The Jacobs Media Blog

Hopefully that headline tease got you to start reading this blog post – because it’s an important marketing story.  Kellogg is changing its priorities and dads are becoming a new target group. This is significant because until now, cereal ads have been geared primarily at moms and kids.  Now Kellogg is embarking on a new campaign, […]

This crazy controversy about Denise, the artificial intelligence “DJ” being tested at KROV radio just took an interesting turn. Alan Cross took on Denise in a recent blog.  A couple of days later, we opined in this space about how seminal personalities can have great impact on local communities.  WCSX’s Steve Kostan, recently inducted in the […]

I’m not a “breaking news” kind of guy.  With all the communication we have available to us now from cable news to Twitter to Facebook to newspapers and radio, it is amazing to me how the initial facts of a story so often are flat-out wrong. Perhaps that’s a product of the competitive pressure that […]

Maybe 2011 is the Year of the Guy. Back in January, we launched our Marketing To Men initiative (we’re the yin to Alan Burns’ yang), and we’ve received great feedback from radio and the advertising communities. There’s more to men than meets the perceptual eye.  And this hit home in a recent AdAge blog written […]

The title might suggest that this is a blog about Steve Jobs.  But that’s not the topic for today.  Instead, we’re talking about a “local Steve,” if you live in the Detroit area or if you work in the radio business. I was thrilled to see the announcement that WCSX’s Steve Kostan, Detroit night guy […]

If you’re a fan of college football, you know Tom Osborne, the storied coach of Nebraska who is now that school’s athletic director. Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Nebraska Broadcasters Association convention in Omaha, thanks to Marty Riemenschneider and that organization’s fine board.  Overall, 435 people were in attendance – a […]

Or maybe it’s partly sunny, depending on your perspective. In Sunday’s New York Times, there was an article devoted to radio (“High-Tech Product, Low-Tech Pitch”), focusing on the power of radio advertising – especially for technology products like the Barracuda Load Balancer and Citrix (GoToMeeting). In fact, the article also praises small market radio, noting […]

It was announced late last week that the King is out at Burger King.  (This is even a more startling story than Mike McVay leaving McVay Media.) According to Burger King, the King was ousted because the brand is moving more toward a nutritional image.  Apparently, the King did not exude the image of healthy […]

Talk about bad days.  I get stranded in Omaha after a great day with the Nebraska Broadcasters Association (more on this in a future post), the stock market goes down another gazillion points, Delta screws up my return trip to Detroit, and then I open my email Friday morning to read this lovely headline in Radio […]

In ongoing conversations with broadcasters about the need to ensure their content is available on the myriad digital channels, I am often confronted with the same types of questions. “We’re short-staffed – do we have to get involved with all these new platforms?” “How can we monetize these new sources?” “If the whole world is […]

In a recent AdAge piece, resident curmudgeon and truly great media observer, Bob Garfield, discussed a new “expert crowd sourcing” model that is making waves throughout the agency world. At the forefront is the virtual Victors & Spoils founder John Winsor, who says the concept is to “create a new operating system for the advertising industry” […]

If commerce totally overshadowed content, then you’d probably start seeing promotions like this one: Except this isn’t a hypothetical example – it actually happened.  Now I don’t want to stereotype Major League Baseball fans, but if you looked at their list of the Top 100 artists they’d pay to see in concert, Sade wouldn’t make […]

A couple weeks back, I wrote a post about how the 80:20 Rule continues to have validity, emphasizing the importance of your “Core 20” in your programming and marketing strategy. Commenting on that post, Vision Critical’s Jeff Vidler picked up on the theme by focusing on what he calls the “PPM engagement gap.” Jeff points […]

I am always surprised to run into radio people who raise an eyebrow when I tell them that Twitter is my preferred social channel. Even with 200 million users, Twitter pales in comparison to Facebook’s heft.  Our Techsurvey 7 reiterated that while Twitter is on a fast track to growth, the Facebook Nation is four […]

20 years ago today, the face of rock music officially changed.  Metallica’s Metallica (also known as The Black Album) hit the retail shelves.  Jacobs Media consultant and Metallica aficionado, Keith Cunningham, provides some perspective. While the album debuted at #1 in ten countries, had six U.S. radio hits, went on to sell 22 million copies […]

We all bought into it.  Back in the ‘80s when the living was easy and a great book led to automatic sales, radio did what the agencies ordered them to do – moved as many formats as possible to the 25-54 “sweet spot.” A quarter of a decade later and it’s still the “money demo.”  While there will always be CHR […]

No, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that more than one in five children has used a smartphone by the age of 2. This is especially true among Gen Y moms, where technology is in their DNA.  And they are passing along those same traits and habits to their kids.  A newly released survey by […]