WINNING ON THE WEB Paul Heine – Billboard To monetize radio's investment in the Internet, programmers and managers must first pull back from the logic that has guided them for years. Their basic broadcasting DNA has to be completely rewritten.
Simply put, they need to be deprogrammed.
While radio can successfully extend its brands online, the two are entirely different mediums. Merely replicating radio for the Internet negates all the characteristics that make the Web so powerful: interactivity, customization, on-demand capability and the like.
Such was the consensus among the four Web gurus who gathered Oct. 20 at Billboard Radio Monitor headquarters in New York for the third in a continuing series of exclusive round-table discussions. While the execs who oversee the online efforts for Clear Channel, Infinity, Emmis and National Public Radio agree there is money to be made in cyberspace, there are stark contrasts in their Internet strategies.
"Get out of the broadcast concept and get into the brand concept," Emmis Interactive VP Rey Mena said. "Look at it more broadly and examine what the [online] brand experience is like. It's a learning process to get out of the broadcast mind-set and more into a brand concept, which to some extent is foreign to radio."
"The products are very different when you add text, video" and other elements, said Gerrit Meier, senior VP/GM of Clear Channel Online Music & Radio. "You need to sell and position it differently. It's a brand-new challenge."
Matt Timothy, VP of streaming media for Infinity Broadcasting, said the Web fundamentally changes the business model from one predicated on the PD as gatekeeper to one where control is spread to the listener. "To win, we have to give as much control to the user as possible, all while hitting 50%-60% margins."
How different is the Web business model from radio? So different that "success is a punishing experience on the Internet," NPR executive VP Ken Stern said. "The more people listen, the more bandwidth costs you have."
Traditional media is a one-to-many relationship. New media is a one-to-one relationship, multiplied many times. "But when programmers think of the Internet, they tend to think of that one-to-many relationship," Mena said. To change their thinking, Emmis recruited "people who get the space" in the hope of spreading that understanding. "Some markets get it—they have that 'Aha' moment where all of a sudden everything's clicking," Mena said. "But others haven't."
A similar dynamic is taking place at Infinity, Timothy said. "There are pockets of light across the country."
No longer does NPR, perhaps the most aggressive radio entity on the Web, think of its sites as an extension of the on-air experience. "It is an entirely different experience," Stern said. "We need to retrain ourselves." The regimen includes taking stock of online consumers' needs and wants and how they think about content. "It's not by a clock," Stern said. "It's by topic or by show or what they need at that time of day." NPR sorts its robust podcast offerings by topic, by editorial choice and by number of requests received. Served in bite-size portions, they run in six- to 13-minute bursts rather than radio's standard longer forms.
"It's an entire community experience," Stern said about NPR's Web effort, which involves local affiliates' sites and national offerings. "It's not just audio, it's print, it's photography, and it's video to a certain extent. Our users are educating us to not think about this as 'radio online.' It's hard to teach old dogs new tricks, but I think we're finally getting there."
Round-table participants agreed that radio is playing catch-up on the Internet. Case in point: station Web sites. Visitors to Clear Channel sites were not getting the quality online experience they had grown accustomed to from other sites, the company concluded. So its online unit systematically overhauled station sites—using best practices from top Internet destinations.
"Our sites were terrible," Meier said. "There was clutter, unreadable navigation bars, banner ads that were stretching for miles." To woo at-work listeners, the company also increased the number of stations streaming on the Net from less than 100 at the beginning of the year to 400-plus now. Meier said, "Audiences told us, 'We don't have radios at work anymore. We have computers.' " |