EndorsementRadio.com

Really interesting article from the Wall Street Journal today, following the “uproar” about Keith Olbermann donating to three democrats in the recent election. The article talks about radio hosts and their live read endorsements of politicians.

I always thought endorsement radio would be good for politics and for movies – because what’s better than word of mouth in these worlds? The problem with politics is that endorsers are putting their reputation on the line – and they should be really concerned those associations. Ideology aside, politicians screw up all the time. You may have read that somewhere. That probably explains why they aren’t backing individuals per-se, but political movements. Basically, the equivalent of the old PACs.

The politicians will want to be concerned as well – you also may have heard that people like Rush and Beck have said things in the past that, while THEY may not regret it, advertisers and networks do. It wouldn’t be fun to build your career (brand) on years of hard work and great rhetoric to be submarined by your association with a perfectly fallible entertainer.

If you’re an ad buyer for a politician and are considering endorsement radio, proceed with caution.

Read the Wall Street Journal’s article on politician endorsements.

Say what you will about Baba Booey – Howard Stern’s long-time producer. He is the best in radio. Half of Stern’s listeners probably think he’s an idiot, his only value being the perfect comedic foil.

But he’s everything to that show. He runs the staff, drives a lot of the creative decisionmaking, and lands big-time guests.

He also can sell the hell out of a product. Take a listen to his endorsement of LegalZoom.com.

Two things about this miraculous ad:

1) It goes wayyyy longer than 60 seconds. Advertiser nirvana.
2) It involves the whole show, spilling into new endorsements and new personalities as they all chime in.

This ad is the ultimate promise of endorsement radio – your brand becomes such a part of the fabric of the show, that it becomes content.

Here is a ridiculous picture of Fa Fa Foo Hye and me – apparently on a valentines date.

Fa Fa Foo Hye and MacD

Mark Ramsey interviews a friend of mine – Dan Granger - on how to run an effective radio campaign and almost as importantly, prove that it’s working. Dan’s advice about measurement and optimization is spot-on, and anybody thinking about investing a dime in radio should give it a listen. Dan has got this down to a science.

You can listen to the very informative interview on radio ROI optimization here: http://www.markramseymedia.com/2010/09/yes-i-can-prove-radio-works-for-advertisers/.

Thanks, Dan.

This guy was telling me yesterday that Burger King has a regional endorsement radio campaign running.

My first thought was, as the kids say “WTFF???” “FF” standing for “french fries”. No, no, no. Endorsement radio is not for QSR (quick service restaurants). I remember a particularly bad endorsement campaign a few years ago for a hamburger chain that I heard on Jim Rome. What in the world could Burger King be thinking?

But as this guy continued, he started to talk about how good a Whopper can be. You know that moment. You’re starving. It’s an hour and a half past lunch and you pass a Burger King. You pull into that drive through and despite your diet and good intentions, those magic words come out of your mouth: “give me a Whopper, medium fries and a DIET Coke”. “With cheese?”. “Sure. With cheese”. Then that warm, 1 pound bag is handed to you and sits on your lap as you get your drink in the cup-holder and put your wallet away. You drive about 5 feet and you’re already tearing into the wrapper. In 10 feet you’re taking your first bite into hot, ketchupy, flame broiled red meat heaven. You’ve got about 12 more bites of heaven to go, fella.

By the end of my short discussion with this guy, I was ravishingly hungry for a Whopper. I got one that very night (actually two – they had a two for one special).

And then it occurred to me – wait a minute – if I’m hearing my favorite DJ or talk show host talking about the joy of a Whopper at about, ohhhhh, 11:45am – there’s a good chance that I’m going to walk the quarter mile for my quarter pounder – errr, Whopper.

So good on ya, Burger King. I’ll take the advice of my favorite host over a subservient chicken any day. It’s gonna beat that wacky expensively produced ad for the golden arches which is going to run 5 times in the following hour. I’ll bet anything.

…as long as they do it in the right way with the right messaging. As always – a good idea can fail with bad creative.

Hmmm, I’m getting kind of hungry.

According to AdAge, Clear Channel is trying to sell upfronts for radio and TV. The article mentions that Clear Channel can include as part of an integrated package “…potential talent endorsements from personalities like Ryan Seacrest, Steve Harvey and Glenn Beck.”

I don’t really get it.

On the one hand, endorsement radio is really the only place where an upfront makes sense – especially for the top 10 endorsers. You have a very limited supply (the host and his time on the air) but plenty of demand (direct response advertisers). The networks can and actually do demand an upfront commitment to a certain level of spend. Again, that’s for the “big boys”. It used to be that way at the local market level. But with inventory you could drive four trucks through, it’s become tougher and tougher for a station/endorser to say “I only take an annual deal”. I’ve seen endorsers now say “let’s give it a shot for a month and see what happens”. It’s a different, and more buyer-friendly world.

But an upfront for an integrated package which includes radio, OOH, and digital? What? Why?

In TV it still seems to make sense – continued strong demand with a limited (and falling!) supply. The advertisers that depend on TV to grow the business or awareness, or simply need to hold onto their share of the market because their competitors are on TV, doesn’t have many options but to play in the networks’ game.

Radio, OOH, and Digital? Really? There’s an almost endless supply and diminishing demand.

In TV, what you pay in the scatter market is almost always going to be higher than what you could have negotiated in the upfronts (only in two years in the last twelve has this not been the case).

In radio, digital (owned by the station/network) and Outdoor, I’ll take my chances. It’s still a buyer’s market there and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Outside of the terrestrial world, maybe. Pandora, for one, seems to be in a constant sell-out state. Buyers are already experiencing upfront-like negotiations with Pandora and video-sites like Hulu.

But radio – especially non-endorsement radio? Nahhhh.

Inc Magazine wrote a nice little piece on endorsement radio. I found two assertions pretty amusing.

The first is the subtitle that says that the “radio pitch makes a comeback”. Comeback? It never left. I’ve been a talk radio listener for well over 20 years – and I remember the Hooked On Phonics and Snapple endorsed ads from the early 90s clear as a bell.

The second is that small brands are using it because they can’t afford TV. Ahem. There is an increasing number of brands that spend millions in TV – like Home Depot, LegalZoom, eHarmony, Bose, Apple, Auto Zone, and Mobil, – that also use radio endorsements. However, it is true that if you can’t yet afford TV but you have the right kind of product and the right kind of company, endorsement radio could be a great place to start.

All in all, it’s still a positive piece – and the online brands they single out are perfect for radio endorsements (Carbonite and ReputationDefender, both very good products). Do you want to know why they’re perfect? Give me a call at (888) 788-0242. But hurry, I’m only available for the next few minutes.

Here is the Inc article on on-air endorsements.

Do you want to buy the lowest CPMs available in a market? Sometimes, you get what you pay for.

When I transitioned from being a brand awareness radio buyer to a direct response radio buyer, I felt liberated.

In my brand buying days – it was all about CPM. It works like this:
You get proposals from every station in the market.
You negotiate each separately.
You divide your share of spend based on the lowest targeted CPM.
If you’re slightly more sophisticated, you consider diminishing returns of reach at the station and market level, but most do not.

Great, you got your low CPM. Congratulations. And it didn’t matter where your spots landed, as long as it was cheap. Country? Rock? Talk? Hip Hop? New station? Old Station? Diary? PPM? How did your buy perform? Who cares, really? You’re job was to negotiate the hell out of the market and that’s what you did – according to the PPM and the Arbitron diaries. If the market didn’t see a lift, it was probably the creative’s fault, right?

In DR buying – you do care how the buy did. In fact, you obsess about it. But with DR endorsement radio buying, CPM isn’t the “end all, be all”. In endorsement radio buying – everything matters: the copy, the offer, the call to action, who the endorser is, what their show is about, what they’ve said in the past about your product category, who their other sponsors are, how long they’ve been on, what their rating trend is, what else is going on in the world – and sometimes, CPM.

I’m not saying CPM doesn’t matter, despite my Yiddish-like title. There is a decent correlation between lower CPM programming fairing better than higher CPM programming. But this is certainly not always true.

Two of my longest buys – both 5+ years, are working with two hosts that have stratospheric CPMs. One of those buys continues to be the most profitable buy that we do. In both cases, I would have laughed the sales reps out of the room in my Brand buying days. I’ll admit that it was tough to sign the contract, holding onto the notion that I can only buy CPMs of $7 or lower.

The point is, they can charge a lot because they work so well for so many advertisers.

Now, obviously, you still negotiate your pants off (and their shirts off). You still try to get everything you can, in terms of added value, bonus, website presence, etc. But could I make a CPM of over $20 work? I’m doing it right now quite well, thank you very much. Some of the hosts we work with can flat-out sell!

Plus, when you’re tracking results correctly, you’ll understand what CPM will work for you. So you start at a high CPM but learn that you’re only going to break even at $10. So you can put it to the station/network: listen, if we’re going to stay, we’re only going to be able to pay $8. Unless it’s a host in huge demand, they’ll often work with you. Money on the table tends to be snapped up these days.

So you brand advertisers can buy your low CPMs. I’ll take the stuff that works.

Hugh Hewitt knows what’s right for you. He knows what’s right for America.

I’m only slightly kidding. Mr. Hewitt, a top 100 talk radio show in the US, is just plain smart. He’s written a couple New York Times best-sellers, graduated from Harvard, is a law professor, and has a continual line-up of very smart people of all political stripes come on his show. You don’t usually get that pedigree with talk radio hosts.

So people often label him “the smartest man in radio”.

And it’s very good, informative radio – your personal politics aside. I’ve got to say that he often gives liberals, centrists and progressives a fair shot on his show, and through listening to the discussion, you always learn something.

He’s also become quite a bit of a cable news star, often stepping in when they want a conservative opinion on a given issue from a well known, well-spoken conservative without the screaming and diatribes.

He can also sell. I guess when you’re a pretty bright guy and people know that you’re not going to endorse just anything, you’re going to be pretty credible.

Ok, so he’s a morale crusader and thinks he knows what’s right for you. But that extends to what you’re trying to sell…assuming it makes sense for his audience.

Got to meet him a few weeks ago:

Hugh are you?

It always amazed me that the funniest people in Hollywood and New York were always politically very liberal – but liberal talk radio has been some of the most boring radio that has ever existed. I mean, Al Franken, a friggin former comic for cry-eye, had me veering off the highway, eyes rolled back in my head, and drool running down my chin when I listened to his liberal “show”.

Meanwhile, you’ve got conservatives – who outside of radio would be labeled boring troglodytes – bring passion and humor every day. Say what you will about Hannity, Beck and of course, Rush; a lot of their content can be funny and it’s eminently interesting radio, whatever side of the aisle you’re on.

People like Randi Rhodes and Stephanie Miller are changing progressive radio for the better. They bring humor through their quick John-Stewart-like wit, their cast of characters on the show with great timing and impressions, and their banter with guests.

It’s what Air America needed but never really had.

I don’t know if it helps a liberal host endorse a company any better – but I’ll tell you this: it’s going to keep listeners, and that’s more than what they did in the past. I think the trick with the typical progressive listener will be suspending their natural more cynical nature and be open to endorsements from their favorite host(s). More on writing for conservative audiences versus liberal audiences later.

The short of it is that progressive radio is embracing what makes liberals more fun: humor. Which makes me think, maybe Tom Leykis should come back to the airwaves – this time, going back to where he started: politics.

Thanks for your show, Stephanie Miller. Enjoy New York!

Here’s a bunch of us meeting with Stephanie at her New York studio.

Stephanie Miller stays awake during boring business meeting!

Some guys were born to do this.

Petros Papadakis is going to be a star. A national star. Yes, he’s fairly well known in the Los Angeles sports community and yes he reaches into pockets across the US through some syndicated radio and cable sports.

But that’s the tip of the iceberg for this cat.

Petros is going to be an empire, a machine, an industry. I’m not kidding. I’m glad I got to meet him yesterday because I think in a few years I’ll have to get through two handlers, a secretary, a PR spokeshole, and some beefy security to say hi to him as he gets into his limo.

Why? After all, he’s basically just a local sports talk radio host with some light syndication across the US. He’s also done some color commentary for football games and I believe he does the PA announcements at USC basketball games (Petros was a tailback for USC in the late 90s into 2000).

But he is magic. He’s so fun, so intelligent, so funny, so off-the-cuff, so charming that he captures a lot of my listening drive home. I think he could easily be as big as Jim Rome or Colin Cowherd some day. But here’s the thing: I think he’s bigger than sports. I think he could be a Carolla or even Stern (heck, maybe he’ll even figure out how to make centrist-politics work on the air instead of needing to be extreme left or right).

He can do sports, and he’s especially good at the college level – he filled in for Rome the day after Duke beat Butler for the NCAA basketball championship and I swear that first fifteen minutes was some of the best sports talk I’ve ever heard. He brought passion, he brought history and he brought humor. When he’s on a roll, it’s impossible to turn the channel.

But he’s much more than sports (and he’s not even much of an Xs and Os or numbers guy – he’s talking from his gut more than anything else). Petros can talk at length about movies, pop culture, all types of music, the Supreme Court, relationships, and English literature, his college major. And I’ll be honest, he’s actually more interesting to me when he is talking about non-sports topics. And he continues to bring the fire and the passion no matter what he’s talking about. He also takes big risks and, a la Charles Barkley, says what’s on his mind WHEN it’s on his mind.

In fact, I have friends who hate sports – hate everything to do with sports – and listen to Petros every day. I’m telling you – magic. You need to listen for yourselves.

What about radio endorsements? Does he bring it? Oh yes. I’ll need to find some examples and post them – but he gives probably the most passionate, knowledgeable read out there. I’m sure programming goes crazy on his live reads – because he’s always giving the client more than 60.

I need to shut up now, before my sales people read this and my rates increase.

Here’s the deal: Petros was born to do this – and his radio listeners and future radio listeners will sure be glad he was.

Here’s me with Petros after copious amounts of red meat.

Greek and Geek

Here’s a video of Petros being Petros. He’s an acquired taste for a lot of people – but that’s true of anything that stands the test of time.