RADIO'S FUTURE: 'TALK BACK TO YOUR BOSSES' Paul Heine – Billboard Though they weren’t singing “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” the panelists at the Future of Radio session on opening day (9/21) of the National Assn. of Broadcasters Radio Show here had no shortage of ideas about what the next generation of radio will look and sound like. The consensus: radio needs to make its content available in as many different containers as possible.
“Radio needs to get cracking, the future is already here,” Coleman Research founder Jon Coleman said. Streaming audio and video are already available on cell phones.
Acknowledging that “the competition is playing with real bullets,” former Infinity and Citadel executive and FigMedia1 founder Bill Figenshu said terrestrial radio programming is better than satellite. “There are no better street warriors than the people in this room,” Figenshu said. “If we can aggregate this talent into new technologies, we’ll kill them. We’re great at branding and positioning, but we suck at marketing ourselves.”
“Distribution is king and radio is in an awful lot of cars,” said Joint Communications founder John Parikhal, while joking that Arbitron’s people meter shows radio has more listeners than there are people on the planet. Radio has the cume and programming power but needs to do a better job of exploiting its Web sites, Parikhal added.
Moderator Scott McKenzie, Billboard Radio Monitor’s editor-in-chief and managing director, noted that HD receivers are — so far — virtually unavailable in cars. The good news is radio has a new HD band, Figenshu said, referring to high-def multicast channels. “The bad news is automakers are giving us two years to create demand for it. I don’t think Americans will beat a path to Circuit City to get Lite FM-2.”
Radio should treat multicast channels as a separate brand, similar to how Toyota created a separate product line when it rolled out its Lexus brand, Figenshu added. HD may be radio’s last chance to prevent 18-34s from bypassing it for new media.
When McKenzie shifted the subject to Wall Street, Parikhal said that if radio consolidates any more and gets any bigger “it will fall over . . . Wall Street is either a pimp or a loan shark — they want everything and then they dump you.” Wall Street has to “get a grip” on realistic radio expectations and stations have to invest in programming development, Figenshu added.
The future of radio, according to Parikhal, is “you have to talk back to your bosses.” There is too much fear and not enough innovation in the business, he said.
Calling the Web “our entree to the future,” Coleman advocated that all stations immediately stream online both their primary and supplemental programming, such as HD side channels. Internet radio is still in its embryonic phase, but growing rapidly, Coleman pointed out, urging radio to focus over the next five years on getting consumers looking for audio on the Web to “think of us first. If we don’t build it, AOL and others services will.” Coleman also called for finding out what content customers and cellular providers want delivered on cell phones.
Parikhal urged radio CEOs to “take your company private” and to make innovation a rewardable skill in your company. And Figenshu suggested managers gather all the under 30-year olds at their stations to help design the next generation of radio. With the industry spending hundreds of millions of dollars on HD, “don’t cheap out on the content,” he said. |