by Scott Howard | Nov 17, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Fort Wayne, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
I was recently asked to share an infograph with you which prompted what I am writing today, Is Bigger Also Better? I’m going to limit my thoughts on the subject to the business world and some personal insights too.
First the infograph:
Anything surprise you?
There were a couple of items that I had forgotten about some of the U.S. based companies and as Americans, we are mostly ignorant about the companies that are headquartered in other parts of the world. Rarely have I worked for a company that was as large as any of those mentioned, but I have friends who do.
The bigger a company is, the more they have to lose if they are not diversified. Google did some restructuring and created their own parent company, Alphabet, which is listed above. Most of those on the list are very diversified which has helped them weather the economic ups and downs for not just dozens of years, but well over 100 years.
I don’t work with companies of that magnitude in the day to day work that I do as a marketing coach, consultant and advertising sales person in Fort Wayne Indiana with WOWO radio and Federated Media. Usually when I work with companies that are publicly traded, I work with a subset or division of the parent company which is fine.
Did you notice the revenue numbers listed above were all Billions? Change that to Millions for the level of companies I work with. (There are a couple of exceptions, this year and next year I am working with a company that has annual revenues of over $13,000,000,000.00, but on a local level which is just a small piece of that 13 billion dollar pie.)
It is not uncommon for a company in Fort Wayne that I work with to have over a million dollars in annual revenue. Most consumers in Fort Wayne are probably not aware of the cash flow that is going on in our city.
These local companies with annual sales in the millions are all over the place. I had neighbors in the pizza business, friends I go to church with in the sign business and home repair industries and there are tons of B 2 B businesses that are never given a second thought because they are not retailers.
All of these businesses need guidance and help with their marketing and I enjoy sitting down and asking the right questions to help them form a strategic marketing plan. Sometimes they become my advertising partners and sometimes we just become friends.
A few years ago American Express launched #SmallBusinessSaturday and it continues again this year. Many local retailers will be participating on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. It’s sandwiched in between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
I suspect I am like most of you in my shopping habits. I buy local when possible and also buy from the big boys.
Amazon Wish Lists help me buy for my out of town family. Were you aware that Amazon also supports local non-profits with their Amazon Smile program? I am on the board of directors for Homebound Meals, Inc. of Fort Wayne Indiana and recently made the switch so my Amazon purchases benefit locally. Kroger also has a rewards program that you can sign up for that gives money to the charity of your choice.
But back to the title of this article.
Is Bigger Also Better?
No, but the opposite isn’t true either.
I urge you as a business person to seek out advice on how to be the best you can be no matter your size. An often overlooked piece of your success is how you invite people to spend money with you, that’s part of your marketing and I can help.
I also urge you as a consumer to support your neighbors and their businesses when possible in a variety of ways as I just mentioned.
by Scott Howard | Nov 7, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Fort Wayne, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Women and WOWO radio, a topic that I’ve talked about for nearly 15 years. Today, I have some insight that business owners, especially retailers need to know.
When I started in the radio advertising business in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 2003, I worked for a competing company, not WOWO radio. I spent over 9 years trying to convince people not to advertise with WOWO.
It was this radio station for old white guys was my usual argument, and you want to reach people who have money to spend, right?
A few years ago, I wised up. In November 2013, I started the process to join WOWO and it has been fantastic for multiple reasons but the one I’m going to focus on right now is about the audience of WOWO.
Is it really a bunch of old white guys that listen to WOWO?
Well, yes and no. There are a significant number of men age 50+ who listen and they are important people to reach with your advertising messages. However, the number of women who actively listen is impressive too.
The Women of WOWO are likely to be Baby Boomer age and I’ve got a couple of reasons why that is important that I read in an article from Mediapost. This article emphasizes why you should invite Baby Boomer Women during the holiday season, but it’s appropriate year round. 
Here’s a couple of quotes from the story:
Today, every fifth adult in the United States is a female over 50. They are the healthiest, wealthiest and most active generation of women in history who control half of the country’s discretionary income and 75% of the country’s wealth.
Okay, think about that for a second. 75% of the country’s wealth is in the hands of 20% of the adults in this country. And these are not the grandmas of the past, these women are the healthiest, wealthiest and most active generation of women in history who control half of the country’s discretionary income. 
Wow, that sounds like the perfect group of consumers to aim my advertising and marketing to, right? Problem is most retailers are not inviting these Boomer women to spend money with them.
Instead, they spend less than 10% of their holiday marketing budgets targeting Boomers.
Retailers should devote somewhere between 50 and 75% of their marketing budgets to reach Baby Boomers!
One reason marketers and retailers ignore Boomer women is the belief that they’re not tech savvy enough to keep up with the changing retail environment. With so many businesses moving to online models, the focus is on younger audiences, particularly millennials. But Boomers are much more tech savvy than given credit for, actually spending more online than millennials. Many may prefer the experience of shopping in a store, but they’re perfectly comfy with e-commerce.
The Mediapost article gives some impressive numbers regarding the online habits of Baby Boomer Women. One that really caught my eye was the number who use their smartphone daily for shopping. 
Let’s address another ageism myth and that is that by a certain age, we become blindly brand-loyal. Not true. If you take them for granted and don’t continue to invite them to be your customer, they are ripe for the picking.
Being ignored for years has resulted in many Boomer women abandoning brands to which they’ve been loyal for decades. And now those brands are in the position of having to figure out how to win these consumers back. An excellent first step for brands and retailers wanting to reclaim their loyalty is to take the time to understand what drives Boomers to make a purchase. What are their needs, and the emotional triggers that prompt a purchase? Believe it or not, their needs are similar to those of other generations. They want convenience, an emotional connection to the brand, and to hear a great story that resonates with their lives. And a loyalty program that offers real benefits and lets them know you appreciate their business.
There’s more you need to know:
Sure, Baby Boomers are tech-savvy and often purchase online, but many still prioritize good old-fashioned service above all else. Marketers and retailers can provide that service by sending follow-up emails that provide the opportunity for Boomers to give feedback and make their voices heard. They need to set aside their preconceptions and stop looking at Boomer women through dated stereotypes. Most importantly, they need to recognize that these women are not one homogenous group. All Boomer women are not grandmas or caregivers. Engage them, and let them know you want to build an ongoing relationship with them. 
In today’s world, our economy is heavily influenced by Boomer women. Marketers need to recognize that these consumers are not stuck in the “good old days” and that they don’t prioritize buying the brands with which they grew up. Take the time to build a relationship with these consumers. Make it clear that they’re important to you, and they’ll reward you.
And now let me circle back to the Women of WOWO radio. I took a look at the latest radio rating information I have access to and asked how many women in the Fort Wayne area that are Baby Boomers listen to WOWO and all the other radio station in the survey.
27 radio stations were in the list. I bet you didn’t realize there are that many radio stations in the Fort Wayne area, and actually there are more than that, but the others didn’t have enough Baby Boomer listeners to qualify to be on the list.
WOWO radio is at the top, with over 30,000 Baby Boomer Women listening every week. Number two on the list only has around 20,000. Everyone of those other radio stations have just a fraction of what WOWO has. I can share this list with you privately if you want to see it. 
So to wrap this up, Baby Boomer Women control 75% of the wealth in the United States, even though they only make up 20% of the population. Locally the very best way for retailers to invite them to spend their money with you is with WOWO radio.
I can help you with that. Just ask.
(By the way, the women’s pictures in this article are from my Facebook friends, some of whom I’ve know since we went to high school together 40 years ago, all are Baby Boomers, and one is my bride.)
by Scott Howard | Oct 29, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Really? The Personal ScLoHo, ScLoHo's Fort Wayne, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo
I am constantly surprised that smart people fall for Click-Bait and Fake News these days.
Even more, I’m surprised at the websites that allow this on their pages.
Today I was visiting the newly redesigned website for one of my former hometown newspapers, the News-Sentinel which recently stopped printing their afternoon paper after 100+ years.
Take a look at the ad on the right side of this page.
The beloved Doctor Oz is dead, according to the copy, right?
Nah, it’s both Fake News and Click-Bait.
It’s pretty easy for the trained eye to see that this is an advertisement link and for some reason the people behind this ad decided to use the incorrect age of Dr. Oz. He is only 57 and won’t turn 58 for another 7 months. But most people don’t know that including me until I Googled him.
So what happens if you “click” on this “bait” of “fake news”?
Here’s where the link goes:
The domain FoodJarVase.com, which has a link similar to what I clicked on: https://foodjarvase.com/instructions-for-creating-a-hat/
But look at what appears when you click on the Click Bait Fake News:
Looks like the good doctor is alive and well, and the website belongs to US magazine right? But once you get over the shock that the Doc is not dead, and maybe someone you know has E.D. …
Hang on. Because this is not really the US magazine website. It’s FoodJarVase.com correct?
So who is FoodJarVase.com?
I decided to explore by going to the FoodJarVase.com website and it looks legit. But when I went to their contact page, it smells fishy.
There are two addresses listed, one is complete with a street address in Michigan. I copied and pasted that address into Google and it shows a small house in the streetview of Google Maps. The other address on that page is just a city in Virginia. And the phone numbers were incomplete too.
Next trick was to find out who the FoodJarVase.com domain belongs to. Turns out it is registered to someone in Panama City, Panama.
All kinds of red warning signs should be exploding in your brain right now. Who knows what would happen if you or someone gives their personal info over to this mysterious scam artist.
Please, be smart. Don’t blindly click and give your personal info to websites that are Click Bait and Fake News. And perhaps someone at the http://www.news-sentinel.com/ can clean up the types of ads they allow on their site too.
by Scott Howard | Oct 17, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Fort Wayne, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
The concept of How To Conquer The World is pretty vast and could apply to a multitude of applications, so I’m going to limit this article to the stuff that I’ve learned for 50 years, since I was a 7 year old kid.
I’m also going to talk about the world of business and relationships.
I’ll even narrow it further and limit this to marketing and advertising.
So if you want to know how to conquer the world with military power, this article isn’t for you. Or is it?
First off, you need to pace yourself.
The overnight success stories of others are not what they appear to be. Before the so called overnight successes we see in the world around us, there were plenty of days and nights that did not look like success. 
Set your expectations in proportion to the work you put in. There are 168 hours in this week. You need balance between the things your human body needs and your business passions. Simple things like sleep, food and non-work related activities will help you become stronger, or if you ignore them, that can destroy you.
Would you rather be a big flash in the pan and get 10 minutes of fame or build a long term success? Depending on your age and experience you may answer differently. It’s taken me some time to realize that it’s the long term that is more meaningful.
As I share my story, feel free to picture your own life story too.
When I was a 7 year old I was starting 2nd grade at a new school where I knew no one. Most of my classmates had known each other from kindergarten and 1st grade and I was one of the new kids. Over the next 5 years, I became friends with many of my classmates, but not all. I gained a few close friends out of that initial class of 25 and some of those I still have friendships with due to the connectivity of social media.
7 years later, I went through nearly the same experience as an awkward 14 year old starting at a new high school filled with hundreds of students. I knew 2 of them when I walked in and not that well. Over the course of 4 years, I developed relationships with several, but again most of my classmates had friendships that were 8 years strong before we met.
After my formal education ended, my career path took me to new towns and radio stations where I worked on the air. Some relationships developed and some remain to this day, mostly thru reconnecting online because we all went our own separate ways career wise. Back then, my idea of conquering the world might have been to be a top 40 disc jockey in Chicago or New York. Turns out one of my co-workers got that gig in New York and yet he often recalls his days of working on the air in Fort Wayne Indiana as some of his favorite times.
You really don’t need to conquer the world. Instead you need to build relationships.
In the business world, it’s a matter of connecting with the people who want to either buy what you have to sell; can sell you what you need to buy; or who can connect you to those you need to connect with.
I’m in the advertising and marketing business. Primarily with WOWO Radio in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The same city I was in when I was starting 2nd grade and my freshman years as the new kid in school. I left and returned. Not on purpose, at least the returning part, but here I am 19 years straight as a citizen of Fort Wayne, longer than I have ever lived anywhere.
The long term relationships that you can develop in your life are also the relationships that will help you in business if you treat people with respect and honor. Be true to your word and when you screw up, admit it and apologize.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Learn from them. Learn from others too. Find a mentor and mentor others. Read, talk and most important… listen.
Ask, explore, make changes as needed but remember the only way to conquer the world is one relationship at a time.
The world of advertising and marketing is continuing to evolve.
The mass media outlets like broadcast television networks, ABC, NBC and CBS attract less of the masses as other forms of entertainment and news on different platforms have become available. Similar patterns have occurred in other traditional mass media vehicles. Fort Wayne had two newspapers for decades and now we have just one due to declines in circulation. The number of local radio stations tripled in Fort Wayne from my youth to today and there are plenty of other options to get what radio stations used to offer exclusively.
Fortunately, my radio station, WOWO continues to attract a healthy sized audience with listeners who develop a “relationship” with our on-air personalities, and ours is a good business model for the listeners, the businesses that advertise with us and for the station itself. WOWO is not always the answer, but it might be.
You as a business person, need to determine how to find those individuals that will help you and your business succeed. The advertising and marketing options are nearly infinite compared to a few decades ago, however there are some guiding principles that you should follow that involve relationships that will never go out of style.
Contact me for help to conquer the world, or at least your corner of it.
by Scott Howard | Sep 13, 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
NewsTalk 1190 WOWO Radio in Fort Wayne, Indiana is going to be 100 years old soon. Despite the most recent doomsday report that AM and FM radio stations would be obsolete before WOWO hits 100, I’m here to present some real reasons that the report is both right and wrong.
Broadcast radio is struggling to remain relevant as consumers embrace streaming platforms, according to a groundbreaking study that examines the disruption to radio caused by digital services.
These trends are crippling radio, which is witnessing historic declines in its audience and its relevance to listeners and advertisers. To survive, radio must innovate, learn from other media, and take control of its path forward into the third decade of this century and beyond.
That’s the intro to a 30 page report that says radio stations like the ones I work for are going the way of the phone book. Here’s a direct link to the entire report if you want to really dig in.
A dozen years ago, I was making the same prediction. Music radio was going to be a thing of the past. At the time I worked with legendary Fort Wayne WXKE Radio Icon Doc West and Doc knew the answer to the problem of music radio stations losing listeners to streaming services and satellite radio stations. Live and Locally Relevant. That was the mantra that Doc used to stay at the top of the heap of radio personalities back then.
WOWO radio used to be a music station when I was a kid and the most listened to radio personality before Doc West was Bob Sievers. His morning program on WOWO had 90% of the available audience tuned in. Farmers for the farm reports, kids like me, waiting to hear the weather, well, actually the school closings and everyone else listened to Bob on WOWO to know what was going on. Bob and WOWO were Live and Locally Relevant.
My reason for predicting the demise of AM & FM radio back then was the digital age as auto manufacturers were adding internet to their vehicles. More options for drivers to listen to their favorite music. I knew it would be an evolving change, simply because it would take time for these internet connected cars to replace the older vehicles.
Your Car, a “radio on wheels”
But then something else has kicked in that I didn’t foresee. The Internet of Things.
The IoT as it is called is the interconnection of stuff via the web that we didn’t need to have connected to the web previously.
The ability for your phone to respond to voice commands was a preview of what we have now with Alexa and the other digital personal assistant devices that are becoming common place.
But back to my headline for this story:
Why WOWO Radio Will Outlast The Naysayers
WOWO radio and our sister stations at Federated Media are embracing the digital age. They were the first in Fort Wayne to jump in and offer the radio programming to listeners on what ever digital platform the listeners wanted. Then they went a step further and began producing content that goes beyond what you can get by listening to the AM & FM radio signals. Podcasts, Videos, and plenty of on-demand content that you and I can read, watch or listen to when we want, where we want.
Listen to what you want, when you want
Our music stations, in Fort Wayne including WMEE, K-105 and 98.9 The Bear have been Live and Locally Relevant for decades! WOWO Radio with our News and Talk format for the past 20 years has a couple of national talk shows in the middle of the day, but every 30 minutes, we have Live and Locally Relevant news updates. Fort Wayne’s Morning News with Charly Butcher starts the weekday and afternoons with the Pat Miller Program, bookend each weekday with Live and Locally Relevant programming.
In case you still need another antidote as to the importance of local media, during tragic events like Hurricane Harvey, it was the local Texas radio stations that were the dominate source of information. Television isn’t portable but radio is.
But what about the radio audience overall? Is it shrinking?
After the report from the naysayer, two more reports came out to counter his claims. You can read them here and here.
But what I care about and so do the businesses I work with who use WOWO Radio to advertise by inviting our listeners to become their customers, is what is the state of radio listenership in Fort Wayne Indiana?
I researched it for this story. I have access to the Eastlan radio surveys from 2013 thru today that measures radio listener habits every 6 months in Fort Wayne.
Between 2013 and 2017, the total number of people age 12 and older who listen to a radio station in Metro Fort Wayne has grown by 25,000.
Boom.
Mic Drop.
396,000 weekly listeners in the spring of 2013.
421,000 weekly listeners in the spring of 2017.
How’s WOWO doing? Every survey that I have access to (including before 2013) show that WOWO radio continues to lead the pack with over 100,000 listeners every week, and 98%+ are grown ups.
In about 8 or 9 years WOWO will be celebrating a century of service. Now is the right time to join the other advertising partners who benefit from being on WOWO. Contact me to find out how.
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.
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