And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor

How many times has the word "monetization" come up in discussions about the media and the digital age? Everyone wants to be the one to come up with the ultimate answer to the question "how are we gonna make money on this thing?," but we're still feeling our way through it. For every paywall that worked, there have been countless others that haven't. For every site that's doing OK with banner ads, there are plenty that don't. For every site that "pivoted to video" and... okay, none of them seem to be working. But it's an important question for all of the media, and that includes talk radio and its cousin/extension/young relative, podcasts. The advertising revenue on the radio side isn't exactly setting records, and on the podcasting side, it's still a drop in the bucket after more than a decade. It's still early, but it's also a lot lower than you'd expect, given the publicity podcasting gets.

One of the things we DO know about advertising on both talk radio and podcasts is that native advertising -- live reads incorporated into the flow of the program -- works. We know that from decades of experience on radio, the premium charged for those spots being justified by their effectiveness. We know that from the success direct response ads get on podcasts, with actual sales trackable to shows whose download numbers might not be massive compared to broadcast audiences but whose listeners will respond to a call to action. It's the same as the live spots talk radio's been doing forever. People respond when a host they like tells them about a sponsor. Simple.

That idea -- the incorporation of advertising into a show's content -- is hardly new. That's how radio did it in the Golden Age, back when Don Wilson would pop up in a scene on the Jack Benny show and ease into a Jell-O spot and then right back into the plot. It's why product placement on TV shows became big. And it's why, most recently, audio producers have aggressively moved into "branded content," podcasts and videos that might appear to be regular programming but are actually created for a sponsor. Again, what's not new about that is that back to the network radio days, shows would be tied to, and often created for, a sponsor, whether it was made obvious -- "Texaco Star Theater," "Lux Radio Theatre," "The Buick-Berle Show" -- or not. On broadcast radio, it takes the form of infomercials, which are deadly. I've written before about the problem: Radio is addicted to that quick buck it can get by selling blocks of time, but airing that stuff has a poisonous effect on overall listening. Listeners hear some gold seller or a fake "talk show" about an erectile dysfunction pill and they will go away from the station, and they may not come back. It'll help the GM make the monthly and quarterly goals, but it will hurt the station in the long run. Too late to fix that now, though.

"Branded content" is a different thing for podcasts. Done right -- for example, the G.E. Podcast Theater shows, which are science fiction series created for the sponsor but not laden with content that's obviously an ad -- they can be quite effective both as advertising and as content. Done wrong.... see, here's why I'm bringing this up. I listened to a branded content podcast that got it wrong, and the ill will I felt from feeling, well, not deceived so much as disappointed made me less likely to think good thoughts about the sponsor. I won't embarrass the culprits, but I'll say that it's a short-run podcast about a real incident involving the sponsor, purporting to tell the story of what happened when a promotion, triggered by a joke on a TV show, went awry. It's an interesting story, and I knew that it was being told in conjunction with the sponsor, but it's all in the telling, and when I noticed that the thing sounded a little TOO crafted by the sponsor's PR department, it became grating. They wouldn't even name the TV show that kicked off the chain of events; it was entirely told from the point of view of the company, with plenty of clips from the PR department. I made it halfway through the first episode and bailed. I don't mind someone trying to sell me something, but make it entertaining and don't make me feel like I'm reading a press release.

The lesson here is that whether you slap a modern term -- "branded content" -- or an older term -- "infomercial" -- on it, some things are constant: People don't mind if you're slipping ad content into their entertainment, but you have to do it right, and you can't hit them over the head with a hard sell. The audience is smart enough to know what's an ad and what's not, but if you want the ad part to be effective, it ought to be as entertaining as the rest of your show. The best radio hosts, and the best podcasters, know how to do that. If advertising is going to remain the primary revenue source as we move into digital, that kind of entertaining native advertising, the kind that's worth listening to rather than fast-forwarding through, is going to be the largest part of it.

=============================

For the part of your show or podcast that ISN'T an ad or "branded," you'll find a lot to talk about at Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, which you will find by clicking here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item. There's the Podcasting section at AllAccess.com/podcasts.

Make sure you're subscribed to Today's Talk, the daily email newsletter with the top news stories in News, Talk, and Sports radio and podcasting, plus my video commentaries. You can check off the appropriate boxes in your All Access account profile's Format Preferences and Email Preferences sections if you're not already getting it.

My podcast is "The Evening Bulletin with Perry Michael Simon," a quick (two minutes or less) daily thing, and you can get it at Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Stitcher, and RadioPublic. Spotify, too. You can also use the RSS feed and the website where you can listen in your browser, or my own website where they're all embedded, too.

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook (where I also do some live videos about radio) at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

=============================

What I talked about in this week's column is just a tiny bit of what you will be dealing with as your career and the audio entertainment industry move in to the future. The panel I'll be hosting at the Worldwide Radio Summit in Hollywood May 2-4 is about that, with Tom Leykis, Steve Goldstein, Rob Greenlee, Doug Reed, and Gina Juliano on hand, because they're all working in that future right now and can tell you what they've experienced. You'll want to be there. Register here, right now. Before that, in two weeks, I'll be on a panel at Don Anthony and Gabe Hobbs' Talk Show Boot Camp 9 in Dallas March 8th and 9th, with Mike McVay, Phil Boyce, Scott Masteller, and Gavin Spittle, and you can probably place bets in Vegas on how long into the panel we'll get before people are throwing things at me. I'll also be on a panel at the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Convention attached to the NAB Show in Las Vegas in April, details to come. I'm going to be at The Conclave in the Part of St. Louis Park, MN That's Practically Minneapolis, too; again, details to come. And look for word about another thing that I might be doing at Podcast Movement in Philadelphia in July. I get around.

Oh, and this week included my wife Fran's birthday. Happy birthday, Fran. No, this wasn't a replacement for a card or gifts.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
www.facebook.com/pmsimon
Twitter @pmsimon
Instagram @pmsimon