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The good reporter who became a bad reporter (and how to be good again)

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Are you doing the right things to retain your top performers? 

By Tim Wolff, Futuri’s VP, TV and Digital Publishing Innovation

The full article lives on RTDNA.com, the website of the Radio Television Digital News Association

How do you use your best people?

I’ve learned a lot over the years in news management. One of the earliest and most profound lessons was what happens when managers think their job is to plug people in where they can operationally succeed that day.

Let me explain what mean and how I learned this. Early in my career, when I was a news producer, we had an incredible reporter. He enterprised lead stories every day, was brilliant covering breaking news, and often left extra packages for later shows. He could also dive in to tricky stories and make them make sense, all with a positive, willing attitude.

The editorial decision-makers knew this, of course. So every day, the other reporters got the easy, no enterprise needed stories, while he had to come up with his own lead stories and take on the toughest stories of the day. And then he’d get pulled for big breaking news first, while other reporters just did their one easy package and left.

This went on for probably close to two years. Then one day, I noticed his package and live shot were just ok; not horrible, but not up to his standards. And the next day he had no story ideas, and again seemed to mail in his package and live shot. I wasn’t a manager then, but I knew something was up. I pulled him aside the next day and asked him how he was.

He seemed surprised for a second, then exhaled and said something like, “I guess it’s obvious, right?”

Click here to read the full article on RTDNA.com.

Tim Wolff is Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri. He has 20+ years of experience as a digital and broadcasting leader who’s led top-performing teams across the country at companies including Gannet, Belo, and Cox Media Group Ohio, which includes three daily newspapers, three radio stations, WHIO-TV, and more. Wolff, who holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Missouri, also makes a mean green chile stew. You can see his live presentation “What News Managers Need Now” at the upcoming NAB conference. To learn more or continue the conversation, email him at timwolff@futurimedia.com or message him on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/timwolff1/.

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WEBINAR | The Studio Line is Dead: How to Get Listener Voices On Air in 2022

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Join our Scott Lindy with guests Deb Turpin,  Nathan James, Jordan Miller, and more for this free webinar on Thursday, March 24, at 4p ET.

Audiences are no longer calling station’s phone lines with requests or comments like they used to. Now they communicate through social, and they crave control of their content. It’s time for a new approach, including using your station’s Futuri Mobile app to get listener audio on the air.

This panel webinar features programming leaders including Deb Turpin from KSOP Z104 Utah’s #1 Country, Nathan James from SummitMedia, Jordan Miller from Steel City Media Pittsburgh, and more who are taking innovative approaches to interacting with their audiences — and succeeding.

From ways to work listener audio into your broadcast (even if they’re not calling!) to creating raving fans through creative listener recognition, you’ll come away from this webinar, hosted by Futuri’s Scott Lindy, with ideas that make your show sound and feel engaging and interactive.

Click here to register for this webinar. Even if you can’t make it live, we’ll send you the video on-demand. 

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Prospect Conversions – Don’t Sell Yourself Short

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At the beginning of each year, we think about improving ourselves. Some make resolutions while others pick up a new planner or organizational tool for work or personal life. Many find themselves reading a self-help book, like Stephen Covey’s timeless classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey wrote that one should seek first to understand, then to be understood. A straightforward tip that’s helpful in one’s personal life and an essential strategy for sales professionals. In our recent webinar, The Broadcast Sales Executive’s Guide to Crushing It in 2022, what we covered is a living example of Covey’s game-winning strategy. Especially for Account Executives and Sales Managers seeking to increase prospect conversions and get more out of their biggest clients.

Walk a Mile in The Prospect’s Shoes

Many SDRs arm themselves with a well-crafted value proposition and create a plan for how they’ll woo the prospect or client into understanding why they should be buying what they’re selling. This is the classic goal-driven best practice for creating a sales pitch. It’s also in need of an overhaul.  

What if, instead of creating your plan based on wanting the customer to understand the value of your product, you took a step back, took some time to get to know your prospects and clients? This sounds easier said than done. How would you do it, and where would you start?

Thankfully, there are tools that can help you understand your clients better. Having a true sense of a prospect or client’s personality is essential. It’s cornerstone of how you’ll tell the story about your product fulfilling their needs. 

At Futuri, we specialize in providing account executives and sales managers with a sales intelligence tool designed to convert prospects while shortening the sales cycle so you can close more deals. TopLine was created to help your sales team understand prospects and clients better on a more personal level and keep you up to speed on the most important news in your client’s industry and help create rock star sales presentations. 

The Right Tools for the Right Job

TopLine equips you to speak the lingo of their industry so you can communicate like an expert in their business category. TopLine Individual Personality Profiles are the secret tools in your arsenal. They help you prepare for the meeting, craft the perfect email, or make a warm phone call. Prospects and clients will remember the connection you made. 

TopLine’s Business Acumen and Instant Insights help you connect in more meaningful and relevant ways. When you sound knowledgeable about what’s happening in their business and use the same terminology and catchphrases, you grow trust. A significant factor in getting the sale.

A great way to glimpse how TopLine can help you identify prospects is our weekly Top 3 Categories infographic, posted every Monday on our LinkedIn page. You’ll see the category, why we think it’s an excellent prospecting opportunity, data to back it up, and prospecting questions to kick start your creative approach. It’s 100% free and clear for you to use when you follow Futuri on LinkedIn.   

We created these features in TopLine for every seller who has experienced that moment in a meeting when your prospect or client seemed to be keeping your ideas and product at arm’s length while they struggled to see how it could help their business. 

That’s where TopLine starts. Our entire suite of features, including meeting prep, client research, custom-built presentations, co-op reports, and TopLine’s newly added client Digital Analysis reports, all come together in a single sales intelligence platform. 

We’ll help you walk a mile in their shoes, help you understand why they bought them, and make them excited to buy another pair from you.

Cut to the Front of the Line

If you’re ready to take the next step and learn how TopLine can maximize prospect conversions, grow your client list, land more new business all while shortening your sales cycle, send us a note, and we’ll be in touch soon.

In the meantime, you can check out our recent webinar here.  

From all of us at Futuri, here’s to crushing your sales goals in 2022!

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Will your newsroom be ready when social media transparency becomes regulated?

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Social media transparency is about to get regulated: here’s what it means for your newsroom.

By Tim Wolff, Futuri’s VP, TV and Digital Publishing Innovation

The talk–and there’s been a lot of it in recent years–is becoming more than talk. Bipartisan bills have been introduced; the public wants action. Even the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, says, “The place where we have the best chance at progress is legislating a certain amount of transparency.”

The main driver, of course, is that so many people use social media and that there is little clarity or consistency around how each social platform chooses the content we see. Toss in a dash of global election interference and warnings that addictive social media is harming our psyche, and you can see where transparency regulation sounds good for consumers.

But what about newsrooms?

An accurate and in-the-moment understanding of the topics and stories people are sharing and seeing on social media has enormous benefits for newsrooms, who are, after all, trying to report and create content about what interests the most people. As the news events of 2022 unfold in a year that will mark the dawn of social media’s legislated transparency, newsroom strategies for monitoring social media will shift as access to more and different social data becomes available. 

It’s foggy at best how social platforms will evolve data sharing in post-regulation. For now, newsrooms need to be careful not to put all their eggs into one basket. A reliance on data coming solely from the social media company itself could become disruptive if the company stops or changes how and what it shares, which currently would be an entirely legal decision on their part.

Consider, for example, CrowdTangle. They were launched as an independent, free-to-use social monitoring tool bought by Facebook in 2016. CrowdTangle is used in almost every newsroom in the U.S. Journalists log in using their personal Facebook account to access a depth of data culled from public Facebook Pages and Groups, Instagram accounts, and the most popular subreddits. But that can all change in a hurry. 

This week, news came out that the co-founder of CrowdTangle, Brandon Silverman, left Facebook and is now working with a bipartisan group of U.S. senators to shape laws intended to make social media more transparent. Silverman also told the New York Times that the CrowdTangle team was disbanded last fall, and the product was being moved under Facebook’s integrity team. He also says it became an annoyance within Facebook, making it unclear how long Facebook will support it.

That’s one reason we have always focused on a much broader range of data here at Futuri. With TopicPulse, the most advanced AI-driven social data tool, we track data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and over 100,000 news publishers. Because we monitor all these different sources and publishers, our partners are covered and won’t be disrupted by one social company shutting something down.

We also include real people as part of the mix, helping monitor and manage the artificial intelligence that brings real-time, live demographic data and predictive analysis to thousands of stories every minute.

We believe in data, we believe in transparency, and we believe in constantly improving the best tools that help newsrooms spend less time unraveling the data behind trending stories so they can concentrate on serving their communities.

Here are our top pro tips to help your newsroom track social media for content:

  • Have a broad scope of data sources
  • Choose information that can be widely accessed in your newsroom; if only one or two people have access, that’s a significant risk for you
  • Track more than just your brand(s) social media and your competitors; after all, that’s only a tiny portion of the average consumer’s social media activity
  • Remember, it’s not a zero-sum game between you and the other TV/Radio/Newspapers in town. Social and digital are virtually unlimited, and you have endless opportunities to grow your brand
  • Keep a healthy skepticism about any self-reporting platform
  • Track trending news topics outside of your news team’s comfort zone (we tend to live in similar areas, follow similar social media, and only reflect a portion of our communities)
  • Ask for (or demand) transparency whenever possible, just as we should be as transparent as possible with our news consumers
  • Ask your news team how much time they spend mining social media for news and tips. Then have them track it to get the actual number
  • Look for tools that can save your news team time and get them the essential information they need (you’ll need AI, and you’ll see an immediate positive impact on your team and your news)
  • Take a look at what personal data your news team has had to share to get access to tech or social media data; journalists are under fire as never before, and it’s a good idea to have a cybersecurity expert review the risks journalists have taken in exposing private information to tech and social media companies
  • Stay up to date on changes in social, AI, and media technology by following on LinkedIn, Twitter, or your platform of choice

Tim Wolff is Vice President of TV and Digital Publishing Innovation at Futuri. He has 20+ years of experience as a digital and broadcasting leader who’s led top-performing teams across the country at companies including Gannet, Belo, and Cox Media Group Ohio, which includes three daily newspapers, three radio stations, WHIO-TV, and more. Wolff, who holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of Missouri, also makes a mean green chile stew.

More Thoughts on Connecting with Younger Audiences

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Young people have a lot going on in their lives at any given time. Getting their attention means competing against many other factors. 

 

Futuri recently hosted a webinar that addressed exactly this topic of how brands like yours can become not just relevant, but essential to younger audiences.  You can see for yourself with our on-demand webinar led by Futuri’s Charlie Maxx and Sabrina Carlo.

 

After seeing a high level of interest in reaching younger audiences and low level of confidence in the ability to do so, this webinar was intended for media executives and others who wanted to see what could be done in this area of engaging younger audiences and making your brand essential to them.

 

Here are a few key takeaways from the webinar, many of which are discussed at length in Furuti’s Future of Audience and Revenue Study 2021. 

 

Declining Trust in Media

 

In general, young people no longer have very much trust in large institutions anymore. This lack of trust in large organizations extends to the mediasphere as well.

 

The Future of Audience and Revenue study surveyed different age groups on the credibility of major TV outlets. While the other age groups scored the major TV outlets at a rate of 30-50% credibility, the younger audience scored the credibility at only in the mid-20%. 

 

This is bad news for major TV outlets, however not so much for local radio, television, and newspaper brands. In fact, local radio and local newspaper brands ranked highly with respect to clarity and facts. So while it would seem that young audiences no longer trust the media in general, the problem is a lot more nuanced than this. 

 

In particular, younger audiences distrust large, national media brands, but are more likely to trust their preferred local radio, television and newspaper brands.

The Younger Audience Has Defined Media Preferences

 

When you’re trying to market your brand to younger audiences, it is important to take into account what kinds of content they are actively seeking. The most sought-after kind of content for 18 to 24-year-olds, the Future of Audience and Revenue study found, was… scary content. Spooky, right?

 

Emotional and sad content was also reported to be popular with 18 to 24-year-olds.

 

On the flip side, it’s important to make sure that you don’t market your brand based on the types of content that young people aren’t interested in or actively avoiding. Surprisingly, The Future of Audience and Revenue Study found that informative, current events, and dramatic content just weren’t as popular with 18 to 24-year-olds.

 

It would seem to me that the media preferences of young people involve more emotional and scary content, rather than factual information about important, timely matters in society. By knowing the content preferences of young people, your brand can be better marketed towards them.

Vital to Long-Term Health of Media Companies

 

By now you’re starting to feel better informed about how younger audiences trust smaller, local news organizations rather than major media networks and prefer more emotionally stimulating content over cold, hard, factual information content. This is all great to know, but after learning so much about younger audiences, you might be wondering how all of this connects to the success of your company. 

 

The young audience of today become the patrons of tomorrow. If you connect with them now and build loyalty and trust — two things that are hard to win with this age group — your company will be in a great place as far as long-term health goes. 

 

Takeaways and More Ideas

 

Knowing how to engage with younger audiences is critical if you want your media brand to survive in the current landscape of media. 

Still hungry for more on how you can make your brand essential to younger audiences? If so, we would highly encourage you to request the white paper from our website so that you can read up on the study for yourself and be sure to check out the on-demand webinar.

CES 2021

CES 2021: The Only Constant is Change

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In a year relatively light on major announcements, CES 2021 reminds us that to reject change is to embrace failure.

The first all-virtual CES is in the books. Compared to recent years, the 2021 event was relatively light on major, industry-changing announcements. Take General Motors, which had the most prominent presence of any automaker, for example. While they unveiled many cool concepts (like its Halo self-driving car concept) and an increased electric vehicle portfolio, its biggest news seemed to be its new logo.

But about that new logo: No company, especially one of GM’s size, takes that type of rebranding lightly. This logo redesign is only the fifth in GM’s 113-year history. And they did it not to freshen their logo up, but to have it underscore its commitment to the future: developing, producing, and selling electric vehicles. 

GM says the new blue gradient is meant to reflect “the clean skies of a zero-emissions future,” and the negative space around the (lowercase!) “m” is even meant to resemble a plug. While the logo itself has been the subject of some creative criticism, the fact it exists is a way for GM to say, “We’re very serious about our commitment to embracing the change necessary to be successful in this changing world.”

So yes, CES 2021 felt more about evolutions of existing technologies and products than launching groundbreaking new ones (especially those that specifically impact broadcasters). But even its virtual execution was an example of how the big-picture evolutions in the ways we develop, distribute, and monetize content are very much here, and not going anywhere. The disruptions that began in March 2020 have tremendously hastened the digital-driven sea changes that have been coming to the broadcast industry for years. 

So many of those changes have to do with delivering the right content to the right people at the right time. 

Let’s talk broadcast sales. As noted in our recent piece “The 7 Trends You Need to Know About to Grow Your Revenue in 2021”, while radio and TV are incredible mass-reach mediums, broadcasters can no longer rely solely on impressions to get the buy. Broadcast brands need to develop and deliver stories about how they can reach a targeted audience well-matched to a brand’s goals to secure new revenue. 

From a content perspective, when people have endless options to get content specifically tailored to their preferences, it’s never been riskier to simply go with your gut on what your audience wants to see and hear. Pairing your seasoned eyes and ears with the right technology to identity exactly what topics and angles your audience will respond to is necessary to grow an engaged audience.

More and more broadcasters are acting on what they may have known in their gut for years: to reject change, especially when it’s inevitable, is to embrace failure. GM’s rebranding announcement was a statement to their world about how they’re embracing change. And embracing change is a big part of the reason that Futuri’s audience engagement and sales intelligence technology, designed to equip broadcasters with the tools necessary to evolve their relationship with their audiences and advertisers successfully, saw record growth in 2020. 

In the latest episode of the podcast Innovation19 with Daniel Anstandig, our CEO breaks down trends related to audience engagement, content, and revenue for broadcast media from CES 2021, capped off with a lightning round of the fun gears and gadgets that always come out of CES (ultra-premium bathtub with mood lighting, aroma, and fog? We’re in!). Take a listen, and as you do, think about how these things all roll up to the importance of change. And remember — at Futuri, we’re always here to have a discussion about how we can help you embrace and navigate change to grow your content, grow your audience, and grow your revenue. 

Listen to Innovation19 with Daniel Anstandig

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Trends in Broadcast Revenue Growth

The 7 Trends You Need to Know About to Grow Your Revenue in 2021

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Successful sales executives know that knowledge is power. We break down seven top trends emerging in broadcast sales, and how you can navigate them successfully. 

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that lacking the willingness or ability to adapt is a recipe for failure. Nearly every business — and hey, almost every person! — underwent some type of massive change in the way they did things, from adjusting to your kids’ remote learning to securing revenue from clients you can’t pitch in person. Those that were most successful are the ones that genuinely thought differently about the way they do things.

The fact that success today requires a change of approach is especially true in broadcast sales. In addition to the massive shifts everyone has experienced in the way they work, brands have changed how they think about ad dollars’ budget allocation. While radio and television stations used to be able to rely on gross audience numbers to sell their reach, today brands understand that a targeted (smaller) audience of qualified buyers provides a more substantial return on their ad dollars compared to a larger audience of inefficient consumers. 

Having the tools and data to tell the unique story of your audience and their buying habits is key. With this type of information, you can maximize a brand’s advertising dollars and become an indispensable part of a brand’s team and win you a client for life.

How do we know? Well, that’s what we’ve been doing for years with TopLine, the sales intelligence system that pairs AI with expert human analysis to advance every stage of the sales process. We work with hundreds of broadcasters across America in markets large and small, and we helped deliver $130 million in advertising and sponsorship revenue for our partners in 2020. Already, we see 2021 off to a strong start.

In a recent episode of the podcast Innovation19 with Daniel Anstandig, Anstandig, our CEO, and Futuri SVP Tracy Gilliam discuss predictions and expectations they’re seeing emerge in broadcast sales.  They make recommendations to help you successfully capitalize on each trend in 2021. Read the high-level takeaways below, listen to the full (but short!) 19-minute episode to dig deeper, and consider how you can make the right changes to achieve revenue success in 2021 and beyond.

1. Advertisers are focusing on targeting, audience engagement, efficiency, and accountability for performance.

Relying solely on impressions to deliver a campaign doesn’t cut it anymore. Radio and TV are best-in-class mass-reach mediums. Still, with so many ways to reach a targeted audience, broadcasters must articulate the ways you can reach an audience that’s well-matched to a brand’s goals. That storytelling is vital for securing new revenue.

2. Agencies have to justify their ad purchases with results.

Increasingly, agencies are dealing with pressure to show justification for their media buying decisions. As the world gets more technical and analytical, buyers want to see how efficient broadcast advertising is in driving awareness or lead generation. Quickly delivering campaign summaries that show precisely how you produced results is crucial.

3. It’s harder than ever to get a prospective ad buyer’s attention. 

This has been a challenge since way before people started working remotely, which certainly hasn’t helped. And today, especially with agencies getting more and more protective with their clients, they don’t want media reps in their space. Arming your sellers with real insights into the buyer to cut through the massive clutter they’re hit with is how to move the mark. Simply pinging a buyer constantly without insights is a one-way ticket to the junk folder.

4. The pandemic is shifting and accelerating trends, and new trends mean new opportunities.

Shifts in the way we live and work are growing categories like home delivery services, bulk shopping, and financial services, and businesses that might not have traditionally bought media, like child care or senior services, need to get their message across to a growing audience. Staying educated about these shifts and getting out of your category comfort zone is imperative to growing your revenue. 

5. Multi-platform influencer campaigns with consistent messaging are essential.

Going back to the fact that gross impressions are no longer enough, endorsement campaigns need to go through every single channel advertisers are using — social, podcasts, video, you name it. Giving sellers the tools to tell the story of all your platforms and how they deliver value will get attention — and secure revenue.

6. Media brands are expecting more from their reps — and there are fewer reps.

It’s still true that good, resilient sales talent will stand the test of difficult economic times. That said, think of the changes in the ways consumers interact with advertisers, advertisers make purchase decisions, and broadcast brands sell to those advertisers. Standing out requires being a true partner to your clients who’s there to help them navigate change. Simply presenting yourself as a subject matter expert on their industry and providing them valuable information when you may not be pitching them means they’ll think of you first when they are spending.

7. Local is still a huge advantage, as long as your message is tailored to meet that community’s needs. 

Local buys are still where it’s at in terms of percentage of revenue for most media companies. Obviously, there’s more and more focus on national and regional opportunities these days. Still, local communities and networks are a colossal differentiation opportunity when it comes to targeting and understanding the unique local audience. Making sure you’re helping advertisers adapt their messaging and approach to meet consumers’ needs in your specific community is a significant advantage.

For more insights into 2021 trends and predictions for broadcast sales, listen to episode 6 of Innovation19 on your favorite podcast platform. And to learn about how TopLine can help you stay ahead of these trends and grow your revenue, reach out to us today.
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Holidays 2020: How CCM Radio Can Take Its Listener Relationships to the Next Level

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As we close a year that has been phenomenally stressful for most of us for many reasons, not the least of which is the contagious, deadly virus out there (come on, vaccine!), many of the year-end social and spiritual outlets we’ve relied on forever aren’t available to us — at least in the same form we’re used to. So, how can CCM radio help fill these gaps?

This is an excellent time to think through how you can deepen your relationship with your listeners around the holidays if you haven’t already, and in this guest post for Christian Music Broadcasters, Futuri’s Zena Burns shares her insight into how you can do just that.

Click here to continue reading.

major research study at crs 2020

Futuri Media and the University of Florida Present Major Research Study at CRS 2020.

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The final day of CRS 2020 featured the presentation Defending Your Audience Share: Exclusive Research Findings, the results of a major study conducted by Futuri Media and the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. 

The study was conducted in January 2020 and surveyed nearly 1,400 people who named country as their favorite music format out of a list of seven options. It also broke out those who listen to AM/FM country radio (both terrestrial and streaming), and those who listen to country music but not via AM/FM country radio. 

Presented by Daniel Anstandig, Futuri Media’s CEO, and Rob Harder, Director of Programming / Brand Manager for the University of Florida radio properties, the study aimed to answer three questions facing country radio today: 

  • How do we defend our country audience and revenue share? 
  • How should we extend our country content onto new platforms? 
  • How will we transcend our challenges as the country competition landscape changes?

Key findings from the study can be found at futurimedia.com/CRS2020. Among the findings: 

  • 76% of AM/FM country listeners would prefer more video content from their favorite country radio station. 
  • Country radio listeners are tuning in to nearly the same amount of AM/FM radio as in the past, but 23% plan to listen to more country radio streaming in the next three months.
  • Women 18-34 who listen to broadcast radio tend to be more active on social media than streaming listeners. Throughout the study, data shows that country stations should have a social strategy that targets country fans, especially younger females, with sticky and recyclable content. 
  • Country listeners who have listened to a podcast in the last month name music as their favorite podcast topic genre. This number is 30%; the next highest topic genre is news/politics at 11%. Country radio station are great at talking about music; this presents an excellent time-shifted and original podcast content opportunity. 
  • Quality station-specific mobile apps present a major engagement opportunity. Younger listeners are more likely to install them, and they’re an opportunity for more connected car listening. Of AM/FM country radio listener respondents, 44% have their favorite station’s mobile app installed on their mobile device, a number that jumps to 48% when looking at the 18-34 demo. And 26% of country fans listen to country music via a connected car platform and are highly likely to listen to country music connecting their mobile device to their vehicle.

For more key findings, including many related to driving revenue, visit futurimedia.com/CRS2020.

how radio can cash in on booming digital ad spending

How Radio Can Cash in On Booming Digital Ad Spending

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With brands spending at record rates on mobile, digital audio, and digital video, radio stations can showcase their best products and add new offerings to grow revenue.

Here’s some good news for radio broadcasters: The digital ad market is surging and now is the time for local stations to cash in. Local radio companies have invested heavily in digital audio, mobile and digital video, positioning them to grab a larger share of digital ad dollars. Consumers are shifting their media time to mobile devices and that’s good for radio’s digital products.

Just how much money are we talking about?

  • U.S. marketers spent $28.4 billion on digital advertising in Q1 2019, up 18% from Q1 2018, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. 
  • The strong quarterly growth comes after a banner year in 2018, when digital ad sales jumped 22% to $104.7 billion, compared to 2017 levels. 
  • Mobile advertising spending doubled last year to $70 billion, compared to 2017 levels. 

As more consumers turn to their smartphones for entertainment, digital audio and video streaming are booming, and advertisers want to reach these audiences.  

  • Thanks to red-hot podcasting and digital streaming, brands are doubling-down on digital audio, spending $2.3 billion last year, up 23% from 2017’s $1.7 billion. 
  • Digital video is similarly growing at a breakneck pace, with ad spend up 37% in 2018 to $16.3 billion, compared to 2017.  

So what are the takeaways for broadcasters? Here are a few suggestions

Keep your mobile apps fresh

The best radio station mobile apps feature live streams, on-demand content, podcasts, and user-favorite features like contests. These are all key components to creating a positive mobile experience for your users. Make sure your mobile app is easy to use and continually revisit to explore new features and integrations. And don’t forget that with the growth of Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and SDL, mobile apps compatible with these technologies are your ticket into the connected car in a meaningful way.

Podcasts, podcasts, podcasts

Your listeners and your advertising partners can’t get enough of podcasts, so focus on developing more original on-demand audio and make your broadcast content available for on-demand, time-shifted listening. Offer advertisers opportunities in your on-demand audio including exclusive sponsorship and even branded podcasts. 

Develop mobile ad opportunities

For local advertisers, offer mobile ad opportunities that go beyond banner ads. You can create branded content, including video and podcasts, and you can also offer sponsorships for popular sections of the app, such as weather or traffic. Lastly, make sure that your live stream quality is as strong as your over-the-air broadcasts to ensure users have a positive listening experience. Pre-roll, midroll, and post-roll video ads give local businesses a chance to get into digital video. Also, be sure to present podcast ad opportunities, these are a major growth area for digital audio.

Dig into digital video

Both users and marketers are clamoring for more digital video. Radio stations can shoot video in studio or in the community. Local events, sports and concerts all offer opportunities for video. There’s even opportunities to create video to accompany original podcasts. Local businesses can buy pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll video as standalone or in conjunction with audio spots. Radio can also produce branded video content for local advertisers, leveraging both their production and sales capabilities.

So how do you tackle all this to-do list? Futuri Media can help. 

  • Top-quality mobile apps: With Futuri Mobile, we can design mobile apps with custom features to showcase your best content and create an immersive mobile experience. Our apps are highly customizable; choose from one of three starting points and create a station app that has any of literally hundreds of customizations. 
  • Get into the video business — without derailing other parts of your business: To help time-strapped hosts and producers with content, we’ve added TopicPulse Instant Video. Subscribers can access dozens of videos daily, based on the day’s hottest topics that they easily can customize with their station branding and even their own PPM-encoded audio. Distribute these on your mobile, web, and social channels. And our POST podcasting system makes it incredibly simple to turn your audio into a video with a licensed image and a dynamic waveform designed to drive engagement. It’s a great way to take advantage of YouTube and other video sharing platforms for your audio content.

***

 

By embracing mobile, digital audio, and digital video, your station can participate in the fast-growing digital and mobile ad boom, as well as bring more innovative and exclusive content to your audience. That’s a win-win for everyone. 

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Futuri is the leading provider of cloud-based audience engagement software for the enterprise. Brands rely on Futuri to make their content more relevant, accessible, engaging, and results-driven. Founded in 2009, Futuri holds 12 published or pending patents in 151 countries. Named to the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies for seven consecutive years, Futuri is the only audience engagement platform that includes solutions for sales, marketing, and content teams.