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.