People don’t fall in love with distribution channels, they fall in love with content

Media Advisor, Research Analyst and Radio/Digital Media Strategist Mark Ramsey made the above statement at his recent Hivio conference in San Diego and, as obvious as it may seem, this message gets lost at times.

Ramsey’s presentation is a ‘must see’ for everyone in radio or any media.

We are all amazed by new technology and we all look for the newest, coolest, latest distribution platform, but as Ramsey says in his presentation, it's the content powering the technology not the other way around.

Ramsey points out that podcasting, online radio, terrestrial radio and satellite radio are no different to each other, they are all just ‘audio choices’ and they are ‘hit’ driven

And he doesn't mean ‘hit’ music!

Listeners don't care which technology platform they are using, they care about the content.

Ramsey looks at the future of your radio brand and explains why people don't fall in love with distribution channels, they fall in love with content.

He shows how people in media often can’t see the forest for the trees. He explains the importance of creating content people will ‘love’, how radio is not losing audience to digital audio, but losing out to digital ‘everything’, the importance of ‘exclusives’ for radio and why it’s necessary for radio to keep creating original, unique content.

His presentation shows time spent listening to radio is forecast to decline 42% by 2018 (that’s in the US)

It should be noted that forecast is not for the Australian market as Australian radio groups have had a much greater focus on programming and content development than their US counterparts and, generally, the quality of radio product is superior here in Australia, compared to the US.

Ramsey’s solution for the future – Make sure you are Big, Unique, Meaningful, Star-Filled and Everywhere.

Thanks to Mark Ramsey for giving Radio Today permission to run this. Watch the video presentation here

{youtube}pmX_XmEsLwo{/youtube}

Or the audio here.

Mark Ramsey is a veteran media strategist, researcher and trend maker. He can be contacted at [email protected] or visit his website

.

Brad March is a Director of Radio Today, is a former CEO and Group Program Director of Austereo and has been named Media Executive of the Year