The Great Divide

by Barry Cohen

"Marketing means aligning the way you sell (and/or move goods and services through a distribution system to the end user) with the way your customers buy." I offered that definition in the first chapter of my book, Ten Ways to Screw Up an Ad Campaign.
The radio community sells; it does not market. Today, we have a huge disconnect between the way radio sells its product, and the way its consumers-advertisers and agencies, need and want to buy it. Let’s examine today’s typical radio sales call. It goes something like this…
Without even asking the prospect about his or her target, the salesperson immediately launches into a diatribe about how much of the station’s audience is aged 25-54. How do you know I don’t want your 55+ audience? (Some of us actually do!) Next comes the sad excuse for a station presentation… usually a canned power point. It gets worse.
You want a proposal? (I haven’t seen a real one in years.) Here’s the package of the week. Worse yet, now that we have your phone number and your email address, we’re going to bombard you with our “one-day sale!-every month.” (as if everyone will just drop whatever they’re doing to climb all over it.) And you’re wondering why people think of radio as a quick fix, instead of a key, driving element in a long-term plan? You get back what you give out. Radio has to stop sending the message that we are the media's used car lot.
Twenty-seven years ago, when I started my radio sales career, we were taught the consultative sell. We were there to solve the client’s problems-not to move our station's inventory. Promotional ideas and creative copy/production were our stock in trade-not cost-per-points, GRP’s and GIMP’s. Here’s a little known secret- they still are.
Yes, the consolidation mindset has transformed our product into a commodity. Advertisers and agencies don’t buy your station’s branding; they buy an anonymous, amorphous blob of an audience number. Wrong. A minute is not a minute is not a minute.
Does the advertiser want bodies… or buyers? Radio has sealed its own death warrant by relying too heavily on quantitative audience measurement. We need to distinguish our product’s unique attributes: with our stellar qualitative, with our fanatical audience loyalty, with our unique format (in the few rare cases where we have one), with our exclusive cumes and our unduplicated audiences… not to mention the strength of our personalities (where we still have them), our ability to turn a campaign around on a dime-you get the idea.
Don't shoot the messenger. The problem is management. Our salespeople do what we train them to do. While so many radio managers talk about NTR (non-traditional revenue), when an advertiser or an agency approaches them with an out-of-the-box idea, they usually throw it back in the box.
The Great Divide will widen before it narrows. When we take total responsibility for the success of every radio campaign on our stations, from start to finish, then and only then will we reduce the churn rate of our advertisers. Advertiser retention is the key to revenue growth, not unconscionable rate increases that chase advertisers away from the medium. Results determine our value-not ratings and not demand.
This is how advertisers and agencies want to be sold. As long as we continue to ignore the great divide between how we are selling radio and how people really want to buy radio, we will continue to experience declining revenues. What is it costing you?

Barry Cohen has served as a suburban radio salesperson, a major market radio salesperson and a suburban Station Manager prior to becoming an agency principal. His book, 10 Ways to Screw Up an Ad Campaign, has been used as a training text in the radio industry and supplemental textbook for marketing students in colleges around the country.