Radio Stations: Stories of Marketing Genius - Not!

A recent blog from Jacobs Media contrasted Apple with radio. To recap: They noted that Steve Jobs is still marketing the iPod heavily, even though it sells like crazy. Contrast that to the General Manager who, when the ratings trends came out and were up, canceled the rest of the marketing buy.

I nearly fell down laughing. I had a very similar thing happen. In my case, it was KKFR, Phoenix, 1987. We designed our own TV spot. It was really good. We talked the GM into a small ad buy. We watched our cume, based on our in-house audience tracking, go from about 5% to 11%. Of course that wasn't accurate, but clearly the spot was helping us achieve "top of mind".

But when our little budget ran out, I went to the GM as asked for a little more. After all, how often can you actually see that a marketing campaign is working? You know what the answer was.

No.

The budget was spent. There was no more budget, even to achieve programming success.

Our new competitor, who was running commercial free though the ratings period, did not stop their marketing.

We seemed to be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And clearly, the example given in the Jacobs blog is the same.

Is this a normal part of our industry? I fear that all too often we have people in senior management positions who don't understand the product as an ongoing dialog with the listeners. They don't know that opportunities for growth don't appear magically in a spreadsheet column. And they do the craziest things in the name of this month's budget goals.

Apple gets it.