by Scott Howard | Jan 14, 2018 | Really? The Personal ScLoHo, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo
Hindsight is fascinating.
This year, 2018 there are going to be multiple anniversaries of events that happened half a century ago.
1968.
It was a year had many life changing events including civil rights battles, political assassinations, and even some good stuff too.
I was there, but I wasn’t too.
I was just an eight year old kid.
Getting ready to get hosed down after a muddy day at Franke Park Day Camp
My youth was the 60’s and 70’s, yet I really didn’t pay much attention to the events of the world. As kids, we didn’t care.
News came to us in the daily newspaper, but I wanted to read the comics.
Instead of 24 hour cable news channels, you had to sit down for the half hour national news from CBS, ABC, or NBC at the scheduled time when it was delivered live in the early evening.
Radio stations were mostly music with brief newscasts. WOWO radio was the dominate station in Fort Wayne, (and still is).
I was reading this pictorial history from the Atlantic today and noticed that it was 50 years ago that the Beatles released their White Album, but I wasn’t into music yet. I was just 8 years old and it wasn’t until I turned 11 that I bought my first record.
Many of you who read this weren’t born yet, or like me you were just a kid and enjoying kid stuff.
And living through those times in the 60’s and 70’s were not personally life changing for the most part. What mattered more was what was going on in the lives of the people around me, my parents and friends.
A couple of closing thoughts:
Despite the ability to know anything, anytime, on demand, don’t get sucked in to the day to day news that will be hardly a memory years from now. It will wear you out, unnecessarily.
Let your kids be kids.
You might think that I’d be emotionally scared from living through a year that had so much turmoil, but no, it was just a blip because I got to pay attention to kid stuff and not adult stuff.
As I mentioned at the beginning, Hindsight is fascinating.
20 years from now or even 50, I wonder what events in this year will be remembered?
Here’s the link to the Atlantic story that inspired this piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/01/50-years-ago-in-photos-a-look-back-at-1968/550208/
by Scott Howard | Sep 19, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Media, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
A new survey of nearly 5,000 Americans sheds some light on where we get our news.
Comparing 2017 to 2016, we see some slippage and some increases.
Not surprising to me is that the increases are related to our pocket computers, those devices you and I call our smartphones.
News Websites or Apps grew 8% in the past year and is now tied with Local TV which lost the most ground (7%)
Social Media grew slightly too by 3%.
I was happy to see that local radio news is still strong in the survey, as I work for WOWO radio, our local news talk radio station. There was another talk station in town but they switched format this month to rock music. And we have our local NPR affiliate that provides news and talk too, but has a fraction of the listenership that WOWO has.
(WOWO’s website also gets the most visits of all our Federated Media stations, company wide, so we are on top of that trend too.)
Also on the survey, was cable TV news like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News; national TV news like ABC, CBS and NBC; and print newspapers, but all showed year to year declines.
None of this is surprising to me. What does surprise me is the local businesses that continue to use some of these media for advertising. But I’ll talk about that some other day. I’ve written a couple stories recently about local news changes in the Fort Wayne area and also about the status of radio listenership locally. You can click on those links if you missed them.
Which reminds me, the phone book arrived this week. My wife took care of it before I got home. I found it in the recycling bin waiting to be hauled away on trash day.
by Scott Howard | Sep 5, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Fort Wayne, ScLoHo's Media, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Where do you get your local news? Is traditional media dead yet?
These two questions have been on my mind for quite awhile and then last month we learned that a Fort Wayne news institution was making a major change:
The News-Sentinel is ending distribution of its afternoon newspaper as it shifts to a digital platform, Fort Wayne Newspapers announced.
Subscribers will still be offered News-Sentinel content in the morning Journal Gazette, as part of a renewal of the two newspapers’ joint operating agreement.
I wasn’t surprised, but I was saddened. In my youth, I was a paperboy of the afternoon paper in Fort Wayne and had a fondness for the paper even though it has been years since I bought one.
The survival of two local daily newspapers in a city the size of Fort Wayne was only due to some planning decades ago that allowed the morning and afternoon newspapers that were independently owned to form a Joint Operating Agreement. This J.O.A. was limited to advertising revenue and kept the news and editorial staffs separate for each paper.
For the past dozen years, I have had access to publication numbers of the two newspapers because of my affiliation with the Radio Advertising Bureau and their access to the numbers reported to the Audit Bureau of Circulations that keeps track of this data.
In 1999, the afternoon paper had over 45,000 subscribers, and that number was in the 20 thousand range 10 years later. The last report I have access to listed a total of 12,000 weekly subscribers to the News-Sentinel back in 2014 and odds are they were less than 10 thousand last week.
This is not just a local phenomenon. The decline of printed daily newspaper circulation has been going on for decades with alternatives popping up online. Many papers moved their content online and used those numbers to boost their subscription numbers that they would report, but the revenue didn’t match up.
A few years ago, I had coffee with a young woman who was in charge of selling digital advertising for the Fort Wayne Newspapers and I remember my advice:
Your job is going to be to keep advertisers spending levels where they are today. The businesses are going to decrease their spending in the printed paper and you can help them stay by migrating those funds into digital products.
I laid out a 5 year plan and at the end of those 5 years, 90% of an advertisers budget was being spent in digital media with the remaining 10% on a souvenir collectors edition of the printed newspaper. She wasn’t allowed to follow my advice and now she works elsewhere.
A couple years later, after I was interviewed to become the Digital Advertising Sales Manager for the Fort Wayne Newspapers they decided to eliminate the position and combine the sales departments of both digital and print.
So where do we as consumers get our news? I still see people reading the morning paper in Fort Wayne on the days I visit a coffee shop. But those numbers have been declining too.
Fort Wayne has over 20 radio stations and a number of TV stations. The television stations that offer local news include a CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox affiliate. According to the ratings, the CBS station has double the audience for local news over the ABC station and the NBC stations audience didn’t hardly register in the latest survey. The Fox station has one newscast at a time that no one else does (10 pm).
On the radio side, WOWO Radio is the only station with a fully staffed full time news staff that does live local news every 30 minutes from 5am until 6pm weekdays, and more frequently between 5 and 9am. Yes, there are other stations that offer local news, but not all day and not to the degree that WOWO does. WOWO has additional news sources and providers in neighboring communities from our co-owned stations in Warsaw, Elkhart, South Bend and Goshen along with “news-partners” at local print and TV stations.
Long ago, WOWO’s news slogan was, “Where you go when you need to know”, and as a News Talk formatted radio station for over 20 years, the commitment remains. WOWO recognized that where we get out news continues to evolve. Nearly every local news story is found on WOWO.com.
News and Weather alerts are sent via text to subscribers. Updates on Facebook and Twitter are posted online too. WOWO is owned by Federated Media and WOWO supplies the news to our sister stations in Fort Wayne including WMEE, 98.9 The Bear & K-105.
Having worked for a couple of the other radio station groups, they simply don’t have a news department like WOWO & Federated Media. When I was there, it was more like grab the morning newspaper and pull a couple of headlines to rewrite and call it a newscast, style of news. And to be fair, there are two radio stations on the non-profit part of the FM dial that have news departments of varying degrees.
News is not the only reason we have traditional media. My original two questions when I started this were:
Where do you get your local news? Is traditional media dead yet?
Individual TV shows on the major broadcast networks can still find a healthy sized audience, but those networks are not filling all their prime time weekly slots with new shows. Lot’s of repeats will air on Friday and Saturday nights, I’ve observed. Broadcast TV is trying to adjust to the on-demand world of entertainment we have now.
Music radio stations have been battling alternatives for decades and usually are still winning if they are locally connected to their listeners and their community. The Radio Advertising Bureau still tells us that over 90% of folks age 13 and older listen to a radio station every week.
From a business standpoint, you as a business person need to understand that there are still some very valuable traditional media sources that you can use to advertise with. It’s just not the same as it was 30 years ago or even 10 years ago and it may require someone to help guide you to make smart decisions on where to advertise.
That’s where I can help. I make recommendations beyond what I can sell to you myself, when I see an opportunity that you should take advantage of. Want help? Let’s talk.
by Scott Howard | Sep 23, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
WOWO radio is the radio station I work for, doing advertising and marketing consulting, helping business people make smart advertising and marketing decisions, and selling advertising solutions on WOWO and with our digital options.
But this is not about me, or WOWO directly. It is about the talk radio advantage for advertisers.
This is a conversation I have several times each month. It is about the mental state of people who are exposed to your advertising messages.
We are going to look at the big picture and include many of the places you can spend money to advertise.
Start with television. When you and I sit down to watch a show, we are paying attention to the show. When commercials come on, most of us stop paying attention, at least not the same level of attentiveness that we have during the show.
Newspapers and magazines. Unless it’s a fashion magazine that is chocked full of 50+ pages of ads before the articles start, we are not really interested in the ads. We bought the paper to read the stories, get the scores, or see if someone died.
Social Media. Facebook for example is a place to go to find out what’s happening with friends and family. They have managed to work ads and sponsored posts into out timelines so we can’t help but seem them but we are not on Facebook to check out the ads.
Radio. Not all radio stations are created equal. For this discussion, let’s look at the difference between music based stations and talk based stations. The reason we tune in to a station that plays music, any music for that matter, is to hear music that we like. In Fort Wayne we have country music stations, rock music stations, pop music stations and plenty of variations.
Every listener to a music radio station selects that particular station because they want to hear that particular style of music. Anytime the music stops for any length of time, say 2 minutes, we pay less attention. If the station plays 5 or 7 minutes of commercials in a row, we really tune out and pay less attention. Some may even change stations. The reason we listen to music radio stations is to hear music. It’s to escape. Anything other than music on a music station is an irritant.
Talk based radio stations are a different animal. Stations like WOWO which are a combination of News and Talk have listeners who tune in for information. The programming on talk radio stations is brain food, not escapism like the music on a music radio station. When the newscaster or program host is talking, listeners are paying attention to the words. It’s the information that people want to hear.
So what happens when your commercial airs on a talk radio station like WOWO? 1st off, it’s not interrupting music, taking the place of your favorite song, so it is less of an irritant. Next, if your ad is a live endorsement from the radio personality, that is the very best kind of commercial because you have the credibility of the radio personality combined with the credibility of WOWO and a receptive audience that is listening to hear the talk, whether it is about politics or your business, it doesn’t matter.
If you air regular recorded commercials on a talk radio station like WOWO, you still get a receptive audience that is not turned off by talking on the radio and you are on WOWO which adds credibility to your business.
Last year I discovered another way to use WOWO’s talk radio format to help your business and that is with our live 10 second sponsorship messages of news, weather, traffic and sports. These are done live by the newscasters and program hosts and are embedded in the program and carry almost as much weight as a full endorsement.
This relationship between the WOWO listeners and the WOWO air staff with our news and talk radio format is one of trust. For many it’s as strong a bond of trust as a trusted friend. You don’t get that with a newspaper ad. You don’t get that with a TV commercial, You don’t get that with nearly any other form of advertising you can spend your money on.
This is the Talk Radio Advantage WOWO advertisers receive. Want more info? Let’s talk.
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