"Do what they love, with what you love, and the money is sure to follow." Tom Asacker

"Scarcely anyone would have become a great actor if the public had been born without hands." Karl Kraus

"Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be." Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Today's image: Southern Alps around Milford Sound and Queenstown, the South Island of New Zealand by Ron Fell. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Google is your home page
The new reality. Like it or not.

Above, text from the first slide of my brief at NAB this year.

Three points from Martinizing: The Nine for 09 brief:

1. Your home page is Google. A significant game-changing strategy that needs to be deeply understood by your team. They need to stop obsessing about your home page as it's becoming increasingly irrelevant. Your assets must be digital and discoverable. Google is your home page, practically everything else related to your online strategy is subordinate to this single issue. When you can Google the name of your firm and/or the products, services, attributes you think you "own" and using I'm Feeling Lucky returns one of your pages, you win (but only in that moment - remember, it's not a static but dynamic environment). Try it. Then Google Search and carefully study the first page of results. That's the real you as the world sees it. Think landing page optimization. [Time to revisit Peter Morville - Ambient Findability - What We Find Changes Who We Become]

4. Mobile is the new black. Back to the future. Broadband wired still counts but now, it's back to wireless (again) and this time around it's the third tribe of wireless that rules. The battlefield is the third screen, the handset. The only limiting step of what's possible with mobile remains energy related, that damn battery. The first person to deliver a cost-effective solution set solving this power issue will, no doubt, get Bill Gates rich. Video becomes ubiquitous. [FD: During Q&A I was called on pushing WAP in my 1999 NAB brief. Guilty as charged, too early. My 2009 response is the iPhone represents more breakthrough OS than simple, sexy user-centric form factor innovation. Sidebar: My thought is a second or third order effect of the Jeff Bezos Kindle is a cool new form factor between the second and third screen. I want my iPhone to be the size of my Kindle.]

7. Local being redefined. Defined not by DMA or any US census def, but by exactly where the customer is NOW, in the moment, within three meters or less. Think GPS.

The obvious is often the hardest to see: The past, and the apparent present, does not equal the future. Exhibit A - thirty something months from a cold start to POTUS. Exhibit B - An international star is born via YouTube in less than two weeks. She's Susan Boyle, 47, and unemployed (still looking). Of course, you'll agree with exhibit B having watched the YouTube video I recommended to you last week.

Closed circuit to Google: Please share the analytics related to the record breaking Susan Boyle video. What were the drivers, the sources of significant traffic? What traffic did MS, FB, Twitter, blogs and other social media produce? What did the links by news organizations, entertainment shows and other MSM contribute to the record views? What country, what metro ranked highest in views, second highest, lowest? How about a timeline track of traffic? What about repeat views by uniques against the norm? There's a simply great case study in the making here.

Congrats & cheers: Kurt Hanson, Paul Maloney and team RAIN. Not only did they stage another killer RAIN Internet Radio Summit but they took the lead in making the first NAB Show Tweetup happen. Kudos to digital evangelist Kipper McGee who worked behind the scenes and helped to make the Tweetup a success.

Bonus: Tom Asacker, the best-selling author, renowned speaker and provocateur known for bold, fresh thinking, has written a wonderful piece that you should read and share. Do What They Love is now available via PDF here. Bravos, Tom.

P.S. The cool kids have Tom Asacker's blog in their reader. It's a must-read.

"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind." Samuel Johnson

"The superior man does not waste himself on what is distant, on what is absent. He stands in the here and now, in the real situation." Confucius

"You can either do what you love or love what you do. I don't see there's any other choice." George Burns

Today's image: 12 Apostles by Ron Fell. Incredible. Thanks for sharing.

Snow day: Yesterday was beautiful here. Sunshine, temps in the 40s. Today we are expecting 11 to 13 inches of snow. Added to the record 92 inches already this snow season today's stuff should push us over 100. Larry Wilson checked in from the farm in Michigan where they are expecting this wet mess later today.

Faster: Mozilla's Firefox 3 Beta 4 seems faster. Add-ons migrated fine with the exception of my fav theme and the themes now on offer are nothing exceptional, yet.

Thank you very much: Kurt Hanson, the go-to guy for all things Internet radio, a great and longtime friend, for his kind words about this little blog.

Bonus: Sarah Perez writes The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere via RWW here. She's spot-on (of course, I found Sarah's post via my FriendFeed - thanks, Terry Heaton). Bonus 2: Fred Wilson Ten Things I'd Like FriendFeed To Do.

Congrats & cheers: Four guys from Mountain View decide to track campaign coverage. The result is skewz (thanks to Sarah for the tip).

"It is not enough to conquer, one must know how to seduce." Voltaire

"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising." Lord Northcliffe

"You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle...In fact, it is almost like listening for the meaning instead of looking for it." James Webb Young

Today's image: a sure sign of winter-pocalypse by pixn8tr. Fine shot. Thank you!

Congrats & cheers: CBS Radio CEO Dan Mason for standing up and providing some long overdue leadership...

“Radio is king –- there is no media that can better deliver more targeted, personalized messages to audiences and advertisers"

Read more via Kurt Hanson's RAIN, here. Jeffrey Yorke also offers up the Dan Mason/UBS story via MediaWeek here.

The first tribe of wireless continues to suffer from a crisis of confidence, a tradition born of low expectations and poor self-esteem.

The original, and best of class, medium for reach, radio, created its own problems when it elected to become the first and only media to employ the value proposition of time spent. Radio wasted decades failing to learn, accepting the status quo, content with single digit shares of the ad spend. Each new management cohort ran their mouth about growing the pie. Remotes, endorsements, co-op, recruitment, vendor, non-spot, co-pros, event marketing, online, step right up, it's NTR du jour. These initiatives, however well intended, have failed to grow the business.

We have confused activity with progress

We can thank Arbitron for the coming measurement reboot (PPM) and the related new dawn of selling radio's heretofore most valuable yet hidden asset - reach. It's back to the future and Westinghouse NuMath (kudos to Jim Yergin the brilliant media researcher who first gave us a credible reach tool thirty-five years ahead of his time). Kevin B. Sweeney, founder of the RAB and my sales mentor, was also way ahead of the curve. Kevin taught us to use one and only one Arbitron data point - weekly cume. It was Kevin's notion to use our circulation number in making the case against the dead tree guys. On the day job we continue to employ, teach and coach Kevin's legendary and very effective four-point pitch. Kevin's consultive selling template is still valid, robust as ever. Truth be known too many are merely talking a good game and as my friend and former partner the great Joe L. Floyd used to say "Talk is cheap, whiskey costs money."

Price has become an objection because we have failed to articulate value

The single biggest challenge facing the radio business is remaining a relevant (i.e., valued) advertising and marketing platform. While the radio business continues to produce impressive margins and free cash it has failed to show growth and growth is the bitch goddess of Wall Street. Absent real growth the radio stocks remain unattractive, poor investments. No amount of creative financial engineering will save the radio stocks. The publicly held radio outfits have to save themselves and the work that really matters must happen in the field. The catalyst Farid needs to drive CDL up (free and clear of being a penny stock) resides within his sales organization, or not.

What is demanded today is the ability to consistently articulate and proof a credible value proposition. Facing another year of flat (or down) ad spend radio must reinvent sales. Our sales managers and sellers need a new format. Radio sales is beyond the point of effective reboot, what it needs now is a new OS. We must stop training sellers to make calls they're never going to make. Leadership must stop making excuses and start producing results.

A massive failure of imagination

Leadership must be held accountable for growing share, for driving topline, for producing results. As has been stated here previously, this is an issue of critical strategic importance. The mission and metrics must be focused on changing the denominator. Continuing to invest time and precious resources into driving the numerator simply will not get the job done, in fact, it's a potentially deadly error in judgment. It's not about getting better, it's about getting different. Radically different.

Whereas once upon a time you could count on the sales department to buy the time needed for programming to develop and deliver the numbers, today we too often witness the sales department killing programming. KOAI, Dallas is but one example. After a nineteen year run in north Texas the smooth jazz format was dumped because "sales couldn't sell it" or so I have been told. Iatrogenic format extinction. The error larger than blowing up a three share station the sellers have lost faith in might be keeping a one share station on life support - cluster detritus - because the costs of creating the inventory have been minimized (along with bcf expectations). Then again perhaps these are each results of a modern day Hobson's choice. (Disclosure: I once worked at KOAI).

Radio folks need to stop going to work everyday with the same tired single minded mission of killing the guys across the street. Radio folks obsessed with killing other radio folks is now killing the business where before this activity only suppressed the share of ad spend. Competitive media are not significantly involved in radio's revenue stagnation. The silo is being collapsed thanks to improvements in internecine warfare. Advances in competitive monitoring have actually worked to narrow the field of prospects limiting the acuity required to grasp and understand the full ad spend landscape. The danger here is as national advertisers move dollars away and local online platforms (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Craigslist, et al) increasingly capture more local direct dollars - the nightmare squeeze play happens. Fighting for share of fewer and fewer accounts while failing to develop new categories...inertia, attrition and entropy take over (with assists from denial and genetic blindness). It doesn't have to be this way. Radio can and should be a growth business.

We need to face reality as it is, not as it was nor as we wish it to be. Radio enjoys an effective and powerful reach, what we lack are the evangelists who can tell the story, articulate value, under-promise, get the order, over-deliver, keep the client, grow the business and teach others how to do it. We can do this. Game on!

Earlier popular posts on sales here, here, here, here, here and here.

Beauty and truth in physics
Murray Gell-Mann

"A theory appears to be beautiful or elegant (or simple, if you prefer) when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have."

Have a wonderful weekend. See you next week with a brand new show.