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The Battle For Your Audience

 
The battle over online audio is one everyone wants to win. Everyone, it seems, understands what radio has had in terms of deep audience relationships, and they continue to seek ways to "own" that audience. Last week was an especially big one for the space.

• Over the weekend, Clear Channel hosted its giant iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas. It was the biggest concert in company history, promoted and supported by all Clear Channel stations. The goal was to create significant visibility and adoption of iHeartRadio as a competitor to Pandora.
• The festival followed right on the heels of Clear Channel's relaunch of the iHeartRadio app with new, "Pandora-like" features.
• Pandora's Tim Westergren spoke at a media conference as the service launched a redesigned website and removed the 40-hour monthly limit on free streaming-   
• Facebook got everyone’s attention with a flanking move to introduce music sharing a la Spotify.
  Facebook also announced deals with Slacker, iHeartRadio, and others.
• Emmis and Jelli announced co-branded online stations with more listener interaction.
• Everyone wants a piece of radio, and there are loads of big, well funded companies seeking to steal your audiences.

What are you doing about it? What can you do that will retain your loyal customers?

When I launched our first Convergence conference in 1999 my belief was that music radio stations need a deep emotional connection with their listeners, and that hasn't changed. Music itself is a commodity, and whomever can play it in the way best pleasing to the consumer will win that battle. Commercial-free environments are tough to compete with, as are self-selected playlists.

Therefore it is my belief that radio should enhance what it does best. If radio relies on playing the most music, it will be vulnerable to others who perhaps can do that better. Make your music-driven stations deeply rooted in your audience, with localism, entertainment, and a deep bond with your air personalities. Take advantage of the recession and knock back your commercial loads (as one broadcaster told me at the Radio Show, fewer spots adds inventory pressure and drives prices up.)

When everyone is gunning for a piece of your action, it means you’ve been doing something right. But they will stop at nothing to steal your audiences and advertisers, so radio should not be complacent, should not assume it can’t happen, and should continually reinvent to be better.
Radio has the upper hand, but that could change rapidly if you don't become proactive and realize the competition is no longer just other radio stations, but other audio services as well.

How Ginny Hubbard-Morris Saved My Life

 

 

The year was 1999, and I felt that the next step for radio would be to create custom online radio stations for big brands. Following multiple venture capital pitches, I raised the first round of financing and hired a team of about 50 people, including radio programmers Steve Rivers, Sean Demery, and Steve Wyrostock.

The other programmers I hired were computer programmers, headed by Rich Sadowsky, the brilliant inventor of live update technology. Together we invented and built a concept to create customized stations in multiple formats. Our first customers were Earthlink, About.com, A&E Television, and dozens of others, and we became the second-largest audio streaming consumer in America.

After a couple of years, once we'd proved concept, developed some great new patents and technology, and had actual customers, it was time to go to the market for more money, so we began the process of pitching our second round. Over several months I made more than 200 presentations to every possible venture group and strategic investor, raising considerable commitments, but we had to finish the round and close one major strategic investor. It was logical that we talk to people in the broadcasting business that might like to invest in the digital radio space. One of those broadcasters was Ginny Hubbard-Morris at Hubbard Broadcasting.

As we did on all trips with the executive team, we scheduled multiple meetings in each location and then moved on to other cities. Our first stop was to visit with several VC firms and strategic investors in New York. Our team was to meet at 8:30 a.m. in the lobby of the World Trade Center on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, for coffee. Our CFO, Mark Dirsa, had a meeting with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the World Trade Center, and then we were to go across the street to our second meeting, to talk with Dow Jones about a strategic investment. Following our day in New York, we planned to fly to Minneapolis to meet with Hubbard.

On Monday, September 10, Ginny Hubbard-Morris phoned to cancel our meeting because something had come up. We would have to reschedule for the following week. Though I was discouraged, the team's first instinct was to go to New York anyway. But Hubbard Broadcasting appeared to be our best prospect to complete the round, so I decided to reschedule our meetings and do the trip the following week.

The rest, as they say, is history. Had Ginny Hubbard-Morris not called on Monday to cancel, we would have been in the World Trade Center at 8:30 a.m. and would have been there at 8:46, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower.

Everyone has a 9/11 story. Most did not end as happily as mine.

So many of us lost friends and colleagues on that tragic day. I feel blessed to have been forced to cancel my trip. Thanks to that cancellation, I've had 10 wonderful years, including the gift of my triplet children, whom my wife was carrying at the time. That decade has been a precious gift.

As we remember the tragedy and the friends we lost on that day, let's not forget the commitments we made to our selves and our families on 9/11. Almost everyone I know committed to spending more time with his or her family and more time on the things that were most important to them. If anything good came from the tragedy, it was the fresh appreciation for life and loved ones we all experienced. This anniversary should remind us of that most of all.