Can You Pass the ScLoHo Sniff Test?

Can You Pass the ScLoHo Sniff Test?

by | Apr 21, 2025 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

41 is the current number.  What does that mean?

41 is the current number of WOWO advertisers that I have spent money with in the dozen years I have been at WOWO radio or before at other stations I’ve worked at in Fort Wayne the past 23 years.

Close to 30 of those 41 businesses I work with personally.

I titled this article, Can You Pass The ScLoHo Sniff Test? because of a couple of things.

First off, like my radio station listeners, I’m an adult consumer who has needs and buys stuff to take care of those needs.

Like many of our listeners, I decided to check out the local businesses I heard on WOWO radio when I was looking to spend money.

Current products or services that we spend money on that are connected this way include my dentist, HVAC system, car purchase and repairs, carpet cleaning, nutritional products, bedding, bathroom remodeling, financial planning, funeral stuff, food, gas stations, and charity giving to name a few of the 40 plus.

Because of the way I go about the process of helping businesses become advertisers, I get to know what makes them tick and I gain insight into the behind the scenes stuff of their business.  I want to know their “Why” they do what they do, not just because I want them to spend money with me.

Actually that brings me to the second part.

Not all business people I meet pass my sniff test.  Every once in awhile I find businesses that are not as honest and ethical as I think they should be.  As a result, I don’t put them on the radio.

I only want to work with businesses that I feel good about doing business with and/or referring to family and friends. That’s the ScLoHo Sniff Test.

I’m planning on an ongoing, long term business relationship with the business people I work with and I want them to have similar values that I have, to be honest and trustworthy.

There have been a couple of times that I “fired” a client.  One was a mortgage company that I discovered was taking advantage of the no-doc rules that led to the 2008 banking crisis.  I overheard a conversation of one of his agents gathering information over the phone to process a loan and the agent said out loud, regarding the persons income, “we’re going to bump that up so you can qualify for a bigger loan.”  Red Flag.

I asked the owner of the mortgage company about what I heard and he said, “yes, that’s what everyone does.”.  His contract with my radio station was up at the end of the month and I did not renew him.

What about you and your business?  Do you think you can pass my test?  Let’s connect and find out.

 

The 2025 Fort Wayne Radio Rating Update

The 2025 Fort Wayne Radio Rating Update

by | Mar 3, 2025 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Media, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

As a follow up on last weeks article and podcast episode, Today I’m going to share information regarding the last ratings data we have for the Fort Wayne, Indiana market pertaining to radio station listenership. This data was collected last Fall and is the most recent information we have until an update is released later this year.  Radio stations and ad agencies pay Nielsen for the data and I’m limited in what I can share publicly but my goal is to give you some insight that will either confirm your perceptions or blow them out of the water.

I have to bounce around a couple different survey data sets but all of this is specifically about radio listenership in Fort Wayne.

Using the Total Survey Area which includes 19 counties in Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio, I see there are a little over 900,000 people ages 12 and older living here. Over a third of them live in Allen County which includes Fort Wayne.  When I eliminate the 12 to 17 year olds, we have almost 570,000 adults in our area.

70% listen to a local radio station every week.

Less than 20% listen to satellite radio like Cirrus XM.

Only 61% are watching one of the traditional broadcast TV channels of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox networks.

Less than 20% are subscribing to our local daily newspaper.

This tells us that local radio stations still have the largest overall audience of readers, viewers and listeners compared to other local media options.

Also the perception that everyone listens to satellite radio is far from true.

Which Fort Wayne radio stations have the most listeners?

In the last rating period , just one WMEE had over 100,000 weekly listeners age 12 and older.

WMEE is owned by Federated Media, where I work.  Other Federated Media stations were in the top ten in this classification include News Talk WOWO, Country Station K105, Rock Station 989 The Bear.  The other 6 stations with the most weekly listeners age 12 and older include WBCL, WAJI, WJFX, WLDE, WXKE and WBTU.

29 stations made the entire survey.

From a business perspective, using the broad age range of 12 years old and older doesn’t make sense because teenagers are not spending much money compared to adults.

And to really take an honest look at who spends money, we should also leave out the young adults in their 20’s maybe up to age 35 or 40.  It’s not that those age demographics don’t have money, but most of it is already spoken for with college debts, rent, car payments and credit card debt eating up most of those paychecks.

Realistically, it’s when we are in our 30’s that our families are growing both in number and expenses.  However by the time adults reach around 40 they begin to have some breathing room or at least figured out how to deal with their finances on a more grown-up level.

That’s why when I talk to business owners I use the term “grown-ups” as their customers.  These are people age 35 and older.  Sometimes business owners are targeting grown-ups age 45 and older because that’s who will spend money more freely instead of the younger folks.

I give you all of that just to set you up for what I’ve been doing for years when it comes to rating data for the purposes of advertising and that is to look at the age demographics of each radio station that matches who will buy what a business is selling.

That starts with age 35+.  My station, WOWO has the most weekly listeners in that age group.

Another important number that I look at from the ratings is how much time do listeners spend listening to their favorite stations?  It’s called Time Spent Listening, or TSL and again WOWO dominates over all the other local radio stations.

From a business perspective this means  there is an increased likelihood that a WOWO listener will hear your ad compared to listeners of any other radio station.

Nielsen has a cool tool in their dashboard where I can plug in a sample schedule on WOWO of let’s say 15 ads per week and it will tell me that on other stations I need  at least 30 ads up to 45 ads to reach the same number of people, the same number of times.

Talk to me about this specifically for your business and I can run reports for you too.

While all this is good news for the people I talk with about inviting WOWO listeners to become your customers, it’s just reassurance data.

Coming up in a couple of weeks, I’ll share my simple  formula on how to buy advertising that doesn’t involve ratings or anything other than common sense and show you how you can use it to be smarter than most advertising sales people.

 

 

The Real Value of Talk Radio in 2025

The Real Value of Talk Radio in 2025

by | Feb 10, 2025 | 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

Since 2013, I’ve worked for WOWO radio in Fort Wayne Indiana.  This is WOWO’s 100th birthday this year and for the past 3 decades WOWO has been a news/talk radio station. It’s a legendary station with most of 100 years being broadcast on 1190AM.  WOWO can also be heard at 92.3 FM

WOWO can also be heard on your favorite streaming device, like Alexa or Google smart speakers, your favorite streaming audio app, or even directly from the WOWO.com website.  I’ll be sharing some information from the most recent rating period for Fort Wayne in the future, however today I’ve got insider data from a company I’ve shared with you before, Edison Research.

In their first newsletter for 2025 the headline reads:

Majority of News and Sports Audio is Consumed via AM/FM Radio.

Here’s what else they say:

Today’s insight is never-before-released data on AM/FM radio consumption and a surprising finding about how different kinds of audio content are consumed from radio.

When a respondent to Edison Research’s Share of Ear® survey records the audio they consume, they also tell us what kind of content they are listening to, including news, sports (talk or play-by-play), talk/personalities, or music.

For decades, pretty much the only way to consume news, sports, and talk audio was through the radio. But now, there is an explosion of new audio delivery options available to listeners.

News audio is by far radio’s strongest suit. Just under 70% of all daily time spent listening to news audio is happening on AM/FM radio. Close behind is sports, at 61%. The majority of news and sports audio in the U.S. is consumed via AM/FM radio.

Meanwhile, AM/FM radio takes a strong, but considerably lower portion of the other two content categories: talk/personalities and music. As we have reported previously, podcasting has taken the lead in the talk category, and of course, music fans now have many options for consumption.

For businesses looking to invite local consumers to be their customers, the talk radio formats are huge. This year I officially represent  both News Talk WOWO radio and also our Sports Talk radio station, 1380 The Fan.

Before I wrap this up, I’ll address the other audio choices we have.

Podcasts.  They have been growing in popularity for awhile and along with their popularity, there’s also been tremendous growth in the number of different podcasts we can listen to. I just did a Google search and answers say there are between 3 million and 6 million different podcasts covering nearly any topic you can imagine. While that’s pretty cool as a consumer, it’s overwhelming as a local business attempting to figure out where to advertise in the podcast world.  Here’s what we’ve done at Federated Media, the parent company I work for… Our own show hosts have their own podcasts.  On WOWO radio both our afternoon host, Casey Hendrickson and Fort Wayne Morning Show Host Kayla Blakeslee take their shows and especially the interviews and news stories and save them as podcasts so listeners can listen on demand, just like all the other podcasts are on demand.  Except Casey and Kayla’s podcasts are an extension of their daily radio shows.

Streaming services.  Our radio stations are listened to via all the streaming services too.  When I’m working from my home office, that’s how I listen.

Want to invite our local listeners to  become customers to your local business? Contact me. Scott@ScLoHo.net

One last item about Kayla and Casey.  On January 6, 2025, Barrett Media released the results of a national survey of radio professionals and Kayla was named one of the top 25 out of 70 morning radio personalities.  The story is here for Kayla.

Casey was named one of the top 25 afternoon radio personalities in the United States.  Details for Casey are here.

What Should You Include In Your Radio Ad?

What Should You Include In Your Radio Ad?

by | Feb 3, 2025 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

There’s a lot of information on how to buy advertising, where to place it and how often it should run, but one subject that I rarely see talked about in my industry is the content of the ad.  And if there’s not much being said inside my industry, the advice from outside is even worse if you can find it.

Today I’m going to show you how to apply Human Relationship Principles to your ad content.

Last month I was meeting with a successful business owner who is returning to our radio station airwaves and I’ll share with you the advice I gave him.

Everything that we include in an ad has to be measured from a listener perspective, not the business owner perspective.

Read that last line again.

People consume media as individuals.  Unlike attending a concert or sporting event where there are hundreds or thousands in attendance, the audience listening to your ad is one person.  Even if 5000 listeners are tuned in at the time your ad airs on the radio, it’s a different experience than the crowd experience.

For now though I want to focus on the content of your ad.

For a long time 60 seconds were the standard length for radio ads.  We had a full minute to talk about your business.  However as our attention spans have become shorter, I questioned if we need 60 seconds or would 30 seconds be better?

When I was the WOWO General Sales Manager, I restructured our rate card.  The net effect was we could offer shorter ads for less money than we were previously, and this allowed some of our advertising partners to get more ads for the same money, and it lowered the cost of entry to get an effective radio campaign on WOWO.

As an advertising copy writer, I noticed that most, not all but most 60 second ads had about 30 to 40 seconds of good stuff, and the remaining seconds were repeated info or unnecessary ad-fluff filler.  So I worked with my sales team to help them improve the ad content to trim the message to 30 seconds in many cases.

Next step is, can you communicate your message in 10 or 15 seconds instead of 30?

This takes a bit more discipline but it’s a great exercise.

After all, if someone takes twice as long to tell you something because they included lots of extra unnecessary information, that can be annoying, right?

I’ve trained others on in-person networking and elevator speeches.  An elevator speech  concept is you’ve stepped into an elevator and have a few seconds to tell someone who you are as you ride to the next floor.  What do you say?  This same exercise that helps you choose your words wisely should be applied to your ads.  Because, after all, your ad message is being delivered to an individual.

So last month when I was meeting with this business owner, we were reviewing the ads I had created for his restoration company.  We had already agreed on a budget and the length of the ads, I had 30 second and 15 second options for him.

He selected 15 seconds and that gets him a decent amount of exposure for the money invested in the campaign.

The initial ad was timely and straight to the point.  Focus on Frozen pipes and water damage along with the company name and web address.  Even mentioned the phone number. which is very old-school.  Initially, he asked if we could mention that it’s January and cold weather and if your pipes freeze, contact them, etc… My response was we don’t need to tell them about the month or the weather, we had 15 seconds to talk to the people who already had the problem and connect them with your company.

Now a tiny fraction of listeners will ever have frozen pipes this winter, but we need to reach as many potential people as possible and with the shorter 15 second messages instead of longer ads, i can get their ad on more frequently which builds familiarity with our listeners.  Since this company was established and not a start-up and a previous advertising partner, the ads didn’t need to sell the company, just the solution they are providing to our listeners who need their help.

It’s really that simple.

By the way I did rework the Frozen Pipe ad slightly to make sure the words we used we correct and we only promised what they could deliver.  Here in Fort Wayne, Indiana we’ve had a streak of sub-freezing temperatures that will make this particular ad timely for awhile.  The other ad I created for them is also ready to air once the cold spell lifts.

There you have it, a real life example of what to put in your radio ad and just as important what to leave out of your ad. In a future article we’ll have more tips on this.  In the meantime, contact me for help with your ad campaign.

Traditional Radio Relevancy in 2024 & 2025

Traditional Radio Relevancy in 2024 & 2025

by | Dec 30, 2024 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

It’s the week between Christmas and New Year and for this weeks update, I found an article that caught my attention back in July. You can read it here.
In the meantime, I’m just going to share a couple of thoughts from that story and what really matters as we move to a new year.

Between ad-supported Spotify or ad-supported Pandora and AM/FM radio, what do most people only listen to? New data courtesy of Edison Research’s “Share of Ear” quarterly study, examined by Pierre Bouvard, Chief Insights Officer of the Cumulus Media/Westwood One Audio Active Group, shares that it is broadcast radio that is the definitive answer to that question.

There are tons of research being done on an ongoing basis that show the power of traditional radio and this is one of them.

With 4,000 Americans surveyed by Edison Research, ad-supported audio was put under the magnifying glass. And, six key findings from the Q1 2024 “Share of Ear” study caught Bouvard’s eye:

 

  • In a typical day, ad-supported digital audio reaches a third of America; AM/FM radio reaches two-thirds of America; Combined, digital audio and AM/FM radio reach 75% of the U.S. daily

Those numbers are referring to daily listening habits which is different from the way Nielsen Research measures listenership for radio stations. Nielsen gives us the number of weekly listeners which has consistently been over 90% of adults.

Items two and three:

  • Between ad-supported Spotify and AM/FM radio, most people only listen to AM/FM radio

  • Between ad-supported Pandora and AM/FM radio, most people only listen to AM/FM radio

Often times, we make the assumption that our own habits and preferences are a reflection of everyone else. So when someone discovers a streaming music platform like Spotify or Pandora and that replaces radio as their music source, they sometimes jump to the conclusion that everyone is abandoning traditional media.  But when you add up the numbers, it’s not really true.   The company I work for, Federated Media operates 5 different stations, and three of 5 are music stations, the other two I work with are talk radio.  The 3 music stations have an impressive number of listeners, many times larger than the local listeners to Pandora and Spotify combined.

Number 4 on his list:

  • The U.S. ad-supported audio clock: Podcasts and AM/FM radio represent nearly 90% of tuning minutes

I would like to see the data behind that statement, but it’s not surprising.  Podcasts have been surging in listenership in the past several years.

Number 5:

  • With a towering in-car share of 86%, AM/FM radio is the primary way to reach consumers on the path to purchase; The proportion of AM/FM radio in-car listening has surged, returning to pre-pandemic norms.

I just turned 65 this month.  I bought my first car when I was 16 and the car was my mobile music machine. Before we had the ability to consume media on demand, we would listen to radio in our cars during what’s called traditional drivetime in the morning and afternoon.  That was radio primetime.  TV primetime was in the evening.   I’ve got some data I’ll share next year about local listening habits but for now, let’s keep going.

The 6th Key Finding:

  • Among registered voters across the political spectrum, AM/FM radio is the dominant ad-supported audio platform.

This article was published before our most recent national election.  Donald Trump won and I can see how the power of talk radio beat the power of Political TV.  Conservative media includes most of the News Talk Broadcast radio stations along with the Fox News TV Network.  Liberal media sources don’t include radio for the most part unless you want to classify public radio as liberal.  Even if you were to do that, the total radio listenership of political talk across the country is heavily conservative.   A few decades ago there was an attempt to create a left-leaning talk radio network but it fell apart because it didn’t have the on-going financial support.  I can’t give all the credit to radio because the viewership of MSNBC and CNN combined are dwarfed by the Fox News TV network, so a combination of conservative talk radio and TV overwhelming beat the liberal progressive media in this years election.

Listenership and viewership are important however what really matters for the businesses I work with are the results we create from the advertising campaigns we run on the radio and our social media channels.

My station, WOWO turns 100 in 2025.  Sister music stations, WMEE, K105 and 98.9 the Bear each have been on the air successfully for decades. I define success as successfully connecting listeners to advertisers and being profitable for all.  More on that in the year to come.