So picture this…
Paul and I are in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at CES a few weeks back. During a moment of relative calm, I check email and there’s a missive from Cromwell Radio Group’s Bud Walters.
If you’ve met Bud, you know he’s one of the most curious and engaged broadcasters in the business. He is tireless, serving on myriad committees, groups, and boards. And he is truly one of radio’s biggest fans. Bud has attended DASH, and truly loves learning about where the industry is headed next.
So I open the email, and Bud has enclosed a Jacobs Media advisory from back in 2008. At that time, we had just wrapped up Techsurvey IV, and used some of its key findings to develop what turned out to be bold conclusions about the state of the radio business, along with ideas about how to face the many challenges on the road ahead.
So standing there at CES, it was a bit unnerving to read my own predictions, as I’m in the process of trying to figure out what might be in the pipeline for radio for the next several years. And as you know if you read this blog, we write a lot, but no one ever looks back at predictions and prognostications we’ve made.
But as I read the email, I felt a moment of relief, as Bud congratulated us, noting that it “looks like you were/are pretty much ‘right on.’”
If you read the memo, you’ll see the major themes were about the growth of audio and video streaming, the erosion of at-home radio listening, the growth of social media, significant increases in cell phone ownership, and yes, automakers moving more of their traditional ad budgets to digital. (BTW, you can also see the parts that Bud underlined, which made it an even more interesting read for us.)
We also suggested that Program Directors be re-titled “Content Directors,” that sales reps needed to understand a new language and new metrics in order to effectively communicate with agencies, and that stations and clusters could benefit from becoming digital leaders in order to better serve local advertisers and businesses, many of whom were struggling to make the transition.
But our main conclusion was that radio wasn’t moving quickly enough on the digital front. And we were so moved by the shifts we saw in Techsurvey IV that we put together a campaign called “What’s The Digital Application?” or W.T.D.A.
It even included a physical presence in the form of those little plastic bracelets that Lance Armstrong made popular. Our vision of a “wearable” was bright green, engraved with W.T.D.A. They were designed to serve as a constant reminder for radio department heads to include digital in every conversation at the station.
And as we introduced the W.T.D.A. bracelets to Jacobs clients, we added this thought:
It is our belief that while many radio professionals are talking the talk about digital/web strategies, they are often not walking the walk. Most radio people are still doing radio, and forgetting about digital applications – podcasting, streaming, texting, and the many other ways our content needs to be distributed to increasingly tech-savvy consumers. The idea behind the wristbands is to remind radio managers, programmers, and sales managers to consider web applications in everything they do.
If you read the memo, we didn’t get it all right. As Bud reminded us in his email, “One difference…radio has maintained greater strength than we all thought possible. The new dashboards (in cars) create both an opportunity and a challenge.”
And in his email, Bud then asked us to figure out the “connected car” challenge now so he could return to this year’s memo eight years from today in 2024 to see if we nailed it.
We’ll begin to address that challenge and others later this week (1/27 at 2pm ET) in a free webinar we’re co-presenting with Inside Radio called “10 Things We Learned At CES That Impact Radio.” You can sign up here.
Join us and let’s tackle these challenges together. And a few years from now, you can check some of the predictions we’ll make this Wednesday to see if we were on point.
You might also be asking yourself, eight years later, whether radio is truly hitting goal on the digital front. While a great deal of progress has been made, digital is still an afterthought inside many stations and companies. It is still thought of as a second job, or something that we’ll get around to when we have the time. In many other industries, the thinking has shifted to “digital first.”
In the meantime, we still have a few hundred of those nifty green wristbands laying around the storage room. If you could use a gentle reminder now and them, email me and I’ll send you one.
Jacobs Media has consistently walked the walk in the digital space, providing insights and guidance through its well-read national Techsurveys.
In 2008, jacapps was launched - a mobile apps company that has designed and built more than 1,300 apps for both the Apple and Android platforms. In 2013, the DASH Conference was created - a mashup of radio and automotive, designed to foster better understanding of the "connected car" and its impact.
Along with providing the creative and intellectual direction for the company, Fred consults many of Jacobs Media's commercial and public radio clients, in addition to media brands looking to thrive in the rapidly changing tech environment.
Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
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