20. 10. 2012
Selling Radio Packages
Selling radio advertising is harder than selling refrigerators. You can see a refrigerator, you can open the door and watch the light go on, you can take a beer from a refrigerator and it’s cold. You know immediately how a refrigerator helps you.
You can’t hold radio time in your hand. While you can listen to a radio commercial, you can’t see a radio commercial. It is often difficult for the advertiser to determine if the commercials you run actually bring customers into a store. That is why smart radio sales people put together packages that give your sales people something to sell that is concrete and results the advertiser can see. The best packages bring people into a business and demonstrate the ability of a radio station to motivate its listeners.
A station in Bulgaria put together one of the best packages I’ve seen in my work in Eastern Europe. The Lev had collapsed and the economy was down. Yet at least one radio station defied logic and prospered in the face of economic collapse. That is because of two truths. The first is that Advertising works when people change habits, and an economic collapse causes people to change habits. Remember, the “golden age of radio” in the United States happened during the great depression. The second truth is that a good package motivates both advertisers and customers.
The Bulgarian package worked like this. The biggest selling beer in Bulgaria was the Dutch beer, Amstel. When the Lev collapsed people could no longer afford an import. Bulgarians had begun to enjoy traveling abroad, to Turkey and Greece for holidays. But with a nearly worthless currency people could not afford that either. Yet people still wanted to drink beer and take a summer break with the family.
The station put together a package with a local brewery and a local lakeside resort. It invited people to a weekend party at the resort. It contacted the local brewer, whose beer was much less expensive than Amstel. The station convinced the brewery to be a sponsor for the party. Both the resort and the beer company bought ads on the station, at a reduced package rate, inviting listeners to the weekend party. The station used its contacts to get local bands to make it a real party. In return for the reduced advertising rate, the resort and the beer company agreed to give the station a percentage of their sales for the weekend. In other words, the advertiser’s risk was lessened and the station made a profit only if the party was a success.
The result was that the station made a small amount of money on the promotional ads and more on the percentage of the sales. The beer company and the resort reintroduced themselves to a public that had drifted away to both foreign brews and waters while making money on the promotion. And the station got great public promotion by sponsoring a party that attracted a lot of happy listeners. They repeated this throughout the summer.
The party was the springboard for both the beer company and the resort to do continuing advertising. “Times may be hard but you can still enjoy a good beer and a good swim at a family resort.”
The sales people had more to sell than radio time, which, as I said, you can’t hold in your hand. The station demonstrated that it could draw a crowd, AND could sell beer. The advertisers had immediate feedback that reinforced the importance of buying on the radio.
In Alaska our classical music station, KLEF, put together a package that got us great press and demonstrated the power of the station. We have a classical music station that plays Mozart and Brahms. But we knew, from the age of our listeners, that they also like classic rock. So when the Rolling Stones did a concert in Seattle, which is about 2,500 kilometers south of Anchorage, we bought concert tickets and did an advertising trade for airfare and hotel with a travel agency. We also bought some tickets for a cultural event in Seattle more in line with classical music tastes.
Then we promoted the fact that “Your radio concert hall, Classic 98” was giving away tickets and airfare for a weekend in Seattle to see the Rolling Stones and to enjoy a museum concert. The contrast of the two, the asymmetry, attracted media attention to the station, “Roll over Beethoven.”
We got three businesses to sponsor the contest. One was a local furniture store. One was a local TV station, and one was the travel agency with whom we traded for the air tickets and hotel rooms. To enter you had to go to one of the businesses that sponsored the contest. Hundreds of people came over the two weeks of the contest to enter.
Each business was featured in our ads. The travel agency and TV station paid us in trade. The furniture store paid us in cash. We demonstrated to them that we could bring lots of people to the stores, which made sales from the people who came to enter the contest. We also showed the general public that Classical Music listeners could not be stereotyped as one-dimensional.
The promotion not only made us a profit, but also cemented our relationship with the sponsors and got us a lot of publicity that promoted future listening.
Thinking of creative ways to put together packages that can both move people to visit businesses and that can pay for themselves through trade is a good way to build an advertising customer base and to promote your station. It is easier for your sales people to sell a package than to sell straight “time” on your station. You can document a successful promotion package and use it in your sales kit to bring in new advertisers. At our stations we spend an hour or two a week brainstorming package ideas. Only a few actually make it to onto the radio, but enough do to help us develop new business, and promote our stations.
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Rich McClear is a broadcaster from Alaska who has worked for almost 20 years helping stations develop in emerging markets. He was Director of the Serbian Media Assistance Program from 2008-2011.