The Infinite Dial

eMarketer's Geoff Ramsey posted his Seven Predictions For 2010 yesterday, and while I generally eschew soothsayers (say that five times fast!) these predictions make so much sense, and affect you and your stations so directly, that they are an essential precis for thinking about the next 12 months and beyond.

I won't recapitulate all of his bullet points here, because you should read his article at the source. I will, however, point out that there are two ways to read these predictions if you are a radio pro. One, of course, is pessimistic. Spending on traditional radio is going to continue to erode. It isn't going back to where it was, and it isn't going to go up again--ever. I know there have been some claims from radio executives to the contrary, but I have to side with eMarketer here. The dollars allocated to traditional, terrestrial commercial radio advertising have seen their high-water mark.

Geoff also predicts that the traditional interruption model of advertising is going to erode further, and he's clearly on the mark there. Commercial TV has already reacted to this by adapting their content to Hulu and other online services. The channel is different, the expectations are different and consumers are less and less willing to make the trade-off of attention for "free" programming when the average Internet user now has not only the means but the will to circumvent irrelevant messaging. This means that for radio, as for other mass media channels, selling spots alone is not going to monetize your content sufficiently. Stations that do not adapt to this (the time to take proactive steps is long past) will simply go dark. There is no "rule" that says your market is supposed to support 50 stations, or even 20 terrestrial stations. In the coming few years, these markets are simply going to contract. That's the writing on the wall.

I said there were two ways to read these predictions. The second way--the way I prefer to read them--is optimistic. Geoff notes that while dollars allocated to media ad buys are imploding, content consumption is exploding. This is truly a golden age for content consumers, who now have more ways to filter and aggregate relevant content than ever before. In past years, only those of us on the geeky edge of the stick programmed our own Internet content experiences to seek out relevant content chunks and skip past irrelevant, valueless messaging (like uncontextualized advertising). Today, the tools the average online consumer has access to are doing that filtering for them. This is going to continue to dramatically increase, not decrease, the amount of online content consumed, and also increase consumers' satisfaction with that content. Geoff notes that technology is driving content to become more distributed, personalized, and contextualized. Consumers can no longer be expected to come to the mountain (that's you); they now expect the content to be distributed across multiple channels and sources to come to them. Content producers that create relevant content, tailor it to various interests and preferences, and distribute it in a platform-independent way, will gain the valuable time and attention of consumers, and they in turn will develop deeper and deeper relationships with content producers that can be monetized well beyond a screaming :60.

For the radio industry, those that concentrate on the atomic units of online content and work to make those units targeted, well-distributed, and relevant will claim their share of the ever-increasing spend for online marketing. That, for a radio industry prepared to rethink its core offering, is the optimistic part of Geoff's predictions. Consider this: ten or fifteen years ago, my "network" was NBC--Seinfeld, Fraser, Friends--you remember. Today, my network is my friends--those I've met, and those I follow online--and I trust that network to filter my content for me. That means all the content I receive in a given day has already passed some kind of bar for engagement, trust and relevance. That's table stakes today. Making your content sharable and personalized isn't the future--it's the current cost of doing business.

I think the hardest thing for radio to wrap its head around, however, will be the decreasing importance (though it's silly to say death) of reach. Reach was king when media was inefficient--when the only way we could reach 1,000 was to blast to 100,000. The Internet changed that game irrevocably. Discrete, targeted chunks of relevant platform-independent content now reach 1,000 when 1,000 of the right people filter that content in--and they are much more satisfied with that content, as it becomes less and less cluttered with irrelevancies. For radio, the economics of "wasting" 99,000 impressions with every message are catching up. The Internet punishes waste. Measuring reach is becoming less and less relevant, and (despite media's current infatuation with the term) even engagement's star will wane as it's held to the stronger light of providing tangible value for advertisers.

What is radio's value? Same as it has always been--its ability to put butts in seats, showrooms and restaurants. As the power of the tower fades, Radio's ability to move consumers has never been stronger. You've only got to heed the call.