We continue to read more and more about how big data will continue to dominate the business world, helping corporations and brands steer their ships, while collecting more info about their customers’ tastes, behavior, and purchases.
But a recent article in MediaPost’s “Cross-Channel” by Stacia Hanley debunks some of today’s conventional wisdom about the process of evaluating media and marketing relying on the metrics while missing the larger point.
Radio should be all ears.
Her premise is that while data is a wonderful way to manage businesses, marketers and company executives should use that information to dream up more exciting possibilities to engage customers, including:
“How our communications strategies can involve and benefit from a more human touch.”
A human touch. Connecting and engaging with audiences and communities in which they live. It’s radio’s USP and it has nothing to do with metrics, and everything to do with emotional bonds.
Consumers don’t care about your data, your M Scores, your rankers, or your EBITDA. Even the process of making content more targetable via email, social media, and programmatic buying doesn’t change the reality of that data-driven marketers often do not truly understand the customers they’re attempting to reach.
Chances are, you’ve seen this chart from Techsurvey11 before. At a Conclave presentation last week, it may have been the most important one of the 65 slides I showed. That’s because while the meat and potatoes radio product – music and DJs – are at the core of listenership, the emotional elements truly provide the uniqueness that only broadcast radio offers.
Those little red “e’s” stand for the emotional benefits of radio listening that Hanley wrote about. Companionship, emotional uplift, stress relief, escape, and a sense of place. These are more important to an audience trying to derive benefit from your station. To broadcasters, they should be more meaningful than conjuring up more data-targeted advertisements and deals.
And while these surveys can help you identify these emotional underpinnings, your programming, sales, digital, and marketing staffers have the onus of translating these touch points into viable programming and targeted content that deliver on this emotional values.
Radio 92/9′s (Greater Media Boston) Amy Brooks with a few thousand of her closest friends at a New Politics concert
Understanding why listeners are hiring your station – when they could be listening to commercial-free music on SiriusXM, Spotify, or Pandora, or caffeinated DJs on Beats1 – are what the data tell you about your product and its relationship to your hometown audience. That’s the science.
The art is bringing these emotions to life, connecting with your listeners where they live, work, and play, and touching their lives in ways that only broadcast radio can.
Human emotions are not scalable. All the data and metrics in the world won’t solve your problems if you don’t understand the jobs that listeners are hiring you to do.
We’ve overreacted to the science of P/E ratios, meters, and music scheduling.
Time to emphasize the emotional art.