by Scott Howard | Jun 26, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
More insight on advertising with WOWO Radio. Today, a little discussion about why we have so many listeners, what they are listening to, and why.
WOWO is 90 years old this year. My family moved to Fort Wayne when I was 6, but I’m guessing it wasn’t until I was 10 that I had my own clock radio. That would be in the 1970’s and over 1/2 of Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana started their day with WOWO at 1190AM.
WOWO Air Staff from the 1970’s Photo from http://historyofwowo.com/
For several decades from 5 to 7 in the morning, WOWO aired a farm program called the Little Red Barn. WOWO continues to be a powerhouse for the ag community to this day. But when I was growing up it was a combination of news, music, weather and sports, especially Komets Hockey play by play were the elements that made WOWO with their 50,000 watt radio station featuring personalities Bob Sievers, Jack Underwood, Chris Roberts and Ron Gregory the most listened to station in the region.
Twenty years ago WOWO evolved into a talk radio station and now features a combination of national and local talk shows.
They are owned by Federated Media which owns several stations in Fort Wayne along with Warsaw and South Bend/Elkhart, Indiana. Federated Media also has a digital division and entertainment division that I work with too. WOWO is actually the 2nd oldest media outlet that Federated Media owns, they also have a newspaper, the Elkhart Truth that is 125 years old. 
In the early 1980’s I worked on the air on WMEE, a sister station of WOWO and now they are in the same building. When I rejoined Federated Media after 30 years, there were two people from my previous tenure who still work there, Sharon our business manager and Charly Butcher. Charly was doing mornings on WMEE in the 80’s when I left and is the host of Fort Wayne’s Morning News on WOWO today.
Before going further, here’s where you can listen to WOWO… 1190AM, 92.3 FM, and also online by clicking here. We also are on TV for an hour each morning from 6 to 7 on NBC 33 in Fort Wayne. 
Weekdays on WOWO starts with Charly Butcher and the Fort Wayne Morning News crew featuring News every 15 minutes with April O’Neil, Traffic every 10 minutes with Kylie Havens, and Sports twice an hour with Jim Shovlin. Continuing our coverage of farm news, we have reports from David Kohli twice an hour too. Fort Wayne’s Morning News follows this format from 5 to 9 each weekday with a continuous, fast paced program featuring interviews from our National Representatives in Congress and the Senate along with local leaders including the Mayor. We have news reporters from our national news network Fox and commentaries too. Business News, Weather Updates, and School Delays in bad weather keep things moving.
Charly’s fill-in host is attorney Steve Shine. Steve, like Charly has a Top 40 Music Radio background, also on WMEE a few years before Charly joined WMEE. Steve once ran for Mayor of Fort Wayne, with the slogan, Shine in ’79, on the Democratic ticket. While he did not win, he has made his name in both broadcasting and politics. Steve Shine is the Chair of the Allen County Republican Party.
We have elected a Democratic Mayor the last few elections however Indiana is traditionally a conservative state.
After Fort Wayne’s Morning News with Charly Butcher, WOWO airs Glenn Beck live and Rush Limbaugh live. Local and national news updates along with weather twice an hour air all day and night. Farm updates from our nationally award winning Farm Director Rob Winters air all day too.
At 3pm, WOWO returns to local talk with the Pat Miller Show until 6pm. Evenings on WOWO during the week feature tape delayed versions of national hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. The full-line up is on the WOWO.com website.
Weekends include some “Best of Shows” along with original local shows like Midwest Ag Matters and House Calls on Saturday mornings. WOWO continues to broadcast all the home and away Komet Hockey games and we are also the Fort Wayne radio home for the Indianapolis Colts, the Indy 500 and the Brickyard NASCAR Race.
In summary, people listen to WOWO to feed their brains. The news, talk and information that WOWO provides is what people tune in to hear. I sometimes say the news talk format of WOWO is brain food compared to music formated radio stations that are escapism. When a commercial plays on a music station it can be an irritant, because it is not music. When a commercial plays on WOWO, it is usually not an irritant because we are already listening to people talking.
Over 100,000 people listen to WOWO every week, 95% are adults age 25 and older. And now you know what they listen to and why.
by Scott Howard | Jun 25, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Yesterday I shared an article about my generation of Baby Boomers who range in age from 51 to 69 as I kick off the summer of 2015 update on advertising with WOWO Radio. Today I’ll share with you some of the information we get from the rating service we subscribe to about who listens to News/Talk 1190-92.3 WOWO Radio Fort Wayne.
These are approximate numbers, rounded off since I should not publicly publish the exact count.
Total number of weekly listeners age 12 and older for WOWO is about 125,000.
The Baby Boomers are about 45,000 of that total.
There’s another 35,000+ that are older.
That leaves more than 50,000 adults that are between 21 and 54 years old.
Anyway you slice it, WOWO has a lot of listeners. More than most businesses have customers. Coming up tomorrow, I’ll give you a peek at why they listen as I share what you’ll hear on WOWO in 2015.
by Scott Howard | Jun 24, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Time to lay the groundwork for advertising on WOWO Radio. This is the place that has been my work home since the end of 2013. Today I’m kicking off the summer of 2015 version of Advertising with WOWO Radio.
I’m 55. Technically I am a baby boomer, the generation born after World War 2. The Baby Boomer years are thought of as 1946 through 1964, so I’m on the tail end of that group. I bring this up because my generation makes up a significant part of the WOWO audience. And that is good. WOWO is now 90 years old and it is a much different station than when it began. There is even a website that chronicles the history of WOWO.
When I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s I woke up to WOWO to see if we had school delays. I listened at night for the music and sillyness that Ron Gregory provided as a WOWO Air Ace.
It’s funny because I’m now friends with Ron and just had lunch with him and a mutual friend a few months ago.
For the past 2 decades WOWO has been a news/talk radio station at 1190am and a few years ago added 92.3fm as a way for listeners to tune in.
Last week I saw this story from Mediapost:
Boomers Are Listening by Spencer Brown
Remember when radio was our only audio source for news, sports and, of course, music discovery? Eighty million or more American boomers listened to radio. Our favorite DJs. The latest hits. The big ball game. And then it became portable! The transistor radio changed our lives. For the first time, we could listen to the radio at the beach or in the park. Well, things have certainly changed.
In the last 10 years, audio consumption has fragmented. But if you think this means radio has become less important in the media landscape, think again. Radio, perhaps the original mass medium, continues to play a big part in the lives of Americans everywhere—with 243 million Americans listening weekly. That means more than 91% of Americans (age 12 or older) are tuning in each week, according to Nielsen.
For advertisers keen to reach the boomer audience, those who continue to listen to radio longer than anyone else, radio delivers a mass audience in real-time across markets large and small. 
Audio continues to appeal to the boomer crowd, ages 50-64. According to Nielsen, 57.9 million use radio each week, that’s 93.5% of boomers! And while Generation Y (ages 35-49) is a close second, boomers spend an average of 15 hours, 6 minutes each week with radio (that’s the most of any demo). Older listeners make up the biggest cohort of news/talk/information’s audience of more than 58 million people.
Let’s not forget that boomers account for nearly $230 billion in sales for consumer packaged good; they control nearly 70 percent of the nation’s disposal income and they stand to inherit $15 trillion in the next 20 years. As they get older, this is a population that will have more time, not less, to listen to the radio, online and over the air.
In the chart above, it shows the national demographic composition of News/Talk Radio (like WOWO) listeners.
I began listening to News/Talk Radio 30 years ago when I lived in Detroit. That’s about the age that a lot of people start listening to News/Talk radio, no matter what generation you belong to. But that’s for another day. Like tomorrow, when I will give you some of the details of the audience composition of WOWO.
by Scott Howard | Jun 9, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Recently I have been faced with a question regarding my work with radio station WOWO,,,
Is radio advertising appropriate for Business to Business marketing?
My simple answer is, “Why not?”
Seriously, let me walk you through this.
Businesses are run by people.
It’s the people who are in those businesses that are either decision makers or influencers that can make a difference.
With a few notable exceptions, most people get to work in an automobile or truck, or SUV or…
Those exceptions are cities that have public transportation so people don’t need a car. Like New York City, or maybe Chicago. But even those cities have plenty of people who use cars as their primary method of transportation.
Cars are radios on wheels.
Even with the introduction of satellite and internet radio services, local radio stations still dominate the in-vehicle listening. 91% of Americans listen at least weekly.
Besides traditional radio advertising, some of us can also offer additional ways to reach those business people. In my work at WOWO Radio in Fort Wayne, I have an entire collection of digital marketing solutions that I offer to radio advertisers and non-advertisers alike.
Some of these digital solutions include items that work hand in hand with WOWO radio, while others are completely independent. Contact me to learn more or you can wait as I unroll them out publicly in the weeks ahead.
by Scott Howard | May 26, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
It’s a curious purchasing decision. Advertising and marketing services.
Recently I was talking with a business owner about the success rate of ad campaigns that we do on WOWO Radio.
You see, I have been very presently surprised at the results some of our advertising partners report they receive. Compared to other radio stations in Fort Wayne, Indiana, WOWO often works better at producing results simply because of the size and quality of the audience.
I worked for stations in the past that had less than 30,000 listeners and we did everything we could to get a return on investment for those businesses. It was successful, sometimes.
The honest truth, and what I will tell you face to face is it is impossible to accurately measure the entire results from any advertising or marketing you spend money on. There are simply too many variables in tracking, which I’ll write about another day. 
What kind of Advertising Guarantee do we offer?
We will air the advertising schedule we agree to, or you won’t pay for the parts that didn’t air.
For example, if we are not able to get all 30 of your ads on this week and only 28 air, you will only pay for 28. That’s pretty straight forward. And it is rare that we can’t air all your ads, but stuff happens that is out of our control. Rarely, but that is the way it goes.
Hang on a second, you say. I don’t want to just pay for you to play some ads, I want to pay you to invite customers to spend their money with me. I understand. I want that too. We just can’t guarantee it. Too many variables.
A friend of mine once said buying ads is like buying a couple pounds of ground beef from the grocery store. You spend your money on the meat and the guarantee is that it is good when you buy it. There is no guarantee from the store that how you use that beef will result in the best burger or meatloaf or whatever you decide to do with it. Too many variables.
However, you do have my solemn pledge to do everything we can to reach our mutually agreed upon goals of success for your business. And right now I’m going to grab a bite to eat. That previous paragraph made me hungry.
Want to read more? Look at what Seth Godin wrote the other day here.
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