Tom Taylor at Radio Info shared a radio station's sales email yesterday. It came from a "very large group's medium market cluster." It read:
Thursday and Friday, November 6-7 – Preferred Customer Sale. As one of our most important customers we’d like to offer you the lowest rates of the year for commercials placed during the upcoming holiday season and throughout the first quarter of 2009 on all our stations. Please expect a call from me soon to provide you with more information on this great opportunity.
Does this email build confidence in radio? Does this email suggest that radio is a valuable tool in building one's business? No, it sounds desperate. And this comes from a "very large group." Is that what consolidation has reduced us to? Beggars?
It is ironic that in the same week the email appeared, Greater Media's President Peter Smyth in his From the Corner Office wrote:
We are facing a challenge to reinvent our business in the midst of a recession. Like so many businesses before us, radio was seduced by the steady increase in market revenues, the expansion of advertising dollars in general, and the transactional business that came our way from agencies, local and national.
It’s time to recognize that it’s not going to “get back to normal”; radio will not heal itself magically. Ad budgets will not magically expand. Agencies will not spontaneously shower radio with new ad dollars. The internet will not evaporate.
But what can happen is changing the way we think and act. We can begin today to focus our energy and our actions on our local advertisers and our local community. We can begin to tear down the radio silos and get out of the media department, cost-per-point and value-added.
We can begin to sell again.
We can make ourselves valuable by solving problems for local people and businesses, but we must put far more emphasis on the idea and creativity of selling and not the rote negotiation of transactional, ranker-bought business. Yes, in the middle of a recession, we must change our way of thinking.
Apparently some very large groups don't agree. And radio won't heal until they do agree.
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