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What about talk radio?
June 24, 2013
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. From NuVoodoo's recent national study of radio listeners 18-54, we have seen just how quickly our audience is shifting to the "digital lifestyle." Their pocket computers (which we quaintly call "smartphones"), are rapidly becoming their go-to tool for nearly everything. Which of course will increasingly include radio listening. So... at this early stage in life-via-smartphone, how does Radio fare? Last week we began, and this week we continue, exploring how smartphone owners feel about their favorite radio stations. Last week, we showed you that radio listeners who are also smartphone owners are inclined to be slightly more, not less, attached to their favorite music stations are than the Muggles who don't own smartphones. That is very encouraging, and confirms that this audience is still ours to maintain or lose. What about talk radio? Unlike music radio, of course, attachment to talk stations skews 35+ and Male. A demo bracket which has been slower to adopt the smartphone, but is increasingly doing so, and is already past the tipping point. So are the smartphone owners inclined to be less attached to their favorite talk stations than the old-line analog guys?
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Compare the Muggles on the left side of this chart to the digitized folks on the right. In fact, the pattern is similar to that for music radio. Attachment to a favorite Talk station is slightly higher, not lower, among listeners who have bought smartphones.Â
Or, put another way, those who value a Talk station in their daily lives at a 4 or higher on a 6-point scale are more likely to be smartphone owners than those who are less attached to a Talk station.Â
What this means to you
A plethora of digital alternatives is available, with far more to come, in both music and talk. But today, we are still at ground zero. The act of acquiring and owning a smartphone itself does not make a listener less attached to their favorite radio station, either in music or talk.
So how do we ensure that this continues? This about how we market our radio stations. We are marketing to people who are converting to living digitally. We need to do everything we can to maintain constant top-of-mind awareness to a listener who now receives most of his communication and information via his hand-held device. Â
We MUST discard our traditional advertising strategy of old-media mass-marketing NOW. Don’t react to attrition. Prevent it. Don’t “wait and see.” Get ahead of the curve, before the curve gets ahead of us.
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