"A magician is an actor impersonating a magician." Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin

"The scientific approach to the phenomenon of human nature enables us to be ignorant without being frightened, and without, therefore, having to invent all sorts of weird theories to explain away our gaps in knowledge." D.W. Winnicott

"What is true, what is false, what is, finally, important? It is not a sign of ignorance not to know the answers. But there is great merit in facing the questions." David Mamet

Today's image: Dennis and Edward by Thomas Hawk. Very cool shot. Thanks for sharing.

Bravos to Les Moonves and David Field. Both have demonstrated courage in doing the right thing with their radio businesses.

In pursuit of his strategy to lighten the concentration of ad-supported assets in the CBS portfolio, Les is selling his radio concern. Giving more resources to radio became counter-intuitive. My sense is an acquisition like Lions Gate seems a better resources fit chasing Les' strategy.

David's portfolio is radio. His strategy of opportunistically growing Entercom and the reach of his local platforms makes the purchase of CBS Radio a savvy move.

All legacy media is now fraught with peril. Accordingly, remaining in the radio game demands an uncommon focus, tenacity and agility. David and team are the radio geeks needed to succeed in that game. They'll also be advantaged by some valuable proprietary intangibles as the CBS Radio properties join the fold. Stay tuned.

New must-read: Sara Fischer's Media Trends newsletter via Axios. Also, follow Sara on the Twitter 

Reading: One Mission. How leaders build a team of teams. By Fussell & Goodyear. Amazon info

Watching: The Defiant Ones via HBO. The docu-series about Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. More

Congrats & Cheers: David Field to Receive NAB's National Radio Award. More

"We need to remind ourselves that advertising is for the customer. It is they who ultimately determine whether advertising is good or not - in that they vote with their purses or wallets." Vic Polkinghorne & Andy Palmer

"We don't get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product." Bob Hoffman

"Understanding comes from focusing, chewing, and relentlessly ragging on a problem. It comes with false starts, dead ends, and frustration. Thinking requires time and space. It's slow. It means saying I don't know. In short, thinking is everything the modern workplace is designed to eradicate." Shane Parrish

Today's image: Some of 2016's best non-fiction reads.

What a year! As it comes to a close, please allow me to suggest some reading. Here are Amazon links to the books featured in today's image.

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice. By Christensen, Dillon, Hall and Duncan. Amazon link

Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. By Robert Cialdini. Amazon link

Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. By Virginia Heffernan. Amazon link

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. By Jonah Berger. Amazon link

Off Script: An Advance Man's Guide to White House Stagecraft, Campaign Spectacle, and Political Suicide. By Josh King. Amazon link

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks. By Joshua Cooper Ramo. Amazon link

And one from 2015 which I read again and highly recommended again this year...

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. By McChrystal, Collins, Silverman, and Fussell. Amazon link

And one other, not pictured above...

How to Make Better Advertising and Advertising Better: The Manifesto for a New Creative Revolution. By Polkinghorne & Palmer. The Design Museum Shop in London sells this book online. To purchase click here

Thanks for stopping by.

"Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: 'Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.'"

"The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique - either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising."

"The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e., pull over new customers to your product."

"These three points are summed up in the phrase 'UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION.'

This is a U.S.P." Rosser Reeves. Reality in Advertising

Today's image: Howl. By Fred Winston. Great shot. Thanks, again, for sharing.

We can all learn something from the great Rosser Reeves. Celebrated as one of the creators of modern advertising, Reeves invented the notion of U.S.P. or what we now commonly refer to as positioning. In his 1961 book, from which we have liberated the above excerpts, Reeves also offered a new definition of advertising.

"ADVERTISING IS THE ART OF GETTING

A UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION

INTO THE HEADS OF THE MOST

PEOPLE AT THE LOWEST

POSSIBLE COST."

The definition is as he originally wrote it, in all caps.

My thought is Reeves' thinking is as fresh, relevant and important today as when first published. This classic writing belongs in your library, and you're in luck. After being out of print for decades, it's again available at a very affordable price. Use the link above - the book title - to purchase via Amazon. Reality in Advertising is a must-read for every serious student of media, marketing and advertising.

More good reads and a great listen deserving of your attention:

Kipper McGee, the venerable radio programming ace and marketing maven, has a book out. Brandwidth has dropped and available now in soft cover here and Kindle here. Don't have a Kindle? No worries, the Kindle eBook version can also be read on any computer by downloading a free reader. Highly recommended.

It's official, we have a winner. Sean Ross delivers the dernier cri and reveals the Summer Song of 2015, here Bravos, Sean. Thanks for again doing a thoughtful and thorough judging.

There's a bunch of good writing on the web but none finer on the subject matter relevant to radio than jacoBLOG. Fred Jacobs and his Jacobs Media gang do a simply exceptional job of presenting the important and interesting. Fred's latest post, Making the Donuts AND Driving the Trucks, is another example of why you need to make jacoBLOG a part of your daily weekday reading. Don't miss it if you can, here.

Related: We wrote about this distribution premise of Fred's post as a paradigm shift, one we called "Export vs Import" in 2007. It was the first year we began to advise clients on the importance of exporting content. My sense is our thinking, while perhaps ahead of its time, remains relevant today. Read the post, here

Creating killer content

has become the first

big step. It's no longer

the finished art.

Vox Jox Redux: The great Claude Hall in collaboration with the always amazing Rollye James delivers the goods via a cool new site. Updated each Monday morning, it's a curation of interesting conversations about radio and more. Rollye is also providing a killer set of links to all manner of good stuff. Congrats and cheers to Claude and Rollye on a wonderful, fun read! Worth the jump, here

Highly recommended: Penn Jillette's Marathon Life in Magic. Here's The Thing, a podcast by Alec Baldwin via WNYC, here

As many of you know, I have been absent from this space for some time. Some 48.5K tweets later, I've decided to come home and invest more attention here. Now, how to get used to a channel that is longer than 140 characters. Thanks to all for your support and encouragement.

"Applause is the only appreciated interruption." Arnold Glascow

"To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting." E.E. Cummings

"Fortune pays sometimes for the intensity of her favors by the shortness of their duration." Baltasar Gracian

Today's image: Morning light in the woods. By Fred Winston. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Disruptive strategy:

zag when others zig

The Great American Dream Machine was a weekly magazine show on public television (1971-72). A mix of short features, sketches and song, it was both satire and documentary. It's acknowledged as seminal work, a precursor to Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show.

The show runners planned to launch the show with rotating weekly hosts but the brilliant Sheila Nevins, at the time, a producer on the show, had a better, original idea. Go without a host, use images and animation as bridges to connect the segments. Nevins' unconventional, fresh concept proved to be a masterstroke.

Let's remember the wise counsel of Gordon McLendon - "The Old Scotsman" 

Carefully study what every station in the market
 is doing, then do the opposite.

What's important is creating perceptible contrast. Nothing subtle whatsoever. Strive to be obvious, palpable, visceral. The marketing genius Dale Pon called this approach "high definition communication" (way back in the early 1980s). 

Do your homework. Know that, in most situations, there is more than one right answer. Follow the lead of Nevins, McLendon and Pon. Have the courage to zag when others zig.

ICYMI: Good reads

What does the Facebook experiment teach us? By danah boyd, here

This American Gamble. Ira Glass's 'This American Life' Leaves PRI. By Cara Buckley, here 

11 Top Quotes on Complexity Plus a Startup Twist. By Margaret Molloy, here

Sharing and celebrating your favorite authors. By Seth Godin, here

Recommended: Shakespeare's Montaigne. Greenblatt and Platt. Classic. NYRB detail, here

Have fun. Make something happen! 

Thanks for stopping by. See you on the Twitter. 

"Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind." Louis Pasteur

"Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience." Comte de Buffon

"One morning one of us, having no black, used blue instead, and Impressionism was born." Pierre Auguste Renoir

Today's image: Late Night Travel By Thomas Hawk Beautiful shot. Thank you for sharing.

Markets are conversations

Thesis #1/95, The Cluetrain Manifesto

One key benefit of today's hyperconnectivity is the wealth of conversation. Not a day goes by without someone starting or adding to a discussion. On topics related to media there's a robust diversity of ongoing discussion. Those working in media will gain valuable insight and advantage by devoting attention to a couple of particular discussions.

First, serious inside broadcasting baseball conversations and, second, the abundance of comments on broadcast media emanating from what Jay Rosen has called "the people formerly known as the audience."

Many of us arrived here from a different world. Access or exposure to some kind of thought leadership or best practice wisdom and any continuing professional education whatsoever were limited; trade pubs were delivered weekly, popular industry conventions staged annually. The important exercise of "holding a mirror up to the audience" was typically a once a year ritual - the perceptual research study - more event than process.

This should not be understood as a suggestion we should discount the potential value of publications, conferences or survey research. Au contraire, my thought is each would be enriched, complimented, not replaced, by careful study of available conversations. What has forever changed is context. The conversations are already in progress. Get engaged and involved.

To review the (now) obvious fundamentals as stated in The Cluetrain: "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media." and "We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with."

Localized radar: To get a quick read on your market create a local Twitter list. Populate with all the usual suspects. For best results make it an ongoing curation. Invite listeners/viewers/followers to suggest additions. Here's an example created for Madison, WI. Such lists can well serve your market "listening" strategy. FYI - some clients have created a second list using a Twitter account not associated with the company so they can also track tweets of all media in their market.

The Broadcast Ecosystem

My sense is broadcasters would benefit from some discussion about ecosystems. Let's frame it this way: Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are each building and fine-tuning (iterating) an ecosystem. A bespoke community set designed to create and sustain competitive advantage. What is the state of your company's ecosystem? Seems a fair, timely and important question.

You can Google "Amazon ecosystem" (or any, all of the big four above) and get an idea of the concept, including graphic representations. In my experience, a candid and valuable discussion about any ecosystem should begin with mapping. Have your associates independently create maps which reveal what they believe is your present ecosystem. Gather your team to share and discuss their maps. Create a map of your ecosystem. Iterate. How can your ecosystem be improved?

One example: broadcaster ecosystem maps include Audience & Advertiser clusters. Within the Audience cluster are lifestyle groups and their purchase needs/behaviors. These relate to buyer, potential buyer groups within the Advertiser cluster.

An area often overlooked in this mapping is your local developer community. The upside potential of establishing a formalized approach, a respectful place within your ecosystem, to effectively involve talented hometown geeks is not at all insignificant. Thank me later.

Good reads

The Future of UI: Contextual Intelligence. By Bob O'Donnell, here

EXCELLENCE. NO EXCUSES. By Tom Peters. This 737-page download is a gem, here

The Power of One. By Fred Jacobs. Fred offers up a solid post about the Nielsen LA Radio ratings scandal which turns into an interesting discussion via comments on how ratings are used, here

Witty Worried and Wolf. Nancy Wolf, the smart and celebrated communications lawyer, is not retiring, she's restarting. Enjoy her new blog here

SCOTUS: The Aereo decision, here

In closing let me share a wonderful image. This week Professor Gary Hamel delivered another of his thought-provoking talks. A keynote at the London Business School's Global Leadership Summit, his talk was about hacking management. The following image was taken from his deck. My thanks to Dr Hamel for allowing it to be shared here. Dare to distribute, discuss and post in your workspace.