It Ain't Over

The obituaries are a little premature.

Spotify fired a lot of staffers and pushed out the executive responsible for the company's push into exclusive, big-name podcasting... and, yet, podcasting isn't dead.

Audacy's stock has dropped to alarming levels and rumors abound about selling off assets and more cuts to come... and, yet, radio isn't dead.

Streaming video services are laying off thousands, dropping programming to save money, and grappling with subscribers dropping out and coming back in depending on what they want to binge... and, yet, streaming isn't dead.

Newspapers... okay, some of them are dead. But some are doing okay online, so newspapers aren't quite dead, either.

What may be dying is the model by which the media have operated since Gutenberg put the first sheet of paper on his first printing press and produced the first issue of the Lake Ronkonkoma Pennysaver. Advertising isn't what it used to be. You can see the shift in how brands are using social media and pursuing virality rather than, or along with, buying traditional ads. Take the M&Ms brouhaha and the A&W followup: The M&Ms Twitter post, the right-wing pearl-clutching, the pivot to Maya Rudolph, the A&W parody, more right-wing pearl clutching, and the next step, the Super Bowl ad payoff, all but the last part textbook social media viral marketing. The publicity generated by rattling cages in a tweet exceeded anything an ad campaign alone could have created. Someone in the M&M/Mars marketing department (and someone at A&W for glomming onto the controversy) will be getting a gold star for that one.

Viral stunts are one way to do marketing. Getting your product or message into TikTok videos is another. At least, that's how things shake out today; TikTok could be a long-term player, it could shrink like Snapchat, or it could be tomorrow's MySpace. (Tom, we hardly knew ye.) Options we don't know about today could be how marketing is done tomorrow. There could be, I don't know, digital displays on car bumpers, messages beamed into your brain via chips, holograms that customize messages as you walk or drive by like in "Minority Report." Maybe the metaverse will be what some people are gambling it will be, though I'm skeptical. Maybe everyone and everything will be all about NFTs and crypto. (Spoiler alert: Everyone and everything will not be all about NFTs and crypto.) Maybe you'll wake up every morning and products will dance into your bedroom and offer themselves up to you based on an algorithm devised from a mysterious presence in the ether (Google) observing you 24/7. We don't know for sure what's coming. Whatever IS coming, it'll be adapt-or-die for the media.

But media have adapted before. Radio survived television. Television is morphing from linear to on-demand but linear-with-advertising is making a pretty impressive stand with FAST apps like Pluto TV. And, back to radio, the medium is retaining most of its reach and still effective for marketing. Aging audience? Okay, that's not ideal, but that's not to say that radio companies can't exploit that with a concentration on local, non-agency advertising and NTR like live events, merchandising, sponsorships, and partnerships. The problem hasn't been that radio can't still work, it's that there's a lot of debt and not enough money around to pay it off. That's not the medium's fault.

Oh, and one other issue. A medium won't die if the content contained therein is what the public wants. That's obvious, and in the past, that meant doing music testing and focus groups. Today, it's about that plus looking at the competition and determining what you can offer that others can't or won't. Radio should be concentrating on personality and demonstrable engagement, which means doing a lot more than shutting up and playing the hits or doing the same kind of talk radio that you were doing 40 years ago or having an intern or corporate "digital editor" posting generic gossip on Facebook. For podcasting, it means finding topic and audience niches that are underserved, amping up the personality and entertainment factors, and curbing the urge to spend a lot more on production than revenue will cover. Quality content may not be everything, but it's the basis for everything. You can't make money for long if nobody wants to listen to or watch what you do.

In the meantime, let's stop declaring any medium "dead," let's stop anointing anything "the future," let's just stop assuming anything and concentrate on what's in front of us now. The one prediction that'll always come true is that nobody will know for sure what's coming. We're all guessing. And in the meantime, maybe we shouldn't bury what's still alive.

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Since radio and podcasting are not dead, you're gonna have to do your show, I guess, so you'll want to check All Access News-Talk-Sports' Talk Topics show prep page for stuff to talk about. Click here for that, and you can also follow the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics and find every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

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You can follow my personal Twitter account -- Twitter is still alive, somehow, it turns out -- at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And I'm on Mastadon, too at @pmsimon@c.im.

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One final, critical takeaway from the column this week: Go Birds.

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon
Mastadon @pmsimon@c.im