Let’s Eat

Ever eat at a Jersey diner?

It's something I miss, having grown up with it and now living on the other side of the country, where "diner" is defined as either Denny's or some high-end "reimagining of comfort food," meaning the portions are tiny and they sprinkle quinoa on the mac and cheese. The Jersey diner has a few very specific defining characteristics, one being that it must have cakes and pies in a tall, cylindrical case right up front by the cash register (but not rotating, because the motor for that broke years ago) and cookies -- black-and-whites, chocolate chip, and "Chinese" -- on trays set on the counter, which is another defining characteristic.

The key characteristic is the menu. The menu has to be massive, it has to have practically anything you might be craving, and, ideally, it has to have an insert of photos of "specials," because it just has to have that. By definition, a Jersey diner menu should have so many choices that if you don't know what you want when you walk in, you'll spend about a half hour deciding.

The Jersey diner menu is pretty much the media world of 2018.

Think about it: You're looking for entertainment or information. The "menu" is practically infinite. It's time to decide. Either you have an idea of what you want -- a pizza burger and fries, the news, "The Leftovers," Klezmer music -- or you're going to be lost. If you DO know what you want, it's easy, because you know it's there. If you don't....

That's how I think content creators like radio stations and hosts and podcasters have to think about their future. The issue isn't the medium; things like Alexa are disintermediating content from medium, so that "the radio" and "the TV" and "the computer" are irrelevant and whatever you want will be available everywhere, all the time. Your problem isn't that people don't own radios in their homes anymore, or that they use smartphones instead of radios, or that AM/FM will have to share the dashboard. You can and will be available on whatever devices people are using, probably delivered via IP but available nonetheless. Your problem will be cutting through to be the choice of enough consumers to be viable. You have a marketing problem, not a technology problem.

The key will be to become someone's choice before they sit down with the menu. You have to not only become a known and desirable quantity to users, but a favorite. They'll be able to access anything at anytime; in many ways, they can do that now. (Since Alexa made it easier to listen to anything with a mere voice command, I tend to listen mostly to audio from places outside my local market or to podcasts and streaming services that aren't necessarily radio. I don't think I'm alone.) But what I ask for is based on what I know I like. The ideal, in the new media world, is to become the kind of content that people will ask for, the menu choices they know they like. You need to become the craving. You need to be the open-faced turkey sandwich or cheesecake people know they're going to order before they walk into Ponzio's or the Tick-Tock.

I'll put it another way: You have Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, right? How much time do you spend scrolling through the menus, overwhelmed by the choice? And how much easier is it when you fire those services up knowing that you simply want to binge-watch that show your friends told you about? Approaching it by knowing you want "The Crown" instead of going in and aimlessly looking for something interesting to watch is a different experience.

You become the thing people go in knowing they want by a) creating really good, worthy content, and b) letting them know you exist. How you do that depends on what you are; for radio, it really means getting back to spending money and time letting people know who you are and why they should listen. The equivalent of those food pictures in the menu would be things like social media posts, billboards, live appearances (oh, Lord, though, not remotes where you send interns to hand bumper stickers out under a canopy at a car dealer), email, cross-promotion with other media... you know, marketing. As we've said before, the problem isn't "too much choice" so much as it's cutting through the overwhelming number of choices to be THE choice.

Which means establishing yourself as that choice BEFORE people have to decide. Be what people go to their devices knowing that they want. And remind them that they want you. Also, try the baklava, it's really good.

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Part of becoming people's predetermined order is to talk about stuff they aren't going to hear anywhere else, which is what Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports, is all about. Check it out 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.

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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.

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The schedule: I'll be on a panel with Valerie Geller, Dan Vallie, Andy Curran, and David Crider at the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Convention attached to the NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 9th at the Westgate. I'll be moderating a panel at the Worldwide Radio Summit in Hollywood May 2-4 with Tom Leykis, Steve Goldstein, Rob Greenlee, Doug Reed, and Gina Juliano; Register here. And I'll be on a panel about podcasting with Seth Resler, Dave Beasing, Sheryl Worsley, and Michael Brandvold at The Conclave in July in Minneapolis. Might be doing something at Podcast Movement in Philadelphia, also in July, but whether I'm on stage or just covering it, I'll be there. Maybe I'll see you there, or you'll see me eating my way through Reading Terminal Market across the street. That place is awesome.

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