeper.

From the study:

Perhaps price is more important to Gen Zers than other factors due to their financial situations: slightly more than half (53%) of Gen Z consumers say that the high cost of living is a barrier to their financial success, and fewer than half (48%) of Gen Zers would describe themselves as fully or mostly financially independent.

Gen Z is currently ages 18-26. and compared to older generations, they have the least amount of income, so it makes sense that the price of what they buy is going to be very important. It’s not because they are Gen Z, it’s because of their life stage that they are more focused on prices than older people. For the most part, as we get older, we eventually have more money to spend. We also realize the value to buying good quality stuff instead of cheap disposable stuff. As most of us become older and wiser, our priorities shift.

This leads me to a huge mistake too many businesses make in their advertising and marketing… They put too much focus on cheap prices and not enough attention to what grown-ups really care about:

Quality.

Convenience.

Customer Service.

Brand Reputation.

If your advertising emphasis is all about price and deals, you are not communicating to me the real reason I want to buy in most cases.

Want help in creating a campaign that offers more than just cheap stuff?

Do you have the guts to do this? (Most businesses don’t.)

Contact me and I’ll help.

The State of Radio and WOWO in 2024

by Scott Howard | Jan 29, 2024 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Is Radio still a viable advertising media in 2024?

The TL;DR answer is yes.

Last week I shared the story of the demise of our local newspapers over the past 20 years and my insider numbers. Today, I’ll review the local radio scene and include some numbers from a recent study on the benefits businesses can get from becoming an advertising partner with me on WOWO.

There are all kinds of studies and surveys and polls that are used to predict what is going to happen. In Fort Wayne, Indiana there were two companies that were measuring radio station listenership, Eastlan and Nielsen, but with some changes back in 2022 and 2023, we just have Nielsen.

Federated Media which is the company I work for, subscribed to Eastlan for well over a decade. I was working for some competing stations when we heard that Fed Med was switching to Eastlan while the rest of the Fort Wayne area stations were still using Arbitron. Arbitron was bought by Nielsen, but Nielsen and Arbitron are essentially the same for radio. Eastlan used a different methodology for doing their research, and when we were subscribers, it served it’s purpose.

However at Federated Media we wanted some of the additional research tools that Nielsen offers and that’s why we returned and dropped Eastlan.

Fort Wayne is market number 116 in size and we get surveyed twice a year, in the spring and fall and we just received the results from the Fall 2023 survey. The rating numbers for all of the local Federated Media stations, including WOWO are good. Depending on the demographics we look at all 5 stations are doing exactly what we want and that is being listened to by the locals more and more. Just the opposite of the newspapers which saw readership declining as I shared last week.

Overall, Federated Media’s Rock station, WBYR, 98.9 The Bear along with Country Station WQHK K105 and Hot Adult Contemporary Music station WMEE are strong and growing with the most listeners overall, and each of those music stations have a competing station in Fort Wayne that we are beating in terms of listenership.

Our two talk stations are also doing well. WKJG 1380 The Fan is a Sports Talk station that has a steady niche audience with both local and national sports talk and play by play games.

WOWO, my primary radio station is also setting new records. As a News Talk radio station for 25 years at 1190AM, we’ve also had an FM signal. 10 years ago it was at 92.3FM, then Federated Media made 92.3 and FM Music station for a number of years. May 1st, in the middle of our last rating period, we flipped the programming on 92.3 FM back to a News Talk Simulcast of WOWO 1190 AM. This most recent rating period shows the full impact of putting the WOWO News Talk programming on 92.3FM along with 1190AM.

As a side note, because 92.3FM still has the legal call letters of WFWI, when we look at the ratings, we do a combination on WOWO & WFWI to get a true picture. WOWO’s target audience is what I call grown-ups. Adults ages 35 and older. Those are the ones that are spending money on big and important stuff for their families and for themselves. Sure there are a few teens and 20 year olds who listen to WOWO too, but at that stage of your life, you’re more likely to listen to the radio for music, not news and information.

Of course the real reason WOWO and our other Federated Media stations are successful is that they are also a good choice for businesses to advertise. The antidotal stories of success from WOWO advertising partners keep coming, but today I’m going to point to a national study that shows why radio is relevant for businesses to grow this year.

Inside Radio reported last week a summary of marketing researcher Peter Field’s latest study.

Based on case studies from 2000-2022, advertisers using AM/FM radio have seen notable increases in brand trust (up 58%), profits (+42%), market share (+28%),and return on ad spend (+23%). Also notable among Field’s findings is that since 2016, profit increases among advertisers using AM/FM radio have steadily grown, compared to those not using the medium. What’s more, over the past two decades, AM/FM radio advertisers have experienced a 23% greater return on ROI vs. non-AM/FM users.

There’s also something in this report that I’ve seen during my 10+ years at WOWO and also at stations I worked for previously, but even more so with WOWO and that is Top Of Mind Awareness of a company. I’ve called it Word Of Mouth with a Bigger Mouth for years. This report on radio stations overall states that there is a 13% increase in what they refer to as Mental Availability. This simply means your company, your brand, your product lives in your future customers mind so that there is a greater chance of you being considered when they are ready to make a buying decision and that is due to the power of radio advertising messaging. You won’t get that from a Tik Tok video.

Want help seeing how to apply this in 2024? Reach out to me, Scott@WOWO.com or 260-255-4357.

Getting Your Business Priorities Aligned

by Scott Howard | Jan 15, 2024 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

What kind of disconnect in your business model do you need to fix this year?

4 years ago with the Covid-19 Pandemic shutdowns, there was a whole heck of a lot of disruptions as we were exploring the great unknown about a virus that we were told could wipe out a significant percent of our population.

Earlier this month I was at a conference and was reminded of some facts that I’d forgotten from history that occured around a hundred years ago. Between the Spanish flu and World War One, we lost 10% of our population or more depending on the geographic parameters you look at. In 2020, our governments and those around the world were looking to prevent a similar catastrophe and as a result we had a combination of business and supply chain shut downs along with increased adoption of emerging tech.

For example, the work from home business model that some companies used on a limited basis soon became mainstream with a lot of organizations. Video meetings and platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom existed before 2020, but now everyone knows about them.

The use of apps to order food exploded and the adoption of many businesses to still provide products and services with less people pushed emerging tech to faster adoption than if we had not had the Covid Crisis.

I’m not talking about politics, I’m referring to reality which we can see with hindsight.

With the aging of the biggest population demographic, the Baby Boomers, and their retirement rates effectively reducing the working population before the pandemic (10,000 are turning 65 every day) we already had a growing labor shortage in many fields such as trucking and healthcare. The Covid Crisis, while not as bad as 100 years ago, percentage wise, impacted us in this manner too.

Organization improvement by necessity is what kept most of the pre-pandemic businesses alive today while others never recovered.

There’s still more to do.

MarketingCharts.com released a study of Business to Business priorities that are equally important in the Business to Consumer world too.

The top priority for B2B go-to-market (GTM) teams in the year ahead is to strengthen marketing, sales, and customer success alignment according to the report.

I’ve seen this too many times in businesses and non-profits that there are too many silos. Or to use a term my parents used, “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

When I’m working with business owners and we launch an ad campaign, too many don’t tell or share with their teams what we are doing except for some very vague mention like, “we’re going to run some ads to increase sales.”

What is really needed is that everyone in the organization is made aware of just what is going on to promote your business. From the person that answers the phone, to the front line customer service and tech people, even those mostly behind the scenes need to know what you are doing, what the details are, and why. When you invest in promoting your business, make sure you have everyone in your organization, “in-the-know.”

When you do this, then most of the other priorities on this list can happen. That includes:

Enhance Customer Experience and Engagement
Increase Brand Awareness
Increase Internal Process Efficiency

Which can set the stage for the last three on the list pertaining to growth and expansion.

How are you posed to improve and grow this year? If you are in the area of Fort Wayne, Indiana, contact me and I can help you and your team begin the process outlined here.

On The Road Again

by Scott Howard | Dec 4, 2023 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

‘Commutes Are Back’ As Time Spent With AM/FM In Cars Hits Eight-Year High.

That was the headline of an InsideRadio.com story last month and that’s great news for those of us in the radio broadcasting industry.

It’s also fantastic news for businesses that want to reach a regular and consistent audience and invite them to become their customers.

Naysayers have been predicting the end of radio relevancy for decades, and when something like a pandemic happens that disrupts our daily lives including our time spent driving, those negative voices get louder. However as a radio insider, I have the facts that say differently.

Here’s some more from that story:

Compared to results from earlier surveys by MARU/Matchbox and Nielsen since April 2020, the height of the pandemic – when more than half (52%) of pre-COVID commuters were working at home – that share gradually fell to just 6% in the recent survey, meaning 94% of average Americans are now commuting to work.

Here in Fort Wayne, Indiana the average commute time is around 20 to 30 minutes. Longer in the afternoon than morning for some reason. Radio continues to live in the car, or whatever you drive. The radio station I’ve been working for the past decade, WOWO in Fort Wayne Indiana did something this year that we’ve been talking about for a few years, we added an FM signal to the WOWO listening choices.

The backstory is that with the growth of EV’s many car companies were not including AM radio in the dashboards, only FM. While the broadcasting organizations having been lobbying Congress to force AM radio to be included in all new cars, at WOWO we decided to be proactive and rebrand with a focus on our full strength FM signal 92.3 along with our 1190 AM radio signal. And not to get all techy, but before May, you could listen to WOWO on the FM band at 107.5, but that was a low-power FM signal. If you had an HD FM radio, WOWO could also be heard at 97.3 HD2, but those were not as popular as a traditional full strength FM signal like we have now at 92.3 FM.

Going back to talking about people driving, last month I noticed that our two major malls were getting busier and busier as the holidays approached. Which means even more time spent in cars, listening to the radio on the way to buy from traditional brick and mortar stores, similar to what we had 4 or 5 years ago.

It’s a good sign for the local economy to see people buying locally and for radio stations like mine that are providing news and local information. This trend will continue after the new year too and if you want help driving our listeners to your business, contact me.

Digital Discrepancies

by Scott Howard | Nov 20, 2023 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

I was born in the 1900’s.

I heard that line last month when comedian Nate Bargatze was hosting Saturday Night Live. Of course I didn’t watch it live on Saturday night, I saw it a few days later because we have YouTubeTV as our streaming service and my wife was catching up on some of her favorite shows.

Back in the 1900’s, (I’m talking about the century, not the decade) we saw a change in advertising targeting options mostly with the growth of cable TV that happened in the 1980’s and 1990’s and what that brought us as consumers was hundreds of TV viewing channel options instead of just the local broadcast TV signals.

Baby Boomers like my wife and I, Gen X and even Millennials like my kids are different from the current Gen Z in terms of media and entertainment experiences and choices. Social Media giant Facebook is on the cusp of being 20 years old, and that was a game changer. Media was not just one way from them to us. With Social Media, we all got the opportunity to have a voice online and share our thoughts and media beyond what the traditional media companies were offering.

A dozen years ago, I took a break from radio and worked for a couple of web based companies. Targeting to the “right people” was the sales pitch for these new digital advertising options which was pretty cool we thought. I mean if you could only send your ads to the people who are most likely to respond… that was a game changer too.

However, there are a few flaws with that kind of thinking because it ignores Human Behavior. I’ll dig more into that in the future but the basics are that we don’t just respond to targeted ads when they are presented to us, there has to be a need on our part to spend our money, or something stronger than a targeted ad that has created the desire within us.

There is a real problem with highly targeted ad placement, in that the controls for the systems that spit out those ads are not very reliable. Some of us are overserved ads for things we might want to buy is one flaw. Another is getting served ads AFTER we made the purchase because the algorithms haven’t been created to address that flaw.

MarketingCharts.com released a report that says:

Only 15% of US advertisers are very confident in their ability to see all creative running across all channels, and even fewer (13%) are very confident in their ability to tie creative performance back to campaign ROI, according to a survey commissioned by Claravine and conducted by Advertiser Perceptions.

In total, the advertisers surveyed – all of whom spend at least $50 million on digital advertising each year – estimate that the wrong creative is served to the wrong consumer about one-quarter (25%) of the time. That includes a majority (56%) who believe the wrong ad creative is served at least 20% of the time, and about one-sixth (17%) who estimate that it’s served to the wrong consumer at least 40% of the time.

Advertisers believe that their ROI would increase by an average of 29% if they were able to serve ad creative to the right consumer every time.

Now, I’m not at all against digital advertising, I just believe it’s not as complicated as some will have you believe.

Instead of targeting individuals, you need to go back to targeting known audience groups. You can do this with social media and other digital advertising but it’s what really what advertising was all about back in the 1900’s.

When mass media like radio, print, TV, heck even Cable TV were the choices business had, they used the characteristics of the media channels audience as the determining factor for where to spend their advertising money.

Going back to my knowledge and expertise in tracking digital targeted ads, I know that when you dig deep enough, all the data becomes less and less reliable.

I challenge you to think like a person, a consumer, a person that could be your customer and the habits and characteristics they have, and then create ad campaigns that speak to them with a relevant message on a form of media that they are likely to use.

If you’re in the Fort Wayne Indiana area, I can help you walk thru this process in person. Contact me, Scott@ScLoHo.net and we can set up a time to help you avoid all of these Digital Dispensaries and actually grow for the future.