The Atlantic recently posted a note on the slow death of the newspaper business, and one of the comments to that note was so perceptive (if not necessarily novel) that I thought I’d share it with you because it has consequences for the radio industry, too.

Wrote the commenter:

Newspapers were dying anyway but the Internet has hastened the process by exposing the newspapers lack of accountability. 

The average schmuck buys a paper and sees it as a product designed to inform him, the customer, about the world around him/her.
But in any financial transaction the customer is identified as the person who pays the money, and since newspapers only get 20% of revenue from subscribers this means the subscriber is not the “real” customer. 

Newspapers get 80% of revenue from corporate advertisers, so they are the “real” customers. And since the corporate advertisers don’t take delivery of the newspapers it means the newspaper is not the real product.
The real product is the reader, and the newspaper is just a medium (like radio waves or tv signals) that is used to “deliver” the real product (our eyeballs) to the real customers (corporate advertisers). 

People are important in the newspaper financial model, just not in the way that they thought they were.

With the Internet, you can have news websites that have zero corporate advertising, which means they are ACCOUNTABLE to the subscribers who donate to the site. This is why the newspapers can’t simply transfer their business model onto the web and hope to survive. 

It’s not about technology. It’s all about accountability.

Again, it’s not exactly news that the “real” customers to newspapers – or to radio – are the advertisers and the real product currently being offered up is not the content on the air but the ears listening to that content – ideally as many as possible for as long as possible.

But thinking about the flow of dollars this way has important consequences for our industry at a time when there’s a sudden disconnect (as there is) between the volume of listeners we attract and the amount of money our customers (the advertisers) consider them worth.

And what it means in the final analysis is that we must provide layers of accountability which add value to our product (the ears or eyes our content generates).  That value, I must add (although it should be obvious) is in the eye of the customer (the advertiser), not in your eyes and mine.

It is not, in other words, about “monetizing our content” wherever that content may be found.  

It’s about enhancing the value of our product (our audiences) to our customers (advertisers).

From the Harvard Business Blog:

The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it’s likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.

When “broadcasting” is the business of sharing content worth sharing between individuals who trust each other, what business are YOU in?

Isn’t this one reason why so many small businesses are attracted to social media?  Because they can become their own media – their own “broadcasters” – to those consumers who have proverbially “raised their hand” and said “connect with me”?

I think traditional broadcasters have been so obsessed over how to market their radio stations in a social media age that they too often forget that our clients have the same challenges and the same opportunities as we do.

Our job is to help them more effectively execute those connections and to do so with the added kick that comes courtesy of the “megaphone” called the radio station and its various assets.

Time to put these pieces together in an integrated way.

“Integrated marketing,” as the phrase goes, isn’t about bundling a variety of marketing tactics into one campaign.  It’s about magnifying the effectiveness of marketing for the benefit of our clients and the consumers they covet.

It’s about making the connections more effective.

If we’re still counting ears rather than connections in another five years, woe unto us.

Don’t read this if you don’t care about radio’s future or if you’re counting down the days to your retirement.

Every now and then some thinking comes along that puts it all in perspective.  This piece from Ad Age is one such summation of thinking that has been bubbling up over the past few months from folks like Tom Asacker and others.

What is the blueprint for what radio will need to be to compete successfully as a vital enterprise in the years to come?

The trajectory of our future can be summed up as follows:

Almost every consumer marketer I’ve spoken to…is moving toward the goal of making marketing more outcome-specific, targeted, useful and conversational, and less about blasting of what we’ve generally called “brand” messages via specific platforms. They see some of today’s media companies as shaping into useful potential partners in those efforts, and others as increasingly redundant — and they’re spending less and less with the latter.

The radio – media – company of the future will:

1. Act more like a marketing company than a media company.

Says Ad Age:  ”Good partners will be marketing companies, operations set up and focused on solving brand marketers’ problems by means of the connection they can create with an audience and results that connection can deliver.”

In other words, the model will shift from selling access to listener ears in bulk toward selling solutions to marketers’ problems via connections.  That is essentially the difference between “advertising” and “marketing,” so choose your side of the fence wisely.

2. Be organized around an audience and not a platform.

Broadcasters frequently talk about being “platform agnostic,” but too often what that really means is putting our radio signal in other places or on other devices.  That’s just transporting the problem, not solving it.  Your job is to rally an audience of raving fans and satisfy the appetites of those fans while connecting them to the marketers who crave them.  Period.

3. Work directly with marketers.

Being bought off a ranker is not the same as working in partnership with marketers.  Increasingly, the ranker-buyers will be the obstacles to our success, not the reason for it.

4. Not just create spaces for ads next to content, it’ll create whole media channels and platforms for brands

Writes Ad Age: “Brands want to be at the center of content and communities and they’re going to create these channels with or without media companies.”  It’s up to us to bring the talent to the party and to build these channels in concert with advertisers.  Or they will simply build them without us.

5. Employ technologists who can build device-agnostic platforms for marketers.

Note the distinction between building these platforms for marketers and building them for your radio brands.  Recognize above all else who is in the driver’s seat.  Hint:  It’s not your radio brand.  It’s your radio brand’s customer base, the marketers.

6. Know how to deliver instantaneous gratification when it comes to measurement, and it’ll be measuring outcomes not outputs. A rating…stat is not going to be enough in the future, and certainly not when it’s presented weeks after the fact.

The dawn of the post-Arbitron world is before us.  

What are you doing to make your efforts accountable today?

From Inside Radio: 

Pandora is pushing its way into the car. The pure play webcaster that allows users to create and customize their own radio
stations has its eye on the auto market and home appliance integrations. Pandora VP of business development Jessica Steel
tells eMarketer that many of its 30 million registered users stream the service in their car via mobile apps. “We’re definitely
looking at ways to make that experience more seamless — basically making all the core user interactions of Pandora integrated
into the vehicle, so that you don’t have to fumble around with your iPhone to skip or rate a song.” Pandora has partnered with
Sony to be included on Blu-Ray players and other devices. Echoing a refrain often heard in the over-the-air radio industry,
Steel says: “Success for my team looks like Pandora being available on pretty much any connected entertainment device.”

Where do I begin?

This is not “echoing a refrain” often heard in the over-the-air radio industry.

It is a fundamentally different notion to get Pandora integrated into a piece of electronics, let alone a car, than it is to integrate a radio.  We should not assume Pandora is following our lead but rather assume that we are following theirs, and none too successfully.

Pandora is new and fresh and shiny and popular among the young and/or hip.

Radio is not and not and not and popular among the older and/or not so hip.

Yes, our cumes are massive.  But this is not about who uses the radio, it’s about who loves the radio.

And radios will only follow the audiences who love them.

The call for radios to be integrated into devices that never used to contain them is one which could have been made a generation ago.  Where were we then?  Indeed, the time to get a radio in a toaster was 1985, not 2010.  Today, such a move would be viewed as a gimmick, not a value-add.

Pandora, on the other hand, is all value-add.

Radio must to be pushed into devices which don’t already contain them, while Pandora can be pulled in – by audience or consumer demand.

If you make cars or electronic gadgets, which will you respond to faster, “push” or “pull”?

The largest concern you should have is that Pandora’s entry into the auto market – something I view as inevitable – has the potential to create a complete substitute for your (music-oriented) radio station.  And this will happen much faster than you think.

Remember what PPM tells us:  ”Fulfill expectations.”  Well, if “more music” is your expectation, Pandora is a better radio station than you are.  And it’s certainly better tuned to my tastes than yours is.

So what are you going to do?

Lobby for more FM and AM dials in more places, or redefine what radio means for a generation which craves novelty, freshness and innovation?

Online radio continues to grow as a viable category for audiences and advertisers alike. 

As we plug along in our efforts to fully monetize this medium we need to recognize something critically important:

Online radio is not simply radio online.

In other words, we need to take advantage of the novel capabilities of the digital medium as we build our online radio strategies and not think of the medium simply as the over-the-air signal repurposed.

One (and only one) of the novel capabilities baked into the digital environment is the ability to efficiently target by matching consumers to the messages that are most relevant for them.

I should say it’s potentially baked into this environment, because the vast majority of radio companies are surrendering this power and the significant monetization value this capability represents.

And that’s because they are not requiring registration to their websites and/or streams.

Listen to this chat with AndoMedia Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Reynolds, who paints a picture of tremendous upside – but only if we act.

MP3 File

Reality check:

Pandora has 100% of their users registered.

How many of yours are?

Here are the “twenty tweetable truths” by and for the magazine industry.

What might they be for Radio?

I guess we can leave aside the irony of arguing for the vitality of an industry using the very media alleged to be supplanting that industry.

“The future belongs to those who take the present for granted.”

So says Clay Shirky in the epilogue to his classic book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, a book full of perfect lessons like this one.

With economic recovery around the corner, many in radio are holding their collective breath, hoping that advertising demand will blossom, that rates will rise, that PPM will open new advertiser vistas, that nobody reminds us how much money we wasted fretting over HD (don’t say you weren’t warned), that longstanding morning shows won’t drop dead from old age, that “reach” will matter as much in the cost-per-click world of 2010 as it did in the cost-per-thousand world of 2000.

Sure, we’re dancing the the digital diva, you may say, but where’s the real money?  Where’s the money we’re due because of who we are?  Where’s that pot of gold under the rainbow?

There’s a joke about the mega-broadcaster who is down to one employee, and that’s the guard outside the door containing the laptop which drives every format on every station in every market.  That day may be coming.

At least it’s on a laptop so it can theoretically be local.

Into this fray comes a cry for more youth in radio!  A cry for fresher ideas.

The NAB Radio Show is now the annual convening of radio’s elder statesmen, while the action and the “new ideas” are happening in other places, other conferences, places with “digital” in the title.

Yes, we need more young people with more ideas, and we need to welcome them to an industry which has done its level best to avoid these people and their ideas since they were, as my grandfather might have said, in “short pants.”  

Radio’s audience, like its management and talent, is ripening on Mother Nature’s vine.  Those who find us important and essential (as opposed to those who simply find us unavoidable) are getting older by the day – literally.  

It is entirely conceivable that future generations will discover this post on whatever supercalifragalistic device Apple is making by then and consider quaint the notion that radio once had stations with popular music, as opposed to All Talk and/or Spanish.

To be fair, this fate awaits us only in the Twilight Zone episode where we view our current hardships as cyclical, punctuated with a passing flirtation with digital alternatives, each one having a worse revenue model than the next.

This fate awaits us only if we fail to take the present for granted, and move on from there.

In times of revolution, writes Shirky, the experienced (i.e., “older”) among us are  at risk of regarding this change as a fad.

Writes Shirky, “Young people are taking better advantage of social tools, extending their capabilities in ways that violate old models, not because they know more useful things than we do, but because they know fewer useless things than we do.”

So how do you recruit younger talent at every level?

You don’t.

You don’t “recruit” youth into radio’s sandbox.  You take radio to youth’s sandbox.  

You play in their backyard, and you play the games they want to play, not the ones you wish they played the way their parents do.  My wife’s elderly grandmother has about ten radios in her home.  How many will be in the home of your children when they reach that ripe old age?

We don’t recruit youth, youth recruits us.  Only when they stop rolling their eyes long enough to realize its worth the effort because we’re actually listening and acting like we care.  

That’s right, you want them to listen to you?  Then you need to listen to them.

We need to change radio into the kind of cross-platform, dazzlingly interactive medium young people want us to be.  We can’t cover our eyes, count to ten, and open them, squinting to see if any young whippersnappers suddenly find us endlessly fascinating and alluring.  More likely, they’ll be wondering why we’re wearing our pants so far above the waist.

We need to get out of what radio has been and into what it’s becoming.

When talent asks us how much more they will be paid to post to a blog or produce videos or otherwise engage with and respond to an audience of social peers, we must remind them that the universe doesn’t care what their contract reads, only when their contract ends.

We need to get out of the NAB Radio Show and into the events native to a digital media-savvy crowd.

If you’re in Public Radio, you need to demand that somebody, somewhere toss a wrench into the bureaucratic cogs responsible for a structure that made sense in the days when content didn’t exist unless it existed on a local affiliate station.

If you’re in commercial radio and your company is structured the same way it was when William Daniels urged Dustin Hoffman to contemplate “plastics,” then all the recruiting efforts in the world won’t bring you a bevy of youthful saviors, especially when you try to explain why the idea that you can win a prize if only you “fan” the station on Facebook is anything other than a cheap gimmick.

Success is not an entitlement regardless of how successful radio has been before.  Media is now all of us and we are all media.

Youth values what youth values, not what you and I wish them to value.  

Change the industry, and the young will follow.

Weather the storm in the hope that happy days will be here again, and you’ll get exactly what you deserve.

Not what you wished for.