Speak For Yourself

The late Margaret Thatcher, longtime Prime Minister of England, once said, “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.”

The brainiacs at Amazon must have been inspired by “The Iron Lady,” because a couple of years ago, they developed a virtual superwoman capable of getting practically anything and everything done: She’s Alexa, the ultimate intelligent personal assistant that comes standard with the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot smart speaker systems.

People Magazine may have crowned Julia Roberts the most beautiful female on planet earth, but for a growing number of people, Alexa is the hottest right now. That said, she’s not the only game in town. The smart speaker landscape is exploding and highly competitive; in fact, we’re witnessing an arms race of sorts between Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot and the Google Home units. According to a report this year from Voice Labs, which provides analytics for both devices, the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers will sell more than 24 million combined units through the end of 2017. That would quadruple the growth from 2016 and bring the total number of devices in the marketplace to nearly 35 million by year’s end.

What the heck does all that have to do with radio? Plenty, quite possibly.

In the past month or so, we’ve written several stories on AllAccess.com demonstrating the growing interest in developing and marketing unique “skills” – capabilities added by third-party developers – for radio to incorporate with these smart speakers. In March, Futuri Media announced a rollout of customized Alexa Skills for radio. In April, Steve Goldstein's Amplifi Media and Fred Jacobs' jacApps announced their partnership to develop voice command applications for the radio and podcasting industries, including Skills for the Amazon Echo and commands for Google Home.

The venture, called Sonicai, will be headed by co-founder and longtime radio executive Lee Davis, who – with Amplifi – will focus on sales, marketing, and “Skills” architecture, while the jacApps team will oversee product development and customer service.

Additionally, at last month’s NAB show in Las Vegas, a new "Alexa Skill Building Bootcamp" was presented, exploring the creation and implementation of Skills for Amazon's voice-controlled devices – the Echo, Dot, and Tap – as well as future implementations in other devices like dashboard infotainment systems.

We Saw This Coming

This technology definitely has radio’s attention, and all of us know exactly why. For at least 10 years now, we’ve seen the meteoric growth of numerous audio choices for people to consume music, spoken word, video, and any other sort of ear and eye candy imaginable. We mentioned Jacobs Media and its recently announced partnership above; 10 years ago at the NAB Convention in Charlotte, Jacobs revealed results of The Bedroom Project, in which they teamed with Arbitron (remember them?) to study how 18- to 28-year-old consumers access their media. The findings were a harbinger of what we know to be widespread today. Radio’s ubiquity was under attack, with the study concluding, “Broadcast radio was not a major part of respondents' use of media.” Jacobs focused on how radio is generally not listened to in the home by young adults and noted that radio's stronghold, the car, was also being encroached upon by iPods. Obviously, a lot has changed in a decade. The iPod threat seems like a much simpler time compared to now, right? If the good ol’ Nano, Mini, and Shuffles were the only challenges radio faced now, perhaps things would be a helluva lot easier.

Four years later, Country Radio Seminar (CRS) commissioned Coleman Insights Media Research for the Country P1 Consumer & New Media Study for a deep dive into Country P1 satisfaction levels and how they were using new media for presentation at CRS 2011. While fulfillment for Country radio at the time was very high, Coleman also shared this observation, echoing the earlier Jacobs/Arbitron findings – only louder – and warning that radio was already overestimating the importance of itself relative to other devices: “Radio ranks a distant third, behind Internet-connected portable computers and smartphones. Country P1s are just as likely to wake up to a smartphone as a clock radio, suggesting radio is already engaged in a battle for the nightstand.” Coleman strongly recommended that Country radio adapt and work to develop apps so listeners would continue waking up to their favorite Country stations through their smartphones.

“That’s the backdrop to all this,” said Fred Jacobs, of Jacobs Media, talking about the rapidly growing penetration of smart speakers – and thus, his new Sonicai venture. “Radio has had an at-home listening problem, and it’s only going to get worse. So, here come these devices; the gateway for radio in a different form to be accessible back in people’s homes, because this is clearly – at least for the moment – an at-home device.”

I’d Tell You, But Then I’d Have To Skill You

Those aforementioned “Skills,” explains Futuri’s Daniel Anstandig, “are a way to teach Alexa, or other voice-activated systems, to do things. With the radio skills we’re building, it could be as simple as, ‘Alexa, play Hot 108,’ and it would start to play an actual stream. Or, it could be more complex, like, ‘What is today’s Word Of The Day?’ or ‘What’s today’s Song Of The Day?’ And because that skill would be enabled for that station, Alexa or Google Home could repeat back information, which is programmed by the station. So, it’s an opportunity for radio and television stations to program artificial intelligence in the home for your audience. The upside for radio is, because it’s the smart speaker and over 80% of Alexa users listen to music on these devices, this is a great opportunity to drive communications and TSL at home. In some ways, it creates another interaction that, before, we might have only done through a request line.”

Adds Jacobs, “The sky is the limit for radio, For example, stations are clearly using them already for news updates, setting it up for someone to say, ‘Alexa, give me a news report from WXYZ radio,’ and it delivers the top five headlines. It’s like apps – they don’t just conjure up content, you have to create it, and the app pulls content down from a website. In some ways, this is very similar. Amazon Echo or Google Home can read news updates, it can give you information about the radio station, or you can ask it ‘Tell me all the places I can buy tickets for next month’s Country Fest.’ Again, it all has to be devised, setup, and then properly communicated to the audience.”

Jacobs cautions there is a good news-bad news with radio listening triggered by voice. “The good news is, maybe it will play your radio station. But it could also play off the TuneIn App and not off your stream.” TuneIn is the San Francisco-based platform delivering radio station broadcasts, on-demand programming, and podcasts to nearly 50 million active users; it has partnerships with most major radio companies to deliver their station’s streams. “Depending on how you ask Alexa to find your stream,” Jacobs continues, “if you’re KISS, or EAGLE, or MIX, or HANK, or some kind of handle – as opposed to some name like WIRF or WSIX – chances are really good that Alexa will direct you to somebody else’s stream other than your own. I believe, if the stream is encoded, that it isn’t a problem from TuneIn or whether it comes from a website. I would urge you to check with Nielsen just to be sure.”

Taking Jacobs’ advice, I reached out to Nielsen Audio; a spokesperson there told me that in terms of PPM-measured markets, as long as a station’s signal is encoded, its stream will indeed be recognized by the meter, no matter the source of it.

“There are a lot of conversations happening inside radio companies on this topic,” says Jacobs. “Everybody should be thinking about it and trying to figure out what’s the best way to harness this and make it work to our advantage. The key is developing Skills for Alexa, and the space is very reminiscent of where we were with apps back in 2008 when Apple opened up the app store. We look at this as being a fortuitous opportunity for your radio station on a big new platform.” According to data presented by Jacobs at the World Wide Radio Summit in Los Angeles this week, penetration of these devices is currently at an estimated 11%, and I already shared growth projections earlier, where – in case you dozed off – an estimated 35 million will be in the market by the end of this year.

“Voice activation is only going to continue to grow,” predicts Anstandig, adding that the two most common places for people to put smart speakers are in the living room and in the bathroom. “For a while now, we’ve talked about how afternoon drive has grown, because there could be nuances in how people use PPM, or it could be that morning usage is not as big as it once was and afternoon usage is growing. But, I think this represents – in particular – an opportunity for morning drive, because they have a significant numbers of people using smart speakers while they’re getting ready. And, that could certainly help us to make our stations part of our audience’s morning routine again in a new way.”

Radio: Already On Board

Entercom WBEE/Rochester, NY PD Bob Barnett is one of the many programmers who are definitely watching all this, while participating themselves. He has a smart speaker in his kitchen at home – a replacement for his radio, by the way – and another in his office. “I believe this technology will end up everywhere,” says Barnett. “In addition to Siri-like helpers on phones, this will be what we do in the cars, at home, in conference rooms, etc. in the not-so-distant future.” He and his company are already working on “Skills” and strategies – which, to nobody’s shock, he cannot share with us here. “Radio really needs to start preparing for this technology in terms of listener usage and how it impacts Nielsen,” says Barnett. “When my morning guy says ‘Alexa, turn on W-B-E-E!’ and the device picks up that command from my kitchen radio and turns on my radio station, you know that it’s going to have an impact.”

KSON/San Diego PD Kevin Callahan also has more than one Echo device – using it at home for an alarm and a bathroom radio – calling them, “Easier than a smart phone, in my opinion.” But, he also advises not to get ahead of ourselves here. “I think we need to improve the experience before getting too crazy with promotion etc. I can say ‘Alexa, play KSON from TuneIn,’ and it’s great. On the other side, it isn’t consistent. All of our stations are available on TuneIn, but not all activate when you ask Alexa to do so. I know some stations are working on station apps that work with the technology, and I am exploring ways to see if TuneIn can help solidify the experience.” Callahan and his staff are also tinkering with Alexa. “I have one on the desk at work, too, so that programming can experiment with a bunch of ideas that we have had. Echo was the number one electronic at Christmas, as I recall, so I think it is worth a little time and experimentation.”

Another PD in a medium market who asked not to be identified told me part of their Spring promotion plan includes giving away Echo Dot smart speakers on air, in conjunction with the incorporation of newly installed “Skills” for the device.

Two random thoughts here:

1. Could "Say it out loud and clear; ‘play (insert your call letters here)’" become the 21st century version of that famous diary phrase, "Write it down?"

2. Could technology, said to be radio’s death of a thousand paper cuts, actually turn out to be its source of rebirth – at least in the home?

Aaaand, we’re back.

We used to think of Country listeners as slow adapters. But, I believe after what we’ve seen with in the Edison Research projects commissioned by CRS in recent years, that is changing very quickly. Part of that can be attributed to Country’s rapid growth of 18-34 listeners during the last seven or so years, with millennials so easily adept at new technology. So, this cool gadget and its projected explosive growth is certainly a huge radio opportunity, but a great one for Country radio, especially because of our unique ability to generate strong connectivity with listeners of all ages.

The Jacobs Tech Survey is also unique in that it breaks everything down by formats, says Jacobs. “We can not only see who is buying these devices in terms of demographics like age, gender, ethnicity, and all of those kind of things, but we can also break it down by format. So, we can begin to start profiling which formats are ahead of the curve when it comes to acquiring these devices. I think that’s going to be a marketing tool for us, but I think it is also going to be really helpful for radio just to learn about the space.”

Anstandig agrees: “This could be another way to advance the cause in a perfect storm of technology – the right time and the right way for people as they’re coming around to it – since it’s just so easy, and it’s like having a conversation. Based on what I’ve seen, it seems like a tremendous opportunity for Country radio, specifically.”

As always, I welcome your comments, corrections, insights, and general feedback. Respond in the comments section, or hit me direct here.