How important was that Triple Sow Cow?

I wouldn’t say that I consume a lot of television, but I do like to watch the news and certain sporting events.  I watch hockey as long as my team, The Canucks, are playing, but wouldn’t tune in to watch Ottawa play Montreal...unless it was the Cup final, in which case the chance of Ottawa playing Montreal is zero.  I’ll watch the Superbowl, The World Series, The Olympics, (including the ‘Ice Dancing’ Gold Medal competition), The CFL Division Finals and Grey Cup...heck I’ll even tune into the Wimbledon finals or the Rugby World Cup final game, even though I haven’t a clue what those guys are supposed to do with the overblown football they toss around.

There is something about the do-or-die elements of ‘playoff’ ANYTHING that brings out the best in athletes, and it’s a great study to tune in and see how people at the absolute top of their games perform under that kind of pressure.

One would think then, that the broadcasters covering those events would also bring out their best performances.  I can’t tell you how many times over the past year, in very important AND not so important matches, I have watched a sports announcer ask this question.  “How important was that...(fill in the blank with ‘goal’, ‘touchdown’ ‘home-run’, ‘try’, ‘fall’, ‘injury’, whatever), and always referring to the most obvious turning point in the game as to render the question not only completely rhetorical, but also leave the athlete being interviewed gobsmacked for a response.

How do you answer a question that is so lazy, so poorly thought out and has no possibility of generating an answer other than the most comfortable series of cliches an athlete can muster.  “Well it was HUGE!” they always respond.  Followed by “we really came together as a team tonight”.  “We all gave it 110%”. “We knew those guys were gonna come with everything they’ve got so we really had to respond...Blah, Blah, Blah.  Asking that question is kind of like making a suicide pass up the middle of the ice while Dustin Byfuglien measures you up for the right size stretcher before he knocks into next Tuesday.

I’m not saying that all elite athletes are PhD’s, but asking them stupid questions usually get’s stupid answers.  I would like to place a moratorium on any question that begins with “How important was that.....” and kindly request professional announcers to prepare for the games the same way that the athletes you are interviewing prepare.  Don’t just fall back on the laziest question imaginable and hope the jock is going to bale you out with some stunning response.  Ask better questions...get better answers.

Creative Avoidance and it's Crippling Enabler - Email

I used to love Email.  I would usually get between 40 and 50 a day, probably a conservative number for many of you...but certainly enough to help me justify not doing any meaningful work for hours and hours at a time.  My favourites were the group emails, sent to me and a bunch of my buddies that were part of a particular tribe to which I belonged.  The staff hockey team was notoriously good at sending time wasting emails, because regardless of who started the string, virtually every member of the group would chime in with a 'reply all' comment.  This could go on for hours at a time, one by one as guys tried to one-up each other with the funniest (or grossest) post.

My next favourites were the 'all-staff' memos which invariably prompted visits from co-workers to my office to discuss the meaning and implications of the memos.  Usually something about a change inside the company benefit plan or an announcement that began with "We regret to announce that John Smith is leaving the company as of....." On any given day, if I got a hockey team post AND an all-staff, I could go an entire morning without having a single client interaction.  Not make one sales call or a single attempt to increase my billings.

I know you do it too.  We all do.  It's one of the best tactics to creatively avoid doing what we least like to do as sales people, which is throw our ego's on the line and make a call to a client or prospect.  If you don't believe that you are doing it, keep track of the time you spend with email for a couple of days and see how often it distracts you from doing the one thing that will make you more money as a sales person than any other activity.  Face to face meetings with qualified prospects.

Email certainly has it's place in business.  It is by far the 'killer app' of the century.  In many ways, it has revolutionized the way business can be conducted...but for sales people, it's a disease that can cause a couple of terrible afflictions...poverty and/or unemployment.

Walk through your office and see how many people have their email client open...or at least have it set up to notify them when a new email comes in.  'Ding!'  Great...I can read an email instead of making a call. 'Ding!' Excellent, my agency needs a proposal so I can do that instead of the prospecting calls I was going to make...or worst of all...'Ding!' What a funny joke.  Who can I forward this to so that I can help infect a whole bunch of other people with a way to creatively avoid doing real work.

I know a few people who are not infected with the creative avoidance bug.  They have an email regimen that goes something like this.  Arrive in the office. Read email. Close email client until 3 pm.  Work. Open email at 3 pm.  Respond to business actionable emails.  Respond to 'other' emails.  If there is a single attribute that I can identify among these people, I would have to say "successful".

Sales people vs. Product people

A short while ago, I ran into a former associate who had somewhat recently left radio sales management to take a position in the outdoor division of her company.  She is highly placed in her organization and is extremely capable having risen to a very senior level within the ranks the radio division...now being entrusted with another significant portfolio.

We had a great conversation about her career path and job aspirations as well as her perspective on the benefits of outdoor vs. other media.  Of course, like most people, extolling the virtues of the media you are 'currently' selling became the focus of the conversation, but when I asked her the following question, I got an answer that I didn't expect.

"What is the single most 'point of differentiation' that makes your new job more enjoyable than your old one? I posed.  To paraphrase her answer, she stated that "Not having to battle with Program Directors on a daily basis about what they will and won't put on the air".

For a person of this stature to identify this element of her job as the one that concerns her most shouldn't really be a surprise.  There is an eternal battle that plagues not just the media business, but business in general...and it's become pandemic.  The age old battle between those who make the product and those who sell it continues to curse businesses everywhere. If you throw the accountants into this toxic mess, you have situations that have to potential to slowly and tacitly destroy your business.

You all know how it goes.  You, (a salesman) go out and find a great piece of new business and bring in the order.  It gets booked to run on your station, you celebrate your success and take satisfaction that you are 'that much' closer to hitting an outrageous target that has been set for you.  The day before it's supposed to begin airing, you get a call from the Creative Director telling you that the PD doesn't want the spots to run on his station.  "WHAT?" you exclaim, then run into the studio to listen to the offending spots...and they stink.  Your first response is to confront the PD with the rationalization that "it's a LOT of money" and we really need the money or we won't make our quarter.  In your mind you know that the spots suck, and that you are bound to get complaints not only from  the announce staff but likely from listeners as well.  If you are LUCKY, you will get listener complaints.  Most of them just vote with their button pushing fingers...however, despite the fact that you intuitively know that the PD is right, the billings actually become more important to you than your product.  The battle ensues, and no matter what kind of relationship you have with your PD, each and every battle leaves some kind of scar on one or both of you.  If you win, in the eyes of the product people, you are a greedy, selfish, lazy sales person who only cares about money.  The spots air, you cringe every time you hear them knowing that radios are tuning out right across your broadcast pattern and the knife digs just a little deeper into the PD's wound...but you DID get to keep the billings.  If you lose, you sulk for a while and then in your weekly sales meeting, you let everyone know what an idiot the PD is for not recognizing the value of that particular contract to the top line of the station.  Either way, two people in the organization build resentment for each other and (probably unconsciously) disseminate their harsh feelings among their co-workers which ultimately causes more conflict down the line.

And so it goes with groups inside organizations that have conflicting objectives...and as I mentioned earlier, throw the accountant into the equation and the conflict intensify's as they attempt to find additional ways to keep their EBITDA margins intact.  Usually at the expense of the product.

Examples of this phenomenon are all around us. At General Motors years ago, the financial analysts, despite vehement protestations from the product people (and in good conscience), found a way to save billions of dollars by building all the GM products on one platform.  The problem was, in order to comply, the designers were faced with physical restrictions that would only permit them to build ugly cars that didn't work very well... the sales people couldn't sell them and the company lost tens of billions and had to beg for bailout money from the US and Canadian governments.  It wasn't until a guy named Bob Lutz was appointed Vice Chairman of the company and handed the design control back to the product people that GM started building attractive and reliable cars again.  The result of this move led to products like the Malibu and Volt that customers love and have snapped up in droves.

Lot's has been written lately about the late Steve Jobs who was so obsessed with design, that he had to control all elements of his Apple products, both hardware and software.  Many times over the years he was confronted by both financial and sales people with demands to change his products to make them either cheaper or open-platformed to appeal to a broader market.  At all intersections, and sometimes in the face of very sound and compelling logic, he held true to his belief that superior design along with products that performed better than the competition would sustain his company long after the others had failed. The end result is that Apple is now the most valuable company in the world, despite the fact that an iMac costs considerably more than virtually any consumer PC.

I am a sales person, so I know how much it might hurt for other sales people to accept that the product people should have complete control over the product, but it's not as bad as you may think.

Back in the glory days of CFOX in the early 90's I worked with a PD who really got it.  He genuinely respected the value and mission of the sales department and the sales people themselves. He was also extremely passionate about his product and what he would allow on the air...but the difference between this guy and most of the other PD's I have worked with, is that when confronted with a situation like the one above, he would always have a counter-proposal or a creative idea about how we could keep the business and also have it conform to his programming taste authority.  (For context, I once had a PD who told me the most important thing he had learned about programming was how to say NO to the sales department)  Recognizing the value of revenue to the company, he would often sit with sales people and ask penetrating questions about client objectives and explain how bad commercial content not only hurt the station, but damaged the customer as well, and on many occasions, when we took his ideas back to the customers, they not only implemented his suggestions, but thanked us afterwards for caring enough to say something. Another thing happened that became an unexpected consequence of his actions.  Sales people started to respect the product more.  Bad ideas and bad creative would get stopped at the door.  Sales people started to understand the benefits of heading these conflicts off at the source and confronted their advertisers, challenging them to understand how tailoring campaigns to fit within the environment of the stations programming could be more effective for them. During that time we also had both the highest audience share AND highest revenue ever attained in the history of the station.

In a business where every day presents new challenges, where rates continue to erode, budgets are reduced on a regular basis and you are fighting tooth and nail with your competitors out on the street, the last thing you need to have inside your organization is a rift between two departments.  Finding ways to work together to solve client problems and create solutions is not just a great way to maintain the integrity of your product, but also a great way to keep a team oriented organization, not to mention a way to make more money.

The State of Radio Sales

The other day I was reading through a series of Linkedin group discussions about the “single most important attribute a sales person can have”.  Meandering through the replies, I came across a great number of thoughts and rationales to support them…many of which were good, in and of themselves, but I would say the most often quoted was “being a good listener”. Obviously it’s important to understand your customer’s needs through great listening skills…and if we got paid to be excellent listeners we would all be driving big cars and living in fancy houses.  In reality, the journey from your prospects office through to the execution of a successful campaign is fraught with challenges that only the most creative, versatile, well rounded and determined sales people can make on a consistent basis.

The business has changed dramatically since I first started producing spots back in 1973 at the Mighty 630 CHED…but never so significantly than since I left it in 2005 to work in the crazy world of Sports Marketing as VP Business Development for the Vancouver Canucks.

I see in the Linked in group “The Sales Floor” a few people that I worked with back in the “good ol’ days” when we basically showed up for work, took a few orders over the phone, had a nice bottle of wine with lunch and schmoozed clients with free tickets to Eskimo Games or dinner at The Point After with Bob McCord or Chuck Chandler (who were legitimate “Rock Stars” in the community).  Those old timers (Hi Len Thuesen) that have been able to stick with it for so many years should be like an encyclopaedia* for the younger members of this group because for these veterans to still be making a living in an environment that has evolved into what it is today takes a considerable amount of malleability and is truly remarkable.

Without getting into all of the industry and corporate challenges that have made your job so much more challenging, it still really comes down to one (complex) question for radio sales people.  How can I negotiate through the myriad obstacles within my station and actually deliver what the customer needs for him/her to justify this expense?  Yes, it’s important to listen carefully to what your prospect is saying…you will need some of that information to craft the execution of his/her campaign…but the most important piece of information you need to get is their definition of what constitutes success in their eyes.  Knowing where they need to get is the only way that you can possibly build the road to get there.  To quote the inimitable Yogi Berra "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

Other than agency buyers, I have never dealt with a client who said his idea of success was reaching 60% of adults 25-34, 3.5 times a week”.  Clients have real needs like, I have to sell 50 of these things before next Tuesday when my loan payment is due.

Part of the problem I see these days with radio sales people is that many of them still believe that a catchy 30 second spot with a discounted, drive-heavy schedule on their top rated 25-54 station is something that clients are salivating for. In the meantime, your lunch is getting eaten by some geeks at the Mountainview head office of Google who are equipping their sales people with data that allows your prospect to target their message directly to the guy in your neighborhood who has two kids, changes his own oil, travels once a quarter to Vegas and is hunting for the best deal on a 2011 Prius Hybrid in black.  How do you compete with that?

The days of selling spots based on cume and average quarter hour audience figures are long gone.  Radio tuning in North America is down a measly 4%.  Revenue is down 25%...and if you haven’t seen the revenue growth curve for Facebook, Google, Twitter etc., check it out to seewhere your money is going.

So the question becomes…Is Radio still a viable ad medium in the face of this new reality…(or should I go get a job selling Google search).

The answer to the question is yes…radio is still relevant and I believe that you will be able to continue to make a pretty good living at selling it…but not the way you have been.

When Sony introduced the Walkman back in 1978, pundits predicted that it would obsolete traditional radio, as we knew it.  Since then, many iterations of portable music devices have come and gone, finally ceding dominance to the current Apple iPod which has become the category standard.  The idea that everyman was a better programmer for their own musical tastes than a Program Director, (even with hundreds of thousands of dollars cast against music testing and research) was appealing to the early adopters.  Today, online stations abound.  Streaming has become easy and ubiquitous, yet the local radio station still exists, despite corporate cutbacks that have left them understaffed, overworked and under resourced.  Why is that?

The combination of maintaining a local focus, with likeable personalities, relevant news and information and the ability to have an intimate relationship with listeners is the key reason that people still tune in to terrestrial radio stations.  Here in Vancouver, waking up every morning to Larry and Willy, getting the traffic and weather information I need to plan my day, hearing how the Canucks, Lions or Whitecaps did the day before and what concert is coming to town next week is just part of what people need from the medium…. but to save time preaching to the choir let’s all just agree that radio is still a great medium and get back to how to use its key strengths to sell advertising solutions to Joe’s café.

Your listeners are your friends.  You keep them company, play them music, give them information, talk to them, ask them questions, send them on trips or to concerts or games…even let them talk on the radio.  You send them Tweets.  They “Like” you on Facebook.  You reward them for their loyalty and listenership in many creative ways.

So suffice to say that you have nurtured this great relationship with your listeners in an effort to keep them listening more often and for longer periods of time… but what do you actually know about them?  There is this terrible measurement platform called PPM, which is at best a wild guess of extrapolated data as to who is listening, when and for how long.  They get a few hundred people on the panel and you hope to hell that a few of them tune in when you give away the Foo Fighters tickets and dinner at the Keg during your peak AQH.  Oh yeah, BBM can give you another guess as to the demographic makeup of our audience and then you take that information to the ad agencies and join your competitors in chasing the rates into the ground.  (I know, I know…Agencies account for a large portion of your overall revenue so you have to play their game, but that’s a different problem that I’ll save for another post.)

If you have a loyal listen club, you should at the very least know their names and email addresses…but what if you knew how many times they came to your web site and what pages they visited.  What if you knew where they lived and could plot them on a map to see where they were concentrated so that you could work with advertisers in areas where you had high penetration?  What if you knew how many contests they entered on your site without winning?  What if you knew what products they are in the market for? Do they have any pets? What if you could help them get a better deal on a new car?  What if you could personally invite them to a product launch or restaurant opening?  How much would it be worth to your advertisers to know this kind of stuff about your listeners?  While your competitors are in the local car dealers office extolling the benefits of being the number one station with Adults 25-54 in the Edmonton CMA, You are next door putting together a deal with his competitor to send a personal incentive to the 25 listeners within 5 miles of his dealership who have told you they are looking to buy a new car in the next 6 months.

Dear listener.  You told us that you might be in the market for a new car so we went to Joe’s Ford down the street and asked him if he could do something special for loyal CXXX listeners like you.  He told us that if you purchased a new car from him in the next 10 days, he would give you an additional $1000 off the price…just because we’re all friends.

Do you think it might be easier to sell a campaign with this kind of information as opposed to your cume figures?  Of course it would.  It’s what Facebook, Google and Yahoo are already doing that is taking billions of dollars out of the pockets of traditional media ‘peddlers’ around the globe. In essence, we can do a lot of what Google et al do, but better.  Better because of the relationships you have with your listeners and the fact that they will share stuff with you that they wouldn’t share with the big search engine guys.  They will share it with you because you understand them and communicate with them on an intimate level and because you live in the same city, know the same people and go the same places. You wake them up in the morning, get them to work, share their opinions and play their favourite songs over, and over, and over….

So how does a sales person thrive in this new world reality?  Listening well – yes, but also by learning about the tools that are available to be able to take to their advertisers a focused activation that is hyper-targeted to a small group of really interested people.  It includes spots.  It includes a creative solution to their expressed needs and it includes pre-determined metrics on what success looks like. Most of all it includes knowing your listeners and working with a team of people at your station who are all focused on creating and executing a more holistic and ambitious solution to your clients needs.  The problem with all of this is that it’s more work and it’s more time consuming. Yup, it is…but the upside is huge once you get the reputation for proving customers successful executions. Plus you can stop wasting time casting a wide net by cold calling uninterested and unqualified prospects so that you can fill up your ‘call sheet’ and focus on bigger sustainable campaigns with more sophisticate marketers.

Some of the biggest challenges you will face in your efforts to save the industry will be from inside your own building.  Will your GM or group President invest in the tools to help you make more sales?  Will the PD buy into the concept of marketing to your listener database? Will your GSM accept creatively packaged executions? Is your creative department staffed with “creatives” or are they just “writers”…but most importantly, are YOU determined to make a difference in the way you help your sponsors meet their expectations within the parameters that are set by your management group?

To be frank…my experience tells me that, with a couple of rare exceptions, (like Astral who are making the investment in tools), the key decision makers across the country haven’t yet made the link.  Most stations still look at their interactive properties as “something the promo guys can update”, and not as a serious potential money-maker.  Stations have become so ingrained in “cutting back” that the idea of making an investment in the resources to forge new directions is out of the question. The industry hasn’t yet attracted the kind of visionary technicians, who can drive these initiatives, nor will it until such time as the pain of losing money to ‘search’ becomes greater than the prospect of investing in the tools and training to reverse the flow of money out of the industry.

I would be happy to chat with anyone that would like more information on the tools and techniques required for relationship marketing.  Email me at gcforbes@me.com

Glossary for the younger readers.

*(an encyclopaedia is a book** that has information about every thing one would ever want to know).

**(A book is a bunch of paper with words on it that is bound into a document)

My Fathers Gun - and why we should pay for music

Every now and then, I'm sure we all find ourselves lying in bed, wide awake, desperate to fall asleep by some means or another.  For me, I usually grab my iPod touch and tune into one of those free Internet stations like Accuradio or Radio Paradise and see if there is something soothing on one of the myriad channels available. It's one of those sure fire, Melatonin-like solutions that has the effect of gradually pushing me over the cliff of consciousness.

Last night was one of those nights for me.  Wide awake at 3 AM I patted my way across my bedside table in a futile search for my glasses so that I could see well enough to tune my iPod to my favourite Accuradio channel.  'Double Latte' is one of those Adult Alternative streams that plays artists like Adele, Mat Kearney, Maroon Five and Coldplay. (Not that those artists are sleep inducing.  I just like that kind of music).  Unfortunately, or fortunately as it turned out, the fact that I couldn't see the channel selector well enough to distinguish Double Latte from whatever channel I ended up on, put me on a totaly different stream than I had intended.  I was a little perturbed at first but the first track presented to me on this mystery channel was "My Fathers Gun"...an Elton John, Bernie Taupin tune from the 1970 album Tumbleweed Connection.  It probably never charted on Billboard, nor do I suspect that it ever made regular rotation on any radio station during the 70's, and to tell you the truth, if asked to name the best 100 Elton John/Bernie Taupin songs ever recorded, I'm not sure that I would have been able to recall My Fathers Gun, even using the 'phone a friend' option.  To be kind, it's the type of obscure piece of music that would only be on the iPods of people like Elton John and Bernie Taupin, and maybe their Mom's...but 15 seconds into that tune, I was flooded with some amazing memories of my life in the early 1970's.

I was a fan of EJ in the early years. My boss at that time bought the Tumbleweed Connection 8-track and added it to the collection of two (2) other 8 tracks that were played in endless rotation in the clothing store where we worked. The other two were the Beach Boys 'Pet Sounds' and the 'Soundtrack from The Musical Hair'.

This was the same year that I bought my first car, a 1962 Austin Mini that I subsequently rolled with two of my brothers as passengers. It was also the year I had my first joint and the first time a girl, (Nicole Whatshername) let me touch her boobs inside her sweater (but outside her bra).  She was the first girl ever to ASK ME out...and probably the last.  I sometimes wonder where she is today as I do with many people who passed through my life during those years.

Somehow I managed to graduate from Ross Sheppard high school despite the fact that I spent as much time at Bonnie Doon where many of my friends attended. I recall that in those days, exams were all multiple choice and I had this uncanny knack of guessing correctly.  As my kids were growing up, I lied to them about what a great student I was and how I became committed to success based on those high school years.

My brother drove a 1957 Chevy, 3-in-the-tree, 'chick magnet' and we were usually seen cruising "the Dub" in hopes that we would run into some of the more attractive girls from school, (who, more often than not, were home studying).

My Dad worked at a Top 40 Radio Station which apparently gave me license to hang around with the DJ's, get free tickets to concerts and load ballot boxes for station contests with the names of my friends filled out.

I had hair down to my shoulders, got my staff discount at the hip clothing store where I worked and wore bell bottoms and platform shoes that added a good 2 inches to my height.

Beer was 20 cents a glass at the pub, cigarettes .65 cents a pack, gas was .36 cents a gallon and  every song from Tumbleweed Connection was indelibly etched in my brain.

The most popular song from the album was "Burn Down the Mission" which I hear regularly on Classic Rock stations everywhere, and by dint of that frequency, doesn't resonate with me much anymore, but I probably haven't heard "My Fathers Gun" for close to 40 years. Hearing it last night on some still unidentified channel on Acuradio, and enjoying the rush of wonderful memories that it stirred, motivated  me to make a  .99 cent investment on iTunes so that I could add that obscure piece of music to my collection. It's certainly not my favourite song. Who knows if I will ever listen to it again but I figure that anything that could take me back in time, to when life was simpler, without the current day stresses and strains of things like Occupy Anytown, Global Economic Collapse and a band of American GOP candidates that make Pee Wee Herman look like a Rhodes scholar, is certainly worth much, much, much more than a buck...not to mention that I fell asleep a short time later...visions of Nicole's boobs dancing through my head.