Fries: Get out of the bunker
With all of the gloom and doom heard about the state of radio revenues, Radio Advertising Bureau President Gary Fries says many people in the industry seem to have adopted a "bunker mentality" and are not being aggressive in trying to move the business forward. While the economy may be slow, he insists that radio is not losing ground and the industry should be working on building share. "There is no erosion. There is no cancer," he insisted.
"There is some good news on the horizon," Fries said at the NAB Radio Show in San Diego. While RAB's crunch of data from Miller Kaplan's X-Ray markets found that 17 major ad categories were down in the first half of this year, with 13 up and 10 flat, when looked at as radio's percentage of total medium spending, 17 were up, eight down and five flat. "We are not losing ground," Fries said, but added, "We can do better." While he said it's too early to call Q4, Fries said the initial indications are positive for radio revenues.
But while he insisted that the gloom and doom is overstated, Fries did say there are challenges that the radio industry does need to address. One, of course, is spot loads, which he said is "critical" - - and is one of the top issues today in radio. "We need better creativity," Fries said, citing the Radio Mercury Awards as one way that radio is encouraging higher-quality advertising. "We need electronic invoicing. We need it because our customers need it," Fries said, adding that radio is not moving fast enough to to replace paper bills with electronic ones. He also called for the industry to move to implement electronic audience measurement and not "test to death" the technology before moving forward. And finally, he urged rapid implementation of digital radio. "If we don't solve these problems we could become a secondary medium," Fries warned.
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