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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

Of course she was making broader point about Rush – that he’ll blast the concept of a Living Will on his show and then turn around and endorse a company that does Living Wills. I like Rachel’s show, but she was off-base on a couple of items. First, she actually played a Last Will and Testament ad from Rush, not a Living Will ad (they’re two entirely different legal documents). Second, Rush isn’t saying that Living Wills are bad…he’s just saying that government enforced living wills are bad. You may have noticed that Rush doesn’t like a lot of things that involve the government.

I digress.

The cool thing is that here you have one endorser playing another endorser’s ad – two diametrically opposed huge personalities endorsing the same company.

Who needs a PR company when you’re using endorsements

Of course, the endorser can also say something insanely stupid. But that’s a (really fun) topic for another time.

Watch the clip here –

I was listening to Dan Patrick the other day and he said he had to have “the talk” with his daughter.

A caller said to Dan that he should have “the talk” sponsored by an advertiser.

THAT’S A GREAT IDEA.

Trojan, where are you?

All hosts should have out-of-show content sponsored.

Rush can be sponsored by Bayer when giving liberals (and republicans) headaches.

Howard can be sponsored by LegalZoom for his divorce and then prenup.

I wish John Madden had a radio show, because his fear of flying could be sponsored by GoToMeeting.

I jest, but not entirely. This is the fun of endorsement radio, the opportunity to do in-show sillyness (yet salient…salient silliness?), further integrating product with personality.

This blog post was brought to you by Mario the Bakers Pizzeria.

It is very evident which advertisers (or their agencies) listen to the shows in which they are advertising and those that have created all-purpose copy.

People! You use endorsement radio for two main reason: to access the credibility of the host and also to tie into the content of the show! Why pay the talent fee and the premiums if you are just going to give the host the same copy that you’d produce for a voiceover actor?

That’s why I say – don’t let your ad agency write the endorsement copy, unless the copywriter is a listener to the show. Ads I heard for Bayer and Home Depot were totally generic and unmemorable. Total background ads: we’re the best, we make your life better, blah blah blah.

I really like Dan Patrick’s Mobil 1 ad, though. It integrates really nicely into Dan Patrick’s show and personality. I don’t have the exact wording, but it basically starts out like this: “If you know me you know I have my passions – sports, beer, my hair, and my awesome Corvette 64 Stingray” and then goes into the fact that he only trusts Mobil 1 on his passion. It gets a little generic after that and there is no real clear direct response mechanism to get me to go that minute to buy Mobil, but the ad totally got me.

I can’t remember the Bayer and Home Depot ads, but I think that’s the point. I heard that Mobil 1 ad a few weeks ago and it stuck. The writers knew Dan Patrick and wrote with his personality in mind.

So Big Brands, do yourself a favor and listen to the show…then write your own ads. Whatever you come up with is going to be better than what the Mad Men come up with. Otherwise, save some money and buy more frequency with your agency’s ad.

Never, Never, Never

1. Never promise everything you plan to deliver.
Leave something to become the delight factor. That unexpected, extra bit you deliver “because we love you” will go a long way toward helping the customer forgive and forget any areas where you may have fallen short. Great ads are written in three steps: (1.) How to End. What will be the Last Mental Image your ad presents to your customer? Begin with the end in mind. (2.) Where to Begin. A clear but interesting angle of approach will gain the customer’s attention. (3.) What to Leave Out. Surprise is the foundation of delight. What will you intentionally leave out of your ad so that you can deliver a delightful surprise? What will you leave out so that the imagination of the customer is engaged?

Scott says This is usually going to be the case. However, in a very competitive environment, where the competitor has ABC and D to offer, you may have to show everything under the kimono. “Not only do we have ABC and D but we do E”, assuming E is of interest to people.

2. Never begin a sentence with the word, “Imagine…”
If you’re planning to take your customer on a journey of imagination, plunge them into it. “The wheels of your airplane touch down, but not in the city you were promised…” “You must now choose between two good things…” “If you had more enemies like these, you wouldn’t need friends…”

Scott says Yeah. This is probably a good call, even for endorsement radio.

3. Never include your name in an ad more often than it would be spoken in normal conversation. Cramming your name where it doesn’t belong is AdSpeak. Back when Americans encountered one thirtieth as many ads each day, the rule was to repeat the name of the advertiser as often as possible. Do this today and your ads will sound like they were written in the 1940s.

Scott says I think an endorser can get away with more mentions than you would hear in a typical, produced ad. If it’s a monotone read, it’s going to come across as an ad. But if there’s a lot of passion from the endorser, lots of mentions can convey excitement.

4. Never conjure an unpleasant mental image.
Fear and disgust work face-to-face, but they often backfire when used in mass media. Conjure these unpleasant emotions in the minds of the masses and you’ll leave your listeners with a vaguely bad feeling attached to your name. They’ll want to avoid you, but they won’t be able to recall exactly why.

Scott saysThis makes sense as a general rule of thumb. But some endorsers/hosts have a lot of leverage. For example, Howard Stern can get away with unpleasant mental images. The listener ascribes the negative image to comedy and Stern’s way of talking about things. After all, his whole show revolves around UMIs (my new acronym for ‘unpleasant mental images’). Furthermore, the ad sounds more like integrated content, which is usually ideal for the advertiser. The listener stays fully engaged and doesn’t have their advertising guard up.

5. Never respond to a challenge from a competitor smaller than you.
Drawing attention to a smaller competitor makes them larger in the eyes of the public. Conversely, if someone bigger than you is foolish enough to shine their spotlight on you, dance in it.

Scott says Definitely.

6. Never claim to have exceptional service.
Most people won’t believe you. And those who do believe you will expect more from your staff than they can possibly deliver. It’s a lose/lose proposition. Rather than promise exceptional service in your ads, tell the public something objective, factual and verifiable that causes them to say, “Wow. Those people really serve their customers.” Never praise yourself. Do things that make the customer praise you.

Scott says True. The advertiser shouldn’t claim it, but the endorser can, in the context of “I’ve shopped there and received exceptional service…and not because I’m a star. I looked around and they were treating everyone like royalty!”

7. Never mention the recession.I understand how tempting it is to say, “In order to help you combat the recession we’re offering…” But all that really does is remind the customer that now is not a good time to be spending money.

Scott says I think the endorser can acknowledge the ‘trying times’, which can lead right into the story of why your product makes trying times less-so. Rather, because the economy stinks, this product makes EVEN MORE sense.

8. Never make a claim you don’t immediately support with evidence.
Unsubstantiated claims are the worst form of AdSpeak. Give the customer facts, details and objective proof if you want to win their confidence. Specifics are more believable than generalities.

Scott says I also generally agree with this. But an endorser making a claim is often all the evidence you need!

9. Never use humor that doesn’t reinforce the principal point of your ad.Here’s the litmus test: If remembering the humor forces you to recall the message of the ad, the humor is motivated. Good job. But if recalling the humor doesn’t put you in memory of the ad’s main point, the humor is unmotivated and will make your ad less effective. Sure, people will like the ad. They just won’t buy what you’re selling.

Scott says I disagree a bit here. If the host is usually humorous and the show is built with comedy, unrelated humor within the spot makes the ad seem more like content. I’ve heard some great Bill Handel and Howard Stern “ads” that sell a lot of product but contained humor completely unrelated to the message.

10. Never say things in the usual way. From billboards to storefronts to packaging to messages on T-shirts, ads whisper and wheedle and cajole and shout to win our attention. A 1978 Yankelovich study reported that the average American was confronted with more than 2,000 advertising messages per day. But that was 30 years ago. When Yankelovich revisited the study in 2008, the number had jumped to more than 5,000 messages per day. The mundane, the predictable and the usual are filtered and rejected from our consciousness. Win the customer’s attention with words and phrases that are new, surprising and different.

Scott says This is going to be true for 90% of the advertisers out there. However, the more your product or service is needed, and the less the competition, the more you’re able to hit the nail on the head and say your message in a usual way. In that lucky case, once your frequency starts to climb,

then

would be the time to mix up the messaging and use all the Robert Frank you want.