Here’s Part 2 of my Q&A with Bob Gilbreath, the author of a new book called The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. With a background in brand management at Proctor & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, Gilbreath is also chief marketing strategist at Bridge Worldwide, one of the nation’s largest digital ad agencies and part of WPP.

Click below for my full Q&A with Gilbreath.  What follows is a highly edited transcript of our conversation. If you missed Part 1 or want to download or listen to the podcast, go here.

(Note:  Subscribe to all hear2.0 podcasts on iTunes here)

Okay. I deal with a lot of broadcasters, radio folks who have clients and advertising agencies. What process should a broadcaster go through to develop more meaningful marketing for its clients? 

If I was working at a radio station right now, I would focus on trying to really understand the listeners who are coming in, and I don’t mean the basic demographics, but going deeper in understanding some of the psychographics.

You know, whether it’s a particular station or a program within a station, what are people looking for, what are their higher-level needs? 

And so for example, if I have a show that’s about finance and business tips, I don’t look at that and tell a marketer “hey, we’re focusing on financial services products so you may want to advertise.” Instead, I want to help them understand what the listeners are really looking for, what the program is about, what are their psychographics, what they are trying to understand. And then proactively going to those customers – those spenders – and saying, “Hey, here are some different things we could do for you that will really help you connect in a meaningful way with what makes our audience unique.” 

And from there, you can actually get creative many times with the client and help them think of things that are related to their business while at the same time adding value to the lives of listeners who are tuning in. 

Just to be clear, those are things that are not thrown in simply because someone’s placing an over the air buy, they are specific things that are paid for in addition to the baseline buy, right? 

Yes. So instead of throwing in a quick “brought to you by,” you actually do something interesting for the consumer and the client through the program itself. 

What’s the best way for a broadcaster who wants to partner with these clients to get down and dirty with metrics that are meaningful for clients, that are measurable for the broadcasters, and that go beyond ratings? 

The biggest thing I have seen a lot and seems to be growing over time is the use of specific URLs or specific discount codes. 

You know not every consumer uses it, but marketers look at those numbers to see how many people are coming from specific programs, and that’s going to become, I think, even more important as marketers work to show more return on every investment they make. 

More and more marketers are looking for ways they can actually see that consumers are listening, having a direct response, and then leading to some kind of sales result at the same time.

This remains a big opportunity for radio, where you know people are more engaged. In many cases, they’re listening to the radio while they’re working, while they have access to their mobile phone or computer, and that can show some real results that a lot of other media don’t. 

What do you say to broadcasters who say all of this sounds great, but this isn’t “radio.” “Radio” is the business of selling spots, and we need to get back to basics and do that more effectively and then our revenue numbers will come back. 

Well I guess I would argue that that’s not what radio is really about. 

The work of any media channel out there has been bastardized by the focus on the advertising dollar and through the basic input of an impression. 

What radio programmers, what television networks, what the newspapers are really about is offering valuable content to the readers and the listeners and the viewers that they have. 

And I think that’s a mind-opening way to start over and say, “If our goal is to really add value in that way, how can we make the advertising that we host also valuable and useful.” 

We’re starting to see this in some of the food magazines, for example, where they’re working with advertisers to make sure that they’ve got unique recipes and coupons and other things through every ad, transforming it into advertising that the users and readers are actually looking for. 

It would be interesting to start from scratch and grab both the editorial side as well as the business side, both Church and State, and get together and ask “How can we negotiate this new world by blending the two, by only offering advertising that you believe is going to be valuable to the listeners as well?” 

You’re saying that Radio is actually in the content and connection business, not the selling-ears-for-dollars business. 

Exactly, and that’s how it started from the beginning and in many cases, what we’re talking about is going back to that more pure form. 

In your book you note that the number of people participating in these digital strategies is often very much smaller than the number of people clients buy when they’re buying, say, impressions. How are broadcasters supposed to appreciate that differential value and how are they supposed to explain the value of those smaller numbers to their client partners? 

Well, when you’re looking at “impressions,” it’s a number far away from sales, so marketers apply a big discount factor anyway. 

And the reason that they are wanting to spend less and less on impressions is that they know that only a fraction of those impressions actually lead to sales, so that’s where I think there’s an opportunity to turn that around, for example, by using an access code or a coupon code. 

Yes, the number of people engaged in most digital efforts is much smaller, but they’re also much closer to an actual sale. 

There may even be different business models where you’re charging per sale or per use of a code to the marketer instead of per impression. 

You are a former brand manager at P&G, you’re with a digital agency now, part of a larger advertising agency. From that perspective, from your vantage point, where do you see radio’s future as options proliferate, alternatives proliferate, ways to get music and content proliferate? Where do you see radio headed? 

I think there’s really a huge opportunity. I mean there’s a much stronger connection for people with personalities and with live content that is unscripted – content that has ability to change according to the times. This is a strength of radio. 

In a way, the radio medium was co-opted by the digital one with podcasting and now with online radio. People like the chunks of content from real people and getting media that doesn’t require continual reading. There are a lot of opportunities there. 

I also believe that there are growing opportunities for getting to niches as people have much more focused interests and are looking for places that gather around them.

Radio for years has gone against that with a limited set of formats and a national focus, but I think there’s an opportunity again to go back to geographic niches or interest areas. 

These will become more important for marketers to get those smaller, focused audiences than going mass across the board.

Bob Gilbreath is the author of a new book called The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with Your Customers by Marketing with Meaning. With a background in brand management at Proctor & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, Gilbreath is also chief marketing strategist at Bridge Worldwide, one of the nation’s largest digital ad agencies and part of WPP.

Click below for my full Q&A with Gilbreath.  What follows is a highly edited transcript of our conversation. Part 1 runs today, part 2 tomorrow.

MP3 File

(Note:  Subscribe to all hear2.0 podcasts on iTunes here)

Bob, you’re not simply a marketing guru, you’re not simply a guy from a digital agency, you’re someone who has actually been in the trenches trying to market brands to real flesh and blood people for years.

Yeah, I got to do some of the early work in digital marketing at P&G and enjoyed that, but I saw a lot of my peers and my management didn’t get it and couldn’t really figure it out. We were looking at banner ads and basic emails and websites and they weren’t cutting it. We were all looking for something more and something different. 

I have spent about 10 years now figuring out where marketing is going and how to elevate it beyond just putting a message in front of someone’s face, and I think that’s really what this book is: A guide for the traditional marketers who are trying to figure out where the world is going and meet it head-on in tactics and in overall marketing strategy. 

I think one of the things we should discuss is how your guide to marketers can also be a guide to media partners of marketers (like radio) who, ideally, should be in the same game as their marketing clients, correct? 

I hope so. Yes. 

One of the quotes that you have in your book that I found particularly amusing was “If baseball were measured like advertising, you would only count the pitches.” 

Exactly.

That’s talking about the “impressions” that have been the basis for marketing for the past 50 years. With the rise of mass brands and mass media, impressions – getting in front of pairs of eyeballs – has been the way the world has worked. 

Unfortunately, that can be several steps away from growing sales or not. 

Well, let’s talk about that, because ultimately what’s of interest to the marketers is growing sales or revenue or whatever the metric happens to be. But clients do have metrics, and those metrics aren’t necessarily eyeballs and ears, right? 

Right. It’s sad, the many ways the media and marketing business has been dumbed down over the years to try to get to that lowest common denominator: Something we can measure across all media – impressions. 

Being in front of someone’s eyes or ears has dumbed down a lot of our business, and I think for media companies it has led the advertising into price wars, where buyers bid down GRP’s to whomever can give it to them the cheapest. 

This really ignores the chance that the media companies can partner with marketers to add more value and get higher sales. 

I think one of the great strengths of radio is that as a result of its tremendous reach, as a result of its universal availability and usage, an awful lot of people come to the party and consume that content, thus giving us the ability to connect these folks with marketers in some creative and meaningful ways, and not simply through traditional spot buys. Would you agree with that? 

Yes. Exactly.

One of the things that we’ve been trying to do with our clients who are more forward-thinking is to discourage them from getting their media agency to contact dozens of different media companies and get the lowest possible price. 

Instead, we encourage them to concentrate the dollars and find a media partner that can be more creative, that can add more value and bring something else to the marketing you’re trying to do. 

One of my favorite examples was a program we did with the Healthy Choice brand. We came up with an idea to launch a new line of products for them, great-tasting, ready-to-eat meals. So we created some lunchtime entertainment – live improv videos during lunch when people at offices who are eating these meals actually look for entertainment online.

Now instead of doing that program and finding lots of different places where we could get banner ads, we actually partnered with MSN and spent the bulk of our dollars with MSN. 

We said, “hey, what else can you guys bring to the table to make this a better program?” They brought in different content from their network on MSN. They were able to help us with the cost of staging the videos, which can really add up and has big bursts of activity during lunchtime. Those are all things that help us save money and be more effective by pooling those dollars in a great place.

Best of all, we ended up blowing away our numbers. 

The trend is away from marketing as “impressions” and towards “marketing with meaning.” Can you explain what “marketing with meaning” is? 

Sure. I’m saying that we’re entering a world where the interruptive model of advertising no longer works, where people are either ignoring the messages – the 3000 ads they get every day – or using technology like DVR’s or even satellite radio to actively skip advertising. 

In this world, you can’t force more and more impressions.

What you’ve got to do is turn your marketing into something that people choose to engage with or advertising that itself adds value to people’s lives. 

For example, in that Healthy Choice program we did research that said 60% of office workers whom we were targeting with our launch regularly eat lunch at their desks, and when they sit down at lunch, they often are surfing the Internet and they’re not doing work or work emails; they’re taking a break to do fun surfing. So they’ll go to Facebook, they’ll see some viral videos, and that’s where we found some opportunity to create entertainment for them at their desks with these Healthy Choice improv programs. 

We actually give them chances to choose what would happen next in the programs.

So, even through the entertainment itself, they were making choices and, of course, seeing the lunch being eaten and seeing people have a lot of fun with the meal at the same time. 

And the last chapter of that story is that it led to increased sales for Healthy Choice, right? 

Right. 

This gets to the importance of having a metric that is different from “impressions” or whatever other kind of interruptive metric you might have. 

Right. In this case, we could have put television ads out showing fake scenes of improv theater, but here we’re inviting people to come in and experience this entertainment. MSN helped us drive some awareness, but it was really up to the people on the network to choose to go watch the videos. 

Right now we actually have more than 5000 people logged on to see the videos that we have. They’re not even live anymore! The program ended over a year ago, but people still keep coming back! And that’s another benefit of this great entertainment content that you produce: It can last for quite a while.

Interruptive advertising doesn’t work as well as it used to. But you’re not saying that it doesn’t work at all, right? 

Not necessarily. But you’ve got to offer something of value. 

For example, on television infomercials are some of the least skipped ads because the advertising itself adds value. It’s interesting. It’s new. People do want to see what’s out there. They do want to be entertained. They do want to be informed. But you’ve got to have something really compelling. 

So some of that more traditional media can still work but it’s got to work a heck of a lot harder and get through the filters consumers place over their eyes and ears. 

So are you saying that if I repeat my 800-number five times in the course of a 60-second spot, that’s not meaningful enough?

No, but doing things like “Will it Blend” for Blendtec Blenders, their viral program that shows people blending up 2 x 4s and iPods to show the power of the blender, that kind of stuff works. 

Because it relates to the benefit of the actual device, right? 

And, frankly, it’s interesting and different and not just another carrot thrown in there.

[Part 2 of my conversation with Bob Gilbreath comes tomorrow.  In it, Bob spells out exactly what radio broadcasters should do to provide more meaningful marketing that benefits both clients and listeners]

In my earlier post, I described how broadcasters tend to misunderstand (at best) and abuse (at worst) the term “local,” thinking that the mailing address of the local radio station somehow entitles it to unique privileges versus its competitors, even in today’s digital era.

Today I draw your attention to a fantastic new book called No Size Fits All: From Mass Marketing to Mass Handselling, which discusses the implications of a digital world on our business, our economy, and our culture.

“Anything that can go digital, ultimately will.  And when something goes digital, it inevitably goes global.  And the more things go digital, the more they are rewarded with explosive growth, enhanced scale, [etc.].”

Differentiation is made between varying shades of “local” and “global.”

The two categories that are most relevant for radio are these:  ”Intrinsically local” and “functionally local.”

Author Tom Hayes writes:

INTRINSICALLY LOCAL:

These are businesses that are typically small, rarely serve more than the immediate neighborhood, and are often single-proprietor.  You frequent them because the services they provide can only really be provided locally.  Think barbershops, beauty salons, convenience stores, gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores, automobile repair shops.

For the most part, these enterprises will not be affected at all by the new global economy.  No matter how much the world is networked, you will still drive down the street to get a quart of milk.

That is not “Radio.”

Tom goes on:

HABITUALLY LOCAL:

These enterprises, though often assumed to be intrinsically local, are in fact highly vulnerable to an increasingly networked world – especially after the right technological revolution or quantum leap in communications or delivery systems.  Classic examples of this are the local printer, the video rental store, the local record store – all were assumed to be enduring local enterprises – until they were rendered all but extinct by, respectively, desktop publishing, Netflix, and MP3 technology.  The LOCAL hardware store, green grocer, and department store were all overwhelmed by improved distribution and inventory systems implemented by national chains.

The awful truth is that, with only a handful of exceptions, every local business and institution is under competitive risk from the newly emerging business order.

THAT is the radio industry’s category.  Vulnerable.

Vulnerable to consolidation.  Vulnerable to centralized, nationalized, globalized content and delivery mechanisms.  Vulnerable to substitutes and alternatives capable of localizing or personalizing content and features as well as or better than a radio station can.

So I call on the leaders of the radio industry to stop harping on the illusory talking point of “local” and to start harping on the advantages that are or could be unique to radio in a local market.

Fail to understand the difference at your peril.

You have a megaphone – a big one.  And the permission to use it to connect consumers and marketers and to carry those consumers wherever they want to go.

That is the leverage-point.

Anything else is a mirage in global media desert.

This is where top-ranked morning shows go when they go off the air – to the garage.

At least, that’s the destination (so far) for San Diego’s legendary Jeff & Jer.

As you’ll see from the archive, this is a very occasional show indeed.

As an aside, my wife and I were looking for updates during the disappearance of Chelsea King, who lived near our neighborhood.  And where did we find the best updates?  From Jeff & Jer and their producer, Tommy.

Hmmm.

Later this month I will be presenting at the European Radiodays Conference in Copenhagen.  The topic is “The American Way – Radio in the homeland of Apple & Google.”

And since I’m speaking for an entire nation, I’d like your input to the making of this presentation!

Here’s the way the presentation is described:

For many years European radio has learned a lot from American radio. Today the situation has changed a bit as the markets are quite different. But there are still lessons to be learned from US – the homeland of Apple and Google.

But what are the news trends over there? What formats are working – and what formats are coming up both in terms of station, content and much more. What are the latest developments within US radio. You get a wide perspective on US radio right now – this is what European radio can learn from US radio right now.

So here’s your chance to express your ideas to an International audience of broadcasters.

Here’s what you can do:

1.  ”Fan” me at http://www.facebook.com/markramseymedia and you’ll be in the loop on ideas as they arise (that’s the spot where you not only get all these blog posts but also tons of other timely tidbit-sized tips on radio’s future).

2.  Go to my Facebook discussion page here:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=13950&uid=115708565063

3.  At that discussion topic, enter your ideas!

4.  Come back later this month and I’ll share the complete presentation with you!

My effort in this blog and in all my digital assets is to provide you with value that provokes and informs – stuff you can use in your job and your career.

My hope is that this presentation is on track with that goal.

I’ll make sure to include your names in the postscript to the presentation!