The Voice Of Your Business

by Scott Howard | Apr 15, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Today I’m going update a topic that I’ve spoken on previously.

Who is the Spokesperson for your Business?

Yes, it’s the people who answer the phone, who greet the customers, and the ones that interact face to face or online. But that is different.

I’m referring to your advertising and marketing.

For many of the best-branded businesses in the world, one thing usually stands out and once people hear it, they immediately know what business it is.

Flo and Jamie are two of the fictional character actors that represent Progressive Insurance. Yet, Progressive uses others too.

There’s Jake from State Farm who is just an actor.

The My Pillow Guy was famous for awhile and then when he became political, he offended a whole bunch of people with his passionate support of Donald Trump and election fraud. I had to look up his name, Mike Lindell. He is a classic example of how not to market your company by jumping into the political arena unless you are prepared for the consequences.

But I’m getting off track here.

Some of the most effective marketing successes in history, both locally and nationally, have involved capitalizing on the voices, faces, and personalities of charismatic and humble business owners and corporate leaders.

In decades past, nationally, you may recall Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca or Wendy’s humble founder Dave Thomas. More recently the spokesperson for Quicken Loans was their President and Chief Marketing Officer Jay Farner. In these cases, and many more, consumers have responded positively to the credible messages delivered by real people.

However even these three companies have diverted from what was once a successful advertising messaging campaign tactic. 5 years ago Quicken Loans launched Rocket Mortgage and pretty much abandoned what made them unique in their industry, although thru an online search, I found Jay Farner in a one minute video ad talking about what Rocket and Quicken are doing with regards to the economic hardships many faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Locally, you see and hear business owners voice their own ads, some of which are fantastically real and have moved their business from mediocracy to hometown heroes, and from rags to riches. On my radio station WOWO radio, we have several business owners that voice their own ads.

People buy from people they trust. It’s that simple. But if you don’t come across as real, trustworthy, and humble, the chances of you going from local to national are slim.

Two of the ten tips for being front and center in your campaigns are:

1.) Check your ego at the door. Only voice your commercials or have quotes and photos of yourself in your advertising if it is strategically correct to do so from a marketing perspective. It’s not about hearing your own voice or having mom see your picture; it’s about bringing believability and memorability to your campaign.

2.) Introduce yourself as the Owner, CEO, or President. There is NO reason to either voice the ad or be in the video if you don’t introduce yourself.

As the owner or president, you don’t need to be better at voicing the ads than a disc jockey, actor, or actress. You simply need to serve the purpose of you doing the ad, and that is to become the voice or face of the company. If you cannot add purpose, hire a gecko, create a fictional character, or let someone else do it!

Nothing sells like the human voice and using your own voice and words can make your campaign stand out against a hoard of ads produced by professional, anonymous sources.

Click here to view the rest of our 10 Tips to Being Your Company Spokesperson.

And to get more Sound ADvice business tips like this, sign up for my weekly newsletter, free from me to your inbox, using the form below.

Radio Listenership As The Pandemic Winds Down

by Scott Howard | Apr 7, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

What’s going on in the media and marketing world now that we’ve gone through the first year of a worldwide pandemic?

As an insider to information that you don’t have access to, I have some answers.

And let me preface this by stating, no the pandemic is not over, the virus did not disappear and the battle is still on. I lost a very good friend last month to complications that included Covid.

However, with the millions of vaccines being injected every week we are in a much better place than we were 6 months ago. Here in Indiana anyone age 16 and older is now eligible for the vaccine as long as the supplies are there.

Even before I dig into the media habits, a couple of observations regarding consumer habits.

My local stores no longer have shortages of toilet paper and disinfecting wipes. We have an abundance of hand sanitizer at my office, and the face mask business is preparing for a slow down, now that everyone has learned how to wear one, although too many people pretend they are just political statements or refuse to cover their nose.

What else?

I’ve got some quotes from Insider Radio to share:

One year after the coronavirus outbreak tuned the world upside down, the latest in an ongoing series of Nielsen Audio Consumer Sentiment surveys shows several key metrics are pointing in radio’s favor. Among them, 64% of Americans 18 and older said they agreed that it is safer than it was a month ago. .

That’s a comparison of March 2021 to February 2021. Here’s more:

Among the employed, two-thirds now work outside the home. That’s up nearly 70% since April. In addition, workers at home due to COVID-19 declined by more than half since April 2020.

There is the perception that most people are holed up, not going out, working out of their basement and it’s simply not true. And they are listening to their favorite radio stations.

The initial virus outbreak one year ago caused a rapid downturn in the number of people using public transportation. One year later Nielsen’s survey shows all groups are still using less public transportation due to COVID. What’s more, those spending an hour or more in vehicles shot up 150% since April, and heavy radio listeners are more likely to spend an hour or more in the car.

Yes, radio is still an effective way to reach people and invite them to spend money with your business.

Heavy radio listeners are more likely to make major purchases within a year, and are 18% more likely to purchase or lease a new or used vehicle, and 64% more likely to buy a new house.

My radio station, NewsTalk 1190 WOWO 107.5 continues to have the largest adult audience in our market of over 25 stations. We are one of two stations that consistently has well over 100,000 weekly listeners.

And I have a team of advertising and marketing specialists that can design and create the messaging and media campaign to help you convert our listeners to become your customers and clients. Contact me, Scott@WOWO.com and I’ll hook you up.

Friendly Competition

by Scott Howard | Mar 29, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Really? The Personal ScLoHo, ScLoHo Sales Tips, ScLoHo's Fort Wayne, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” is a sometimes quoted and often misquoted saying that is credited to the book The Art of War from over 4000 years ago and the Godfather Part 2 movie a mere 40 years ago.

While much has been said about that quote, today I’m going to share another personal story about a friend of mine who just passed away this past month unexpectedly and how that quote started off a friendly competition that became a true friendship and mentorship for nearly two decades.

I’ll conclude with some lessons and wisdom for you to apply to your life and business.

This friend of mine is Ron Latham.

I thought I first met Ron in 2003. I’ll explain more about that in a moment.

In 2003, I was returning to the world of media and marketing to join a group of radio stations in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Travis Broadcasting was their company name which a year later became the Summit City Radio Group. Ron was one of the older salespeople in his early 60’s and I was in my early 40’s. Ron was very competitive and instead of just being boastful, he went out and beat his competitors.

As one of 6 new salespeople that started in early 2003, he didn’t really pay attention to me or the rest of us, he just went out and did his thing while we did ours but I later learned, he took pride in being the best each month.

About a year after I started, management held a sales meeting and announced new goals and budgets for each of us. When the meeting adjourned, as we were all walking back to our offices, most of my coworkers were unhappy, including Ron. I asked him, what’s wrong and he told me over his shoulder, “I don’t care about their stupid goals, I have my own that are higher than those.” I responded, “I just have one goal.”

Ron stopped walking and turned around and said with a little snarl, “Yeah, what’s that?”

I told him, “To beat you.”

That lit up his eyes with a competitive spirit that said, “Game On.” We made a little side wager, loser would have to buy lunch at the end of each month.

Ron hated to lose, and I did too, but I’ve been what I call “quietly competitive”. Cool and calm on the outside, but a fighter just below the surface. Over the next several months, this lunch wager was fun. We compared billing and the first month I won. Probably shocked the old guy that someone like me was able to beat him at something he’d been doing for 40 years.

“Anyone can get lucky for a month,” he said as we ate that first lunch that he paid for. The competition continued. Month two, he got his revenge and I bought lunch. Month three and month four came and went and I won those two months. Then it was his turn to be on top for a month while I got a free lunch the month after that.

Within 6 months a new found respect and friendship developed out of this friendly competition and while I believe I beat him by at least one month before we stopped, everyone really won. Ron’s billing grew to new heights, as did mine and we helped a bunch of local businesses with their advertising and marketing.

Ron decided to leave those radio stations when they did some programming changes that wiped out a big chunk of his monthly billing and income, but he was a wanted man, in a good way. He had offers to sell advertising at other places including the monthly Hispanic newspaper. That’s a story in itself.

The publisher of the Hispanic newspaper, Fernando met Ron and did a Spanish Language weekend radio show which expanded to 7 nights a week. The programming changes I mentioned cancelled Fernando’s radio show, however Ron joined forces with Fernando and became the Gringo Sales Manager for the Hispanic paper. See, Ron couldn’t speak a lick of Spanish, and didn’t want to learn. But he saw the opportunity for mainstream businesses to advertise in the paper and invite the Hispanic community to spend their money in their stores.

After Ron turned 65, he moved to California for about a year with family but couldn’t stand it and returned to Fort Wayne. Ron had an apartment in the same historic high rise that the Hispanic newspaper was located and the paper was Ron’s main gig. It didn’t pay a lot he said but it was his “buttered popcorn money”. He and some of his older buddies would get tickets to the local college football games in the fall, Komets hockey in the winter and Tincaps baseball in the summer.

Ron was always a huge sports fan and basketball was his main game. However he also took up golf and other activities to stay in shape.

In 2013 I joined WOWO radio. I learned that the WOWO radio sales team had a tradition of taking a day off in the summer to go golfing. The only golf that I knew was miniature golf so Ron offered to teach me and once or twice a week we’d spend an evening at the golf course using some passes he traded for advertising in the Hispanic newspaper. When the big event came that summer, I wasn’t the worst, but we quickly played “best ball” to keep the game moving. My golf skills have only gotten worse since that first year and I never was able to beat Ron.

I did beat him bowling a few times and miniature golf too.

Remember the lunch wager I mentioned awhile ago? When Ron returned from California, he and I started a new tradition of a weekly lunch without the wager since we worked for two totally different forms of media.

Over the nearly two decades that we were friends, I learned a lot from Ron. He started out as a bit of a mentor to me. We explored ideas and brainstormed. If I had a client that I needed some extra input on, Ron was a great person to bounce my idea off of. And it turns out, he did the same with me.

My step-daughter who is now in her 30’s was on the girls basketball team in high school and Ron’s wife at the time was the head coach for another girls team in town, one that won multiple championships. I learned a lot about the game of basketball too from my friendship and conversations with Ron over the years.

I noticed over the past year that Ron was slowing down a little bit, as all of us were forced to live our lives differently with the onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic that shut down so many things including all the sporting events that Ron would have normally been doing. He and I continued our nearly weekly lunches when the world began opening up, even if it meant a trip thru the drive thru and sitting in a parking lot “socially distanced” in our own cars.

March 4, 2021 was the last lunch we had together. He turned down the opportunity I offered him to return to his beloved WOWO Radio as a part-time, “free lance” salesperson. WOWO was where he started his advertising career 60 years earlier.

A week later, he contacted me in the middle of the night with a plea for help. It was a few days after he had contracted the shingles virus in his ear and the constant pain was making it impossible to get any rest. I went to his home, contacted medics who took him to the hospital and the last time I saw Ron was when I visited him in the Emergency Room to deliver his phone. The medical staff were assessing his situation and over the next two weeks discovered some other undiscovered health issues that ultimately made it impossible for him to recover. His only son was allowed to be with him in Ron’s final day since the hospital was abiding with the strict precautionary protocols brought on by the current pandemic. That was the only person outside of the medical team who got to see Ron after I saw him in the ER a couple weeks prior.

I found three pictures to share of Ron and myself. The first was from 2009, when he and I were in our weekly lunch routine while working for different media companies, I think he was scowling at me having another hot dog or something.

The middle picture was snapped in 2004 about the time we were in the middle of our friendly lunch wager competition at a basketball tournament that our radio stations were sponsoring.

And the last picture was a shocker to both Ron and myself. When he was preparing to move to California, they were downsizing and Ron found a box of old pictures from the 1980’s. Turns out we did NOT meet in 2003. We actually played basketball on the WMEE Basketballer’s team. This picture from 1982 features a gangly radio disc jockey named Scott Howard whose only qualification to be on the team was I was the night time WMEE radio disc jockey, sitting next to a much better basketball player named Ron Latham who was a ringer for our team so we wouldn’t be entirely embarrassed when we went out to play in charity games.

With the passing of my friend who was 18 years my senior but we developed a friendship like brothers, I have some lessons to pass on.

Friendly Competition can be life changing. While you may view your competition as the enemy because they are going after the same customers you are, that’s just an illusion. You and your competition are different in ways that may not be obvious. Those differences is what is likely going to determine who the customer buys from. Learn from each other and you’ll both be better. In the fast food world, some people prefer a flame broiled Whopper while others prefer a Big Mac. Apply that to what you do too.
Mentor One Another. Just as I learned from Ron when he and I started working together in 2003, he was also learning from me over the years. I recall a comment he made 10 years ago about how he could never do things my way because we just thought differently. But we both used the other persons strengths to improve ourselves. Today, I have 5 very different people on my advertising sales team at WOWO radio. They are doing the things that Ron and I would do in bouncing ideas back and forth and mentoring each other. How can you develop that in your world?
Get Personal. When you make it all about business or competition, you lose out on the human side of competition. Do you know the names of your competitors family members? Do you ever hang out with them? If something were to happen to you, could you reach out to them for help?

Thanks for indulging me today with this reflection of my nearly 2 decades of friendship with my adopted older brother, Ron Latham that I disguised as some lessons for all of us in what can happen with a little Friendly Competition.

Are You Using Your Coop Funds?

by Scott Howard | Mar 9, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Your suppliers or vendors have a vested interest in your success, and most of them have access to extraordinary marketing funds and resources beyond traditional co-op to help you sell more of their products.

The problem is, seldom does anyone ask for these funds! If you don’t access those funds, you are literally throwing money away, or worse yet, your competitors will scoop those funds and use them against you.

In our How to Leverage Your Suppliers’ Marketing Muscle, tactic number one is “Tender your Next Ad Campaign”. Present a written proposal for submissions for marketing support to all of your suppliers outlining your proposed advertising schedule and investment, along with any special displays, promotions, demonstrations, or other exposure the winning bidder will receive.

Many business owners believe their hands are tied to rigid manufacturers’ restrictions if they use manufacturers’ co-op advertising funds, but seldom is this the case. The squeaky wheel oftentimes gets the grease!

If you are an appliance dealer, for example, and you sell GE and Whirlpool, your GE representative has a vested interest in you featuring GE versus Whirlpool in your ad.

If you make a presentation outlining the kind of campaign you propose to sell more GE without using the standard GE script or ad copy that the manufacturer supplies, it will generally be approved by their office because they don’t want your campaign to feature their competitor.

Nearly every business that offers products has a supplier, and these manufacturers and suppliers want to sell more products. Give them an idea of how you can sell more and they just might come up with some money. But you have to ask for it!

Still, other businesses opt not to leverage their suppliers’ marketing muscle because it takes time and effort. In today’s competitive environment, you need to take advantage of every competitive edge you can.

At WOWO Radio, me and my team have helped our advertising partners find and use hundreds of thousands of coop advertising dollars that our advertising partners use to get the the word out about their business to invite our listeners to spend money with them over the past few years.

Click here to retrieve our FREE How to Leverage Your Suppliers’ Marketing Muscle.

And reach out to me directly at Scott@WOWO.com for help.

The Significance of 200 Episodes

by Scott Howard | Feb 3, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Really? The Personal ScLoHo, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

The Scott Howard Genuine ScLoHo Media & Marketing Podcast turns 200 this week.

To me, that’s a little bit of a bragging right. For you, perhaps it will give you a little bit of confidence or trust in what you are reading or listening to.

Indulge me for a moment as I talk about the significance of this and I’ll be sure to wrap up with a couple of questions that can help you with your business or branding.

First of all, what’s a ScLoHo?

Nearly 17 years ago I registered the ScLoHo.com & ScLoHo.net domains, and even before that I had email accounts on Hotmail and Yahoo! that used ScLoHo. I may have even had a MySpace account under the ScLoHo moniker.

ScLoHo is a made up word. I took the first two letters of my first name (Scott), middle name (Louis), and last name (Howard) and created a unique word. There is a Wikipedia user page that has more of my history. The name Scott Howard I discovered is not unique. The most famous Scott Howard is the fictional character in the Michael J Fox Teenwolf movie. So ScLoHo became a unique way to identify myself online and it eventually spilled offline too. My wife and some coworkers call me ScLoHo and every once in awhile.

Here’s how ScLoHo became more than an email address. I started a blog on the old Google Blogger platform which grew into multiple blogs. It was a way for me to share stuff online about media and marketing along with personal stuff. It was nothing I got paid for, it was simply a passion of mine to capture and share some wisdom from others and myself.

In 2011, I left the radio stations I was with and took a position working with my friend Kevin Mullett in the web-world and Kevin encouraged me to spend money and buy my own spot on the internet. Not just a domain name like I had been doing, but a real hosted website. It took a few months to design but I launched ScottHoward.me in October 2011 and moved over 10,000 article that I had written to the new website. Also I want to emphasize that the dot me is only because the dot com version of my name is taken by a realtor in California.

The blogging articles never stopped on this website, although I slowed down to about 50 articles a year. I used to do 50 per month, that’s how I got up to 10,000 in a short period of time. Later this year, I will be writing my 15,000 article which is another accomplishment that not many people have done.

And before I tell you about the significance of 15,000 articles or 200 podcasts, here’s how the podcast even came about.

Our company, Federated Media, decided that it would be a great idea for someone to create an advertising or marketing podcast about 5 1/2 years ago. I wasn’t in management at the time, but was writing these weekly articles on the subject so a couple of the managers asked me if I would consider switching to a podcast instead.

I told them I could do both. With my on-air background, I knew how to do all the recording and production. With my desire to continue writing, I created an audio version of what I was already doing. Sort of like books on tape, read by the author. It took a few weeks of planning including picking out theme music, and creating a logo after deciding on a name for the podcast and then it debuted 200 weekly episodes ago.

Here’s a few lessons that you may be able to apply.

Do What You Are Passionate About. There is no way, that I would still be writing weekly and then creating 200 podcast episodes if I didn’t care about this stuff.
Do It When You Don’t Feel Like It. There are times when I really don’t feel like writing or recording, or producing this material. But I have found a way to push through those times, because they don’t last forever. Here’s my secret… I usually have a few articles ready to go in advance. That way when I don’t feel inspired, I can pull something I wrote from a day when I was feeling inspired and turn it into a podcast and publish it.
Don’t Do It Only For The Money. Here’s another secret… Nobody pays me to write the articles or produce the podcast. Which leads to my next lesson:
Invest In Yourself. In real dollars, I have spent a few thousand bucks over the years making purchases for this website and the podcast. I have no real tangible way to measure the Return On Investment, dollar for dollar, but that’s okay.
Invest In Others. That was the primary reason for starting my own website and blog and now 200 episodes of the Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast. It’s not about me, it’s about sharing with others lessons and observations about Media, Marketing, and Life from this dude who just turned 61 years old on his last birthday.

There are plenty of others that I know that started a blog and after a few months, they quit. Plenty of others who attempted to do a podcast but after awhile, they quit too.

The significance of sticking with it, that’s important.

Sticking with it doesn’t mean that you don’t make adjustments. You have to adjust because the world is changing and you and I are changing too.

Quit smoking, quit drinking if you want, but don’t quit on yourself. You can give up on many things, but don’t give up on your dreams and don’t give up on those around you.

Do the right thing and do it well.

Is It Time To Fall Out Of Love With Digital Ads?

by Scott Howard | Jan 27, 2021 | 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

It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

The whole magical world of digital advertising online.

For the past decade plus, I’ve seen study after study after study that talked about the shift in advertising from traditional ads to digital ads.

As a point of reference, traditional ads refer to radio and television broadcast ads, newspaper and any form of print including direct mail and phone books, also outdoor ads like roadside billboards and even in-store signage, etc. Digital ads are delivered digitally via the internet someway on webpages, apps, search engine marketing, you can even throw in search engine optimization.

Most of the predictions of double digit percentage increases in digital ad expenditures year over year have come true, just like the decrease in money spent on traditional ads have come true too.

But, has this shift in where companies advertise paid off?

According to a recent article in Forbes, the answer is either no, or not anymore, or no one knows.

There’s a lot of no’s in that last sentence. And that should concern you.

When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?

That’s the tile and here are some of the details from Forbes:

Proctor and Gamble was spending $200 million on digital advertising and turned it off. Result = no change in business outcome.

Chase Bank was serving their ads on 400,000 sites and cut it 99% to just 5,000 and saw no negative impact.

Uber was spending $120 million and stopped and saw no change too.

The Forbes article lists other examples big and small of businesses that either stopped their paid digital ads completely or shrunk the budget significantly and actually improved their business. They mention Facebook ads and Google Adwords along with other digital marketing activity and I believe I know the reason for this.

There’s a phrase called the “Zero Moment of Truth”. It’s the time when a consumer decides to make the purchase. The digital world likes to say they deliver buyers at that Zero Moment. Maybe or maybe not.

What if you need to buy a new hot water heater? That’s a purchase most people don’t plan for but when you wake up and need one, you don’t wait for days or weeks to decide to buy. You are suddenly at the Zero Moment of Truth when you are in the ice cold shower.

Your brain is going to immediately start by telling you the names of companies that you already know that could be your problem solver. Then your heart will kick in and screen out the companies you know but don’t trust.

How does your heart and brain know these things? Ideally it’s because you have been exposed to advertising and marketing way before your hot water heater died. And this is where certain forms of traditional media shine.

I call it intrusive media. Over 90% of the American population still listen to the radio every week. For my wife and I, we listen to the radio every time we are in the car which is at least 5 to 7 days a week. The radio stations we listen to have ads. Our brains hear those ads thru our ears and that reputation of hearing about a local business builds trust so our hearts are also impacted.

My parents never picked up the phone book as part of their casual reading routine, it was the Zero Moment of Truth when they grabbed the phone book if they didn’t know who to call, they’d flip open the Yellow Pages to search by business classification and see the ads for water heaters. Or if they already knew who they wanted to call, they would open the White Pages which was the alphabetical listing of people and businesses and get the number that way.

The digital revolution has replaced the phone book in multiple ways, hasn’t it…

So why are the digital ads that I mentioned at the beginning of this article not needed anymore? It’s because the impact has diminished. The brands that are using digital to get the sale at the Zero Moment of Truth already have Top of Mind Awareness and consumers would buy from them anyway.

That Top of Mind Awareness came from traditional media over the years, and has continued as those brands keep showing up on TV and radio.

I’ve got one more quote from the Forbes piece:

Digital marketing works; but the vast majority of impressions and clicks are from bot activity currently.

I’ve worked in the digital world and I’ve done some deep dives into the Google Analytics and unfortunately, it’s true. I can make you a promise that when you are listening to my radio station, WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana and we share with you the number of weekly listeners, those are real live people, like you and me, not bots.

Contact me for more info. Scott@WOWO.com.

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