DAN O’DAY TALKS ABOUT RADIO

You might want to stay for the closing credits.

Click here to view this radio show prep video online.

Recently I found myself on the home page of a radio station website.

The one thing that immediately grabs the attention of every visitor — placed squarely in the middle of an almost empty page — is a Google search box.

It wasn’t to use for searching the contents of the website. It was Google’s standard “search the Web” function.

So the big, immediate Call To Action on the station’s website is…to leave the site.

If someone wants to search for something online, they are not going to think, “HmMm. I think I’ll go to a radio station’s website and use their search tool.”

The only website that should feature a Google search tool (again, for searching the Internet, not for searching within your site) is:

www.google.com.

This is the second in a series devoted to helping radio advertising professionals teach their clients what they need to know in order for their radio commercials to succeed.

Copywriting pioneer Robert Collier defined successful advertising as entering into a conversation the targeted consumer already is having.

The conversation might be with another person, or it might be within the consumer’s head.

But it will be a conversation, not a shouting match.

The fools who think you must shout to attract people’s attention are

…Well, fools.

I just came across a piece I wrote in a 2006 edition of The Dan O”Day Radio Programming Letter.

During the Spring of 2006, I was certain I had seen a Sign of the Future…

I even shared my vision with the head of a big research company. He expressed doubt. Because normally he’s much more “ahead of the curve” than I, I found myself questioning my Big Insight.

I still believed The Sign. But I stopped sharing it with others.

This week, however, a big newspaper headline declared precisely what I had proclaimed months ago.

For a decade, people predicted the impending satellite radio revolution. It wasn’t available, but they kept telling us it was just around the corner.

The reason satellite radio is struggling in the U.S…

The reason XM and Sirius are certain to merge, I’d say within a year…

…has nothing to do with the anti-satellite campaigns of some terrestrial stations.

It is not due to the lack of availability of hardware (which soon will become standard in new cars).

The Satellite Killer — okay, the Satellite Seriously Wounder — is something that didn’t even exist six years ago:

The iPod.

I know my Sirius and XM subscribers will howl at this, but….

For all those years we spent waiting for the satellite revolution to Change Radio As We Know It, the big Unique Selling Proposition was:

“Digital quality, commercial-free music. All you can eat.”

Yeah, I know, now they have Sports and Talk and specialty programs. But that was their one big U.S.P.

The day an interface became available that easily connects an iPod to an in-car stereo system is the day that Satellite Radio — Well, it didn’t fall out of the sky. But it was forced into a much more modest orbit.

That was the big newspaper headline: “iPods Hurting Satellite Radio Subscriptions.”

So next year {Editor’s Note: 2007}, look for just one U.S. satellite radio company.

They’ll be able to consolidate the best programs under one name, and with the sudden lack of competition they’ll be able to raise subscription rates.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the satellite’s original “killer app” — the music — becomes a value-added aspect of their product line, as specialty programming becomes their primary listener magnet.

It’s nice occasionally to be right.