Radio is Broken (Hearted).  Like so many industries built on content and advertising, Radio has found itself struggling against falling ad revenue and increased competitive pressure from the internet and new media.  Like so many industries, Radio was not broken by the economic downturn, it has been broken for years, but now finds itself in rapid decline.

Radio has always struggled with the fundamental conflict of advertising.  It attracts audiences with compelling content, but drives those same audiences away with advertising injected right into the middle of the content its listeners most want to hear.

The relationship with the listener is what has kept radio viable.  Against the internet, against satellite, against the iPod, radio’s local relationship with its listeners is what has made it competitive – for listeners and for advertisers.  Not simply connecting listeners with their favorite music, but connecting them with local DJs, content, and the station itself.  Services like Pandora create a closer bond with a listener’s music preferences, satellite and the internet provide more variety without the commercials, but no other format or delivery system can recreate.

Now as the industry desperately tries to find some footing, many companies are abandoning that relationship with the listener.  The drive to strip stations of their individual identities and replace them with common brands and syndicated, nation-wide programming will kill Radio.  This is how Radio now breaks its relationship with the listener, by taking away everything that made that relationship special and unique.

Radio cannot deliver music that better match a listener’s tastes better than their own iPod or Pandora.  They cannot deliver more variety with less advertising than satellite.   Their competitive advantage is the local, close, intimate relationship with the listener.  Losing that relationship costs them their competitive advantage.

Radio will only stay competitive by strengthening those relationships.  By getting closer with the listener, by shifting advertising to be more meaningful and more involved than it has ever been before (and honestly by doing so making it more effective).  By connecting with the listener on air, online, and on mobile, by having that relationship anywhere and everywhere.  By strengthening the connection between the station and its personality and the listeners, and the listeners and one another.  This is what will make Radio viable and competitive, but it also seems to be on very few companies’ radar.

At least it makes it easy to pick who will be the long-term survivors.

One of the greatest victims of the economic downturn has been traditional advertising.   As cash starved companies slash their marketing budgets, traditional advertising, and the media companies built to deliver it, find themselves in a desperate situation.  Even without the weakened economy flaying the market, advertising, even on the web, was already broken, and disruption of advertising and media was inevitable.

Traditional advertising, and again, even traditional banner advertising on the web, is built on distraction.  By nature, advertising has been built to draw the audience’s attention away from content, and direct it somewhere else.    So-called innovation in advertising has only served to make advertising more distracting. 

That has created a fundamental conflict between advertising and content.  Content must be compelling and engaging to continue to attract eyeballs.  Companies must continue to make their content that much more interesting and interactive to keep the attention of their audience.  Deepened engagement is now a critical competitive advantage. 

Yet, while companies struggle to involve their audience with their content, they continue to sell advertising whose primary purpose is to draw that very attention they are trying to cultivate.  Content and advertising, at their most basic level, are in complete conflict with one another. 

It is that conflict that has broken advertising.  It is that conflict that continues to threaten media.

What must and will change in advertising, and what will ultimately change media, is the ability for advertisers themselves to involve themselves with media’s content and audience.  It will inevitably take diverse strategies and forms as elements work for certain content and audiences and not others, but advertising with change just as the rest of media has – it will become participatory.

Advertising and marketing campaigns will be built on reaching smaller audiences directly and in an interactive way.  They will not simply try to blanket audiences with enough impressions to distract just enough people to produce some kind of ROI, instead they will involve those audiences in the creation, reaction, and spread of that campaign. 

It will be an evolution, but they will be changes that advertisers must make.  Just as interactive and social features are now critical to the engagement and success of a website, those same concepts will drive the future success of advertising.

February has a long history of love, from the celebration of love and fertility of the Lupercal in ancient Rome held the 13^th and 14^th, to its replacement by the romanticized Valentine’s Day of Chaucer and Shakespeare.  With a long history of love comes the inevitable history of love lost and broken hearts.   

While it’s hardly fitting to fill this blog with courtly love, desperate romances, and all that is fair in love and war, I think that it’s a good opportunity, especially given the current environment and climate (and I am not talking Polar Bears) to spend the next couple of weeks reviewing things that, albeit not hearts, are very, very much broken.

More to follow.

This came from a Hoover's article (slightly edited), but I thought was excellent advice (and I watched the same show).  It reminded me of a book I read, the War of Art - good advice for anything.

A couple of weeks ago I was watching a nature show with my kids. It talked all about the lives of cheetahs on the savannah. I found out that mother cheetahs, in order to feed their young and fuel their own low-fat, high-performance bodies, must hunt every single day. If they go a day without capturing any prey, they might make it; if they go two days, they probably won’t. That’s how close they live to the border between survival and starvation, all the time.

We are lucky to not be in a similiar circumstance, still -

Find what you’re after and go for it — now, not later.  Your survival may depend on it.

Every professional or collegiate sports team and league should develop its own online community. 

I spent the past two days at the Sports Media and Technology conference, a great gathering put together by the Sports Business Journal and Fantasy Sports Association and each and every conversation there reinforced that conclusion.

Sports teams, unlike almost anything else, drive passion for their fans.  Their fans crave, are desperate for, a deeper connection with their team.  It is what drives traffic to a team’s website instead of ESPN.com.  It is what drives fans into the stadiums in the worst weather. 

When it comes to online communities, fans wont be satisfied with a special page on MySpace - they want that direct connection with a team.  Social Networks like MySpace and Facebook are horizontal, they cover a broad range of people and interests.  True online communities, are vertical.  They deliver a distinctive, engaging

Fans are community.  People who are watching the same games, reading the same commentary, sharing the same experiences are a community.  Creating an online destination is just harnessing that interaction.

Facebook or MySpace are part of the equation but not the solution.  Facebook and MySpace are built on existing, offline relationships.  Fan communities are all about discovery – discovering other people with interest just like yours and building new relationships.  Facebook and MySpace do not deliver a true connection with the team.  Just like teams need a page on ESPN, people still come to the team website because it delivers them the direct connection to the team – they want the true, official team experience.  Finally, and most importantly, the traffic your team drives to MySpace and Facebook are monetized by MySpace and Facebook.  That traffic, as fans connect with one another, engage with one another, etc – all drives revenue for those sites, not the team.  The team may be able to weasel out a share, or drive some interest in ecommerce, etc – but the majority of that traffic, being created by the team, is monetized and leveraged by MySpace and Facebook. 

By creating their own community, the team is delivering their passionate fans what they want – a completely immersive team experience and a community of fans.  For the advertisers, they are delivering a unique opportunity to interact and engage directly with their fans.  It not just drives online revenue, but premium online revenue.