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September 28, 2007

Who's Missing Out on Radio Advertising Opportunity, Part I

While many businesses are overlooking the opportunity to grow profitably with direct response radio advertising, they aren't the only organizations missing the boat.

There are organizations in other arenas that could reap huge rewards by tapping into the expertise and lower advertising costs of experienced direct response radio advertising agencies.

One such arena is that of public health communications.

This is the arena where often public tax dollars (state and federal) are put to use in advertising to positively influence health-related behaviors. Common topics include: drinking and driving, smoking, stay in school, organ donation, and safe driving during holidays.

Earlier this year, I attended a conference at Claremont University on this topic. Claremont is the "holy grail" of Applied Psychology - the field that seeks to apply the knowledge from academic research in a way that contributes to solving real world issues - and this was their annual conference on the topic.

The focal point of this conference was the social issue of organ donation - essentially the application of various subfields of psychology to the efforts to influence people to become organ donors. The conference consisted of a number of fascinating presentations, by very interesting and intelligent people from around the country, about results of programs using different approaches to boosting organ donor sign-ups

Two things struck me at this conference:

One, there is a LOT of tax money being put toward advancing social causes by a large number of very bright people in many organizations.

This was, in one sense, refreshing because I felt like because my tax dollars were going toward helping people in these ways, I was helping them.

In another sense, though, it was concerning because the second thing that struck me was that not once during the whole conference did any of the presenters describe their results in terms of "this approach yielded a cost per sign-up of $X." Results were described in a number of ways, but none with the simplicity and clear accountability of 'cost per sign up' that could be compared across approaches.

When I asked one of the program resenters about this metric, he said "that's what we're missing". And I agree.

The bottom line here is this: the skills and knowledge involved in direct response radio are directly applicable to public health communication efforts.

Moreover, if you understand effective advertising communication as reaching the right person at the right place and time at the right cost, then radio, as a medium that is with so many people as they're 'on the go', at work, at the beach, and certainly in their cars, is at least as appropriate - if not more appropriate - than TV or print or online for many topics in public health communications.

Think drunk driving, safe driving on the long holiday weekends, stay in school, stop smoking, even simply drinking responsibly - and then picture how radio has the ability to reach people at critical moments that are a part of the situations where these issues occur.

In essence, I suspect our tax dollars could be spent significantly more effectively if those involved with issuing grants for public health communications, and those involved in spending that grant money, would tap into the expertise of direct response radio professionals.

Posted by Brett Astor at 10:42 AM | Permalink