You Can Only Coast Downhill

by Scott Howard | Jun 14, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

What are you doing to build your business right now?

It’s a question I ask when I am in front of a business owner.

Sadly, many don’t have a plan.

Or some are afraid of what the future might hold and they are behaving very cautiously.

Too cautious I dare to say.

“Oh, we’re going to take a few months off from advertising and see what happens”, is something I hear by many.

Good luck with that I say. Sometimes I say it to their face. Sometimes I say it to myself and write them off.

We are going thru a time of uncertainty that some of you are experiencing for the very first time. However there is plenty of history in the recent past that points to a positive outcome for those who are willing to step out instead of retreat.

About 14 years ago, in 2008 our economy was seeing economic collapse that created panic and downturns that were just as scary to the casual observer. For years, lenders were taking us down a path that was going to create a crash, and basically in 2008, it all came crumbling down. In a nutshell, lenders had been told to make it easier for people to buy a house. Sub-prime loans were a part of this along with no-doc mortgages.

I saw first hand how the no-doc mortgage loan was abused. I had a client that was running a mortgage company and we were supposed to meet about 1 o’clock one afternoon in 2008. I got to his office before he returned from lunch and overheard one of his mortgage guys reviewing an application with a client over the phone. As their customer told them their monthly income, the mortgage guy said, we’re going to bump that up so we can get you a lower interest rate.

Afterward, I spoke to the owner of the mortgage company about what I heard and he told me that was common practice now since they didn’t need to provide any documentation to back up the figures they were putting on the loan applications. Also they could get people into bigger, more expensive homes this way and the mortgage lender would make more money without risk because they were just a broker and these questionable loans were sold off and he had no liability as the mortgage broker.

I decided not to renew his advertising contract when it expired a few weeks later because I had a gut feeling that this was not right and I didn’t want my radio listeners to be taken advantage off by this company that was putting people’s finances in jeopardy in this manner.

When things took a crash in 2009, this guy’s mortgage company went out of business. That was a good thing.

There were other companies that went under back then but it wasn’t because they were crooked. Many of them did what I see going on right now and they decided to be conservative and act like a scared turtle and hide in their shell, waiting for things to get better.

They decided to coast for awhile.

Problem is, you can only coast downhill.

Sure if you have enough momentum you will continue to be fine for a bit.

But if you stop inviting people to do business with you, eventually they will stop doing business with you.

And that’s all that advertising really is… a paid invitation from you and your company to potential customers to consider you when they are going to buy.

Some of your best customers will eventually decrease their spending or stop. It may have nothing to do with you, just circumstances in their life. For this reason alone, the average business will need to replace 20% of last years customers with brand new customers just to stay even.

That 20% number fluctuates greatly depending on the type of business you are in.

We have roofers advertising on my radio station that offer lifetime warranties. That means they will never be able to sell that customer another roof until the customer moves to a new house. Roofers like that have to replace nearly 100% of their customers every year!

Besides the business owners that say they are going to coast for awhile, there are others that are in the start-up or growth phase of their business plan and those are going to advertise. They are going to earn the trust of your potential customers now and once a consumer buys from someone else, they are out of the market to buy from you.

I actually don’t mind the fact that some businesses are going to coast for now because it makes room for those that want to grow and those are the ones me and my team enjoy working with.

I’ll boil it down to this:

If you want to grow, contact me.

If you are considering coasting, contact me and we’ll continue this discussion.

If you have already made up your mind to pull back and coast, thank you for making it easier for your competition that I’ll be working with to take your place.

Apples, Oranges and Gasoline

by Scott Howard | Mar 8, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights

The main point I’m about to share with you is that not all advertising is the same and that’s good.

Also you need to understand the differences before you say yes to spending anything.

Apple, Oranges, and Gasoline.

At first glance the first two, Apples and Oranges have nothing in common with Gasoline.

However consider this:

Apples, Oranges and Gasoline are all fuels.

Yes, Gasoline is the most obvious fuel because that is what we pump into our cars, but Apples and Oranges are fuel for our bodies. It is because our forefathers were able to fuel their bodies with food including fruit like Apples and Oranges that the science and technology was invented and created to produce Gasoline.

And now, Gasoline, and other petroleum based fuels are needed to transport the Apples and Oranges from their trees to our homes.

I bet you never thought about Apples, Oranges and Gasoline like this before.

Perhaps you are also wondering what Apples, Oranges and Gasoline have to do with advertising and marketing.

I just used them to create a word picture or two as we dig deeper.

Let’s pretend Apples and Oranges are two different radio stations with different formats. The Apple station plays Country Music and the Orange station features News and Talk as their format.

The expectation of what you’re going to get when you bite into an apple is very different than a bite of orange. One isn’t better than the other, they are just different. Some people prefer one over the other and it may also depend on the person’s mood or time of day.

Same applies to radio stations. I know some people who only listen to News and Talk radio during the week, but on the weekend, they crank up the music of their favorite station.

Just like their are differences in the chemical and nutritional composition of Apples and Oranges, there are also distinct differences between music based radio stations and news talk radio stations that you should know about before you purchase radio or any broadcast advertising. It’s not just as simple as picking your favorite fruit.

What about that Gasoline? In our story today, let’s equate Gasoline with Social Media.

Both Gasoline and Social Media can be very beneficial. They can both be very dangerous. The properties of Gasoline that powers our cars are the same properties that can be explosively dangerous.

Same with Social Media. With the growth of platforms like Facebook, I’ve connected with dozens of people from my past along with made hundreds of new connections. That’s the good side. Social Media sites like Facebook have also fueled some terrible things and created divisions and ignited countless negative things too numerous to mention today.

Apples, Oranges and Gasoline can work together for good. I’ve seen Social Media work in sync with News Talk and Music radio stations too.

My challenge to you as a business owner is what I said at the beginning, that not all advertising is the same so please work with someone that understands how to use each and how not to use each.

It’s more than the cost, it’s the purpose of what you want to accomplish.

I just looked up the cost of a gallon of Apple Juice, gallon of Orange Juice and a gallon of Gasoline and while Gas is still the cheapest of the three, you wouldn’t drink a glass of gasoline as a substitute for your morning O.J. right?

Need some guidance figuring all this out for your business? Contact me.

The Trust Factor

by Scott Howard | Feb 15, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

A couple of Thursday mornings ago, a couple things happened before 8am.

An email from Insider Radio that included the headline:

Americans May Love Social Media, But Survey Finds It’s Radio That They Trust.

Also it was the beginning of day 2 of a weather-induced work from home day as our area was getting non-stop snow with predictions of well over 15 inches which becomes much more severe when the winds kick in and “drifts up to 4 feet” were predicted by the national weather service.

(I heard that prediction listening to my local news/talk radio station WOWO.) We ended up with a little less and by Friday, I was back at the office and by Monday most of the rest of the city was back to normal.

Social Media has been the darling media that normal Joe’s and Jill’s turned to for communication to the masses. What began with MySpace and then Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and numerous others became the bright and shiny new place for advertisers to run ads. Promises of “hundreds of people for mere pennies” and “trackable results” along with “targeted ads that produce less waste” were all made and continue to be made.

To which I can say, not really.

Look, I am speaking from a multitude of perspectives. Yes, I’ve spent the majority of my career in radio. However a couple of times I worked full-time in the online world. First time was 2011 when I anticipated never returning to radio and instead I was highly immersed in the digital world where we crafted websites that were built to convert traffic into sales. We looked at, what appeared to be heat-map technology and a deep dive into analytics to design websites that improved the UX or User Experience and so I know how that is done and not just the technology but psychology behind it all.

I also worked full-time for a multi-million dollar world-wide company that transitioned from a print catalog sales model to an e-commerce based outfit. I was one of a half dozen specialists in the Internet Marketing Department and my chief role was Social Media for our multiple brands.

Then there is my own personal success story of creating an online following and connections with the ScLoHo brand identity, so I am a believer in the power of online and if you and your business can’t be found online… well you simply don’t exist. Get your company a website now. Claim your social media profiles for you and your company. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram at the bare minimum.

However, if that is all you do, the online stuff, you are being short sighted and leaving yourself very vulnerable.

It was just announced that Facebook actually lost members recently. That’s right the biggest Social Media company in the universe, saw a decline.

But that’s not the real reason you are vulnerable. It has to do with the Trust factor.

A dozen years ago I was giving a presentation to students at Huntington University and part of the discussion demonstrated the good stuff that was happening on Facebook. I used the example of my friend Heather who was looking for a new dentist for her family and so she asked for recommendations. Dozens of friends responded with both recommended dentists and a few to avoid. This was modern day word-of-mouth and crowd-sourcing done on a personal level.

However when companies tried to tap into the social networks by running ads, it just wasn’t the same. It was an advertisement, not a personal recommendation. Like so many other forms of advertising, except it started to become annoying because all we wanted to do was see what was going on with our friends and family and instead we were being served ads every few posts on our newsfeeds. I just took a look at my Facebook newsfeed and of the first dozen posts, numbers 2, 7 and 11 were ads.

Another factor creating distrust in Social Media is the political climate for the past several years. I think it has intensified online when we were limited in our ability to gather in-person due to pandemic restrictions.

Here are some quotes from the story I referred to at the beginning of our talk today:

A new MRI-Simmons survey finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans say radio is either “very trustworthy” or “trustworthy” with radio topping every other media type other than newspaper – trailing by a mere one percent difference.

Also:

More than twice as many adults consider radio trustworthy compared to social media. When it comes to fake news, it seems Americans have concluded it is not traditional media outlets that are the source, but rather online media options.

And finally:

In its analysis, Katz says the MRI-Simmons research shows why radio is an “ideal platform” for advertisers looking to make their voice heard and their message count. “Radio is a trusted environment with vested local connections to consumers across demographics, and all types of media users,” it says, adding, “Radio provides the best chance for messaging to break through, resonate, and not be mistrusted by consumers.”

Contact me for more information and insight.

The Scott Howard Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast

by Scott Howard | Feb 1, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

This year marks the completion of 5 years of creating, hosting, recording and producing a weekly podcast and it seems like an appropriate time to introduce myself or reintroduce if we’ve been friends for awhile. By the way, don’t worry when I say completion, I decided to use that word and not conclusion. I’m not planning on stopping my weekly articles and podcast episodes, it’s just that we are entering year number 6 of the podcast.

First off, my background. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana and as a kid dreamed of doing all kinds of professions. Astronaut and race car driver, gave way to television production by the time I was in middle school and then high school set the stage for radio. When I was growing up, I listened to Bob Sievers in the morning on WOWO Radio to see if we had school delays. Back in the 70’s over 70% of people in Northeast Indiana listened to WOWO in the morning. Some to hear about the weather and school closings, others for farm news delivered by Bob and farm director Jay Gould on the Little Red Barn radio show on WOWO. I also listened to Chris Roberts in the afternoon after school and Ron Gregory at night on WOWO as a young teenager and that was what planted the seed to be a radio personality.

WMEE was another Fort Wayne radio station that was influential as they played the Top 40 hits of the day. WMEE was AM radio station at 1380 in the 70’s and WOWO was also on AM at 1190. At the end of the 70’s WMEE moved to 97.3 FM where they have been ever since.

My high school, Concordia started an FM station when I was there and that was my first on-air experience. After graduating I began a full time on-air career at WBAT in Marion, Indiana, followed by WIOU in Kokomo and then I ended up on WMEE for 3 years. I returned to Kokomo, Indiana for about 3 years on the air and as Program Director at WZWZ until the station was sold. I worked briefly on the air at WXIR in Indianapolis before moving my family to Detroit and WMUZ where I first ventured into the advertising and marketing side of the business.

I did some additional on-air work both part-time and full time at stations WMUZ, WBTU, WGL, WFWI and WAJI. In 2003 I entered the ad world in Fort Wayne, working for a group of 6 radio stations for more than 8 years and it was during that time I began blogging using the online name ScLoHo.

ScLoHo is a mashup of my first, middle and last names. Take the first two letters on Scott Louis Howard and it spells ScLoHo. Many people have attempted to pronounce it without success. Often they leave out some letters or add extra letters. Not even Alexa knows how to pronounce ScLoHo.

I had multiple ScLoHo blogs on the Google Blogger platform and my friend Kevin challenged me to create an online reputation under my birth name of Scott Howard so in 2011, when I was working fulltime in the webworld, I launched the first version of the Scott Howard dot me website using over 10,000 articles I had already published as the foundation.

Ever since around 2004 or 2005, I have published a minimum of one new article per week. I used to do it daily and multiple times per day, that is how I ended up with over 10,000 articles in just 6 years.

15,000 articles and counting was what I was continuing to work on when I was approached in 2016 with a request to do a podcast.

More on the podcast in a moment, but first back to me and radio. In 2013, I was hired to join WOWO radio, not on the air, but as one of the Local Advertising Sales People. Official job title was Account Executive and I added Marketing Consultant too it because that was what I did besides selling advertising schedules. By 2019, I grew to be the top local advertising account executive not just at WOWO but in our entire company at Federated Media which included a dozen radio stations and nearly 40 A.E.’s.

At the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, before the pandemic hit, Federated Media had a couple of management changes. My boss, Ben took over as the Federated Media Fort Wayne Vice-President and General Manager and I became to General Sales Manager for WOWO. These were not “automatic” promotions due to longevity. Both Ben and myself were promoted from within after our company conducted extensive nation wide searches to find the best leaders for management. Both Ben and myself are now in our 3rd year in our current positions with Federated Media.

Let’s go back to 2016. Ben and another manager, Suzee were given the task of starting an advertising oriented podcast for Federated Media. Podcasts were still an early adopter thing 6 years ago and Federated Media wanted to get in on the ground floor.

Ben and Suzee, were aware of my weekly articles I was writing about advertising and marketing on my website at Scott Howard dot me and they might have been aware that I had experience talking behind a microphone too, so they approached me to consider being the one to launch this podcast. After a little bit of thought, prayer and negotiation, I said yes and by March of 2017 The Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast was launched as a weekly audio version of the articles I was writing and publishing.

While the written form of this is article 15,000 and something. This is also episode 250 of the podcast.

Who chose the name of the podcast and why? I did. Because of my online identity as ScLoHo and the subject matter dealing with media and marketing, that’s why those words were selected.

Why is it the “Genuine” ScLoHo podcast? As a way to clearly claim my work. Several years ago when I was just publishing online under ScLoHo, I discovered someone was stealing my articles and republishing them on another website site without my permission. I also voice my own podcast and identify myself as Scott Howard in each podcast episode.

One change was made a few years ago with the advent of smart speakers. I discovered that Alexa doesn’t know how to pronounce ScLoHo so I amended the name to Scott Howard’s Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast. Now if you ask Alexa to play the Scott Howard Genuine Podcast, she usually knows where to find it.

Unlike the audio version of this article, nearly every weekly episode is less than 10 minutes. Just long enough to give you an update without eating up too much of your time.

As we move forward this year, I’m going to revisit and update some of the topics I have covered in the past along with keeping you current on the latest trends and thinking to help you with your advertising and marketing as you run your businesses.

There are some Timeless Human Relationship Principles that should be applied to your marketing and advertising and that is where we will start again in some upcoming articles and episodes.

Wrap Up and Step Up

by Scott Howard | Dec 21, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

Twas the end of December and all through the land,

Lots of creatures were stirring, children, woman and man.

The hustle and bustle of the holidays are here,

And nearly everyone is attempting to be of good cheer.

The retailers are hoping to rake in more bucks,

While they alternate between taking care of customers and unloading trucks.

The advertising salespeople are doing their best,

to reach their customers, sell a few more ads, meet their budgets and then finally get some rest.

I could continue to write and talk in verse,

but honestly I’m not that talented, as a lyricist, I’m cursed.

So like many of you who are taking a break, this is my last column and podcast until 2022.

For those of you who are in the broadcasting business, I have an invitation for you to join me on Thursday, January 13th at 2pm eastern time for a live event called the 2022 Radio Sales Lift Off.

This event will be on the Clubhouse App, so you’ll need your smartphone, Radio consultant Loyd Ford reached out to me earlier this year to contribute to his Encourager series for people in the broadcasting business and I’ve been writing a monthly article.

This event on January 13th is the creation of Loyd and will be co-hosted by another radio veteran, Alec Drake. They asked me along with broadcaster Chuck Wood, I wonder if that’s his real name or an on-air name, to be their panelists.

Here’s what Alec said about it recently on LinkedIN and his own website:

We are all deep into thinking about next year’s sales strategies, so add this appointment to your calendar, “The 2022 Sales Lift-Off”. Join Loyd Ford from Rainmaker Pathway Consulting Works and me on Clubhouse for a panel discussion by frontline managers to discuss Q1, sales team recruiting, and actionable revenue ideas for 2022!

and…

Join us live on the Clubhouse app Thursday, January 13, 2022, @ 2 p.m. Eastern/11 a.m. Pacific for a revenue-focused event that will take place quarterly for sales managers, market managers, and local sellers.

Loyd Ford from Rainmaker PathwayConsulting Works along with Alec Drake will open up a panel of sales partners to discuss a strong finish to Q1, recruiting sales staff, and a closing roundtable with actionable items to help you and your team grow revenues. The Revenue Partners for this Q12022 Live Event:

Chuck Wood – VP/GM of Delta Media Corp., a multi-media media company comprised of seven television and nine radio stations in Broussard, Louisiana

Scott Howard – General Sales Manager at WOWO Radio/Federated Media, Ft. Wayne, Indiana

– Actionable sales ideas – Recruiting Strategies – Get Your 22 Momentum – Share and Learn

Have a safe, relaxing and prosperous end of 2021, my friends.

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