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March 31, 2008

Radio Advertising Bureau Announces Changes

The RAB (Radio Advertising Bureau) on Friday announced a restructuring of its organization.

The RAB calls itself "the sales and marketing arm of the Radio industry." and says its objectives are:

To enhance the perception of Radio as a primary medium for all advertisers.
To increase Radio's advertising and marketing revenue
To organize the industry to set standards and guidelines that make Radio an easier medium for agencies and marketers to buy and capture value

Our take on the restructuring: you can't fall off the floor. We have no idea what the RAB has been doing. Indeed, the radio industry as a whole seems to be residing on Pluto. Not that we're complaining --- it often means opportunity for us and we turn that into opportunity for our clients.

We'd like to make a suggestion to the RAB: if you want to be taken seriously, you have to establish legitimacy. One way to do that is to NOT publish studies that are so clearly biased. Get an independent firm to conduct an independent study on a specific question that is relevant to radio advertisers. That means asking radio advertisers, not radio industry management or radio industry salespeople. All they want is some more "stuff" to use in sales presentations.

What we've found is this: radio advertising, done right, sells itself. Smart people see right through biased studies, even if they are essentially correct. And those same smart people are turned off by pushy salesmanship.

The great thing about direct response radio is that we don't ever have to take a radio salesperson's word for it because we can test directly... and independently. That means our clients don't have to rely on blind faith either. Isn't that the way it should be?

Posted by Jeff Small & Brett Astor at 08:27 AM | Permalink