Advice

Monday Memo: Read Me, Please!

 

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

BLOCK ISLAND, RI — You DO regularly communicate with an opt-in email list…right? Few opportunities to engage are more powerful than the ongoing conversation you have with listeners. It’s a relationship that Pandora and Spotify and your robotic AM/FM competitors can’t emulate.

Any email you send is worthless if it doesn’t get read  

And you yourself demonstrate why, every time you open your in-box. True or false: You delete some (lots) of messages unread, simply based on the subject line?

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Advice

Monday Memo: BOOM!

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

BLOCK ISLAND, RI — CNN reports: “Special counsel Durham alleges Clinton campaign lawyer used data to raise suspicions about Trump.” Righties light-up Twitter with “BOOM!”

Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book says White House staff “periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet,” which they believed the president was responsible for. Lefties light-up Twitter with “BOOM!”

Many days, these gotchas become radio talkers’ snark du jour.

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Advice

Monday Memo: Talk Topic Two-fer

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

BLOCK ISLAND, RI — Barring the unforeseeable, today’s callers are talking about Super Bowl commercials. Next Monday, Presidents Day, is a holiday for some, disrupting habit listening. So here are two timely topics, which lit-up-the-phones when I myself used them guest-hosting “The Jim Bohannon Show” and elsewhere.

“Your Most Monumental Presidents?” 

On Mount Rushmore, there is room for four: “If we were carving it today, who do YOU think deserves to be there? [phone number]”

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Advice

Monday Memo: But Wait, There’s More!

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

BLOCK ISLAND, RI — I worked with the late great Larry King four times, and I can sum-up how he got those he was interviewing to say something they didn’t say in other interviews along the PR tour by quoting his RT America show promo: “I never learned anything while I was talking.”

So thanks for compliments and to those who shared my column here last week: “Talk Radio 101: LISTEN.”

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Advice

Start Your Own Business

By Walter Sabo
SABOMedia Corp
Founder

 

NEW YORK — “Get fired from your corporate job and start your own business.” That is the advice shared with air talent and radio executives when they are kicked out of corporations; start your own business. Working for yourself is a seductive thought. The challenge is that very few corporate employees know how to embrace the frame of mind and tools of self-employed entrepreneurs.

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Advice

Monday Memo: Talk Radio 101 – LISTEN

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

BLOCK ISLAND, RI — Talk radio isn’t just different than music radio. It’s better. Talk radio is never on in the background. And streaming has music radio on its heels, because The Sentence Never Spoken is “Alexa, please play six commercials.”

Yet talkers should avoid taking false comfort that we’re less vulnerable to digital competitors, because people are using social media to talk to each other without us. So joining the conversation there is now table stakes. But defending the towers remains Job One.

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Advice

Monday Memo: Improving Results from Endorsement Spots

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

BLOCK ISLAND, RI — The news/talk stations I work with make big money doing what talk radio does best: cutting through mental clutter, with live endorsement spots delivered by familiar local on-air personalities.

OOPS.  Do your endorsement spots say “I haven’t sold you yet?”

Often, these are long-standing advertiser relationships. Two cautions:

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Advice

Monday Memo: Podcasting ‘Will Continue to Explode’

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

BLOCK ISLAND, RI — So says none other than the CEO of the biggest radio station owner. In a marketing piece to the advertising community, iHeartMedia’s Bob Pittman: “Podcast audiences will continue to explode, passing the biggest music streaming services in reach, with no signs of growth abating.”

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Advice

CES2022: Cars, Cash, COVID

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

LAS VEGAS — “Just imagine where we would have been the last two years” without technology like streaming, Zoom, tele-health, e-commerce, and other trends-already-in-motion that accelerated during the pandemic. In his State of the Industry address, Consumer Technology Association president/CEO Gary Shapiro acknowledged speed bumps we’ve hit along the way, admitting that “innovation is messy. It takes us out of our comfort zones” (as radio people know well).

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Advice

CES2022: Gadgets, Still!

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

LAS VEGAS — They REALLY don’t want us calling this “The Consumer Electronics Show,” which harkens back to VCRs and other things-in-boxes, as so much of the now technology on display here is software that enables experiences.

Fine. But there still are acres and acres and acres of inventions here in nerd heaven:

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Advice

CES2022: Pandemic Pivots

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

LAS VEGAS — Gadgets? Gazillions! There are 800+ start-ups here from around the world and I told several inventors I chatted-up at a showcase event, “You should get on Shark Tank!”

But tech THINGS are “trees.” Technology-driven EXPERIENCES are “the forest” Consumer Technology Association VP/research Steve Koenig described in his “2022 Trends to Watch” research presentation.

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Advice

CES2022: 5G, 4 Wheels, 3 Days

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

LAS VEGAS — Security guys are walking COVID-sniffing dogs around CES venues. Just to get sniffed, we had to enter vaccination dates – and vaccine lot numbers – into that Clear security app you see used at airports. Upon arrival here, we’re presented with self-test kits.

Other big international conventions are watching this bellwether. The World Economic Forum in Switzerland was recently postponed as Omicron numbers mushroom.

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Advice

Monday Memo: CES, Carefully

By Holland Cooke
Consultant

 

BLOCK ISLAND, RI — Like most conventions a year ago, CES2021 settled for virtual. And just days before its October show here, NAB canceled, vowing to try again in April. But this week — even as the Omicron variant is scotching events and has states and cities reinstating relaxed pandemic protocols – we’re in Sin City, vax’d, boosted, tested, masked and toting the jug-handle-size hand sanitizer.

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