Attorney and frequent RAIN contributor David Oxenford reminds us that certain noncommercial webcasters who want to pay royalties under the Noncommercial settlement under the SWSA need to file a notice of intent to participate by tomorrow, July 11. "Noncommercial educational entity" webcasters (for example, college stations) have until October 15 to elect in.

BY KURT HANSON
National and network radio advertisers have a wonderful opportunity, it seems to me, to reach millions of upscale and attentive radio listeners in what is now the 15th-largest radio market in America: People listening to radio via their PCs at work.

These radio listeners are distributed smoothly and homogeneously across the U.S., in a manner that might be significantly more desirable to a national advertiser than the patchwork of stations that comprises any national or network radio buy today.

And these radio listeners should be particularly desirable to any advertiser who wants consumers to visit his website, as virtually 100% of them are (A) sitting in front of a PC (B) that's connected to the Internet (more likely than not with a broadband connection) and (C) has a browser window open.

And a 30-second commercial played to these radio listeners should be significantly more effective than the exact same commercial played on broadcast radio (on a per-impresssion basis), because it will not be buried in a cluster of other spots (in fact, it may well be the only spot in the break) and it can, on many Internet radio stations, be accompanied by the advertiser's logo or other desired visual image (in a 468x60 banner). (Wouldn't you think that a radio spot for McDonald's new premium salads be more effective it was accompanied by a mouth-watering photo of one of the salads? Mmmm, salad!)

It seems to me that if I were a radio buyer making a national or network radio buy in Summer 2003, these listeners would be the very first ones I would snap up.


To quote the band Chicago, "We can make it happen"
Previously this week in RAIN (here, here, and here) I've presented numbers to support my thesis that Internet radio's midday audience size is currently the equivalent of the 15th largest radio market in the US and we've discussed some of the reasons that national and network radio advertisers have not yet begun to seriously embrace Internet radio.

(Those reasons include: (1) Internet radio falls between the cracks in an agency's organizational structure. (2) The audience size of any individual webcaster is relatively low. (3) Agencies have concerns about AFTRA talent fees. (4) And others; see Tuesday's issue for details.)

Still, if webcasters genuinely have a midday AQH of over 500,000 people and a weekly cume of millions, it seems to me that the time is now right for Internet radio stations to get out on the road and tell their story!

"Yeah, yeah, sure," you say. It's not as if others have not tried. Others have! And they've had some limited success.

But one problem is that the national or network radio buyer has not been empowered or authorized to buy Internet radio stations. Internet radio may have a great story to tell, but that story needs to be told at the highest levels of an agency or even perhaps at the client level.

And then it's got to be something that those buyers will like as well. We can't make Internet radio so difficult to purchase that the story is appealing on a conceptual level but falls apart on a practical, implementation level.


Final criterion: "Sexy! High concept"
Those of you who know me from my days in broadcast radio (WOKY, WLS, WDAI, WLUP, Strategic Media Research) know that I am no spring chicken. I have been around the block a few times. And I've learned a few things about this industry.

And one thing I've learned is that if you have a story to tell, that's not good enough. If you want to get your message across, you've got to make it as "sexy" and "high concept" as possible!

Remember last year's Internet radio "Day of Silence?" It got fantastic national coverage — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, Newsweek, US News, AP, hundreds of local stories. (See coverage here.) Well, the truth is, a lot of webcasters weren't truly "silent" all day; they were running PSAs or a talk show or merely "moments" of silence.

But a "Day of PSAs and Talk Shows" wouldn't have worked! It isn't sexy! It wouldn't capture the imagination of the public; it wouldn't have made a great lead paragraph for a journalist.

The concept "Day of Silence," on the other hand, could quote Fat Bastard in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: "I'm dead sexy!"


So here's my idea: One buy of the entire MEDIUM!
Trying to use what I've learned over the years, and having brainstormed this for the past couple of months with some smart individuals that I trust (you know who you are), and trying to take into account the issues and concerns we've been discussing over the past three days in RAIN, here's the highest-concept approach I've been able to come up with:

Let's put together a national road show, visiting top national and network radio advertisers and agencies this summer, pitching them on the concept of one advertiser buying THE ENTIRE MEDIUM of Internet radio!

No advertiser has ever purchased an ad schedule on every magazine in America. Similarly, no advertiser has ever purchased a spot schedule on every radio station in America, and no advertiser has ever purchased a spot schedule on every TV program.

This will, hopefully, be front-page news in Ad Age and Mediaweek and the "Money" section of USA Today and elsewhere! The savvy advertiser who makes this innovative buy will get valuable media exposure far above and beyond the radio buy itself!


Details
I'm envisioning that we, as an industry, would offer a campaign with spots that run once every two hours for eight weeks on virtually every advertising-supported Internet radio channel in North America — including both (A) terrestrial broadcasters who are streaming their stations on the web and (B) Internet-only stations.

One spot every two hours means that a webcaster with a monthly TTSL of 1,500,000 hours would be able to run about 750,000 impressions each month, for a total of about 1,500,000 impressions over the course of the two-month campaign. And if advertising-supported stations make up, say, about half of Internet radio's total listenership, and if my audience size estimates yesterday were correct, this means we could, as a group, deliver about 100 million impressions over the course of the campaign.

This offer should, of course, be priced attractively, but at the highish end of national spot pricing — sold at an $8 CPM, less 20% for sales and administrative costs — it could theoretically generate up to $640,000 in revenues for webcasters to split appropriately.

We can go into this in more detail about execution details tomorrow, but here are some bullet points:

• This needs to be run as simply as humanly possible for the advertiser: One contract, one invoice, one check.
  
  
• Similarly, there should be one single, central source of affidavits that the ads ran as scheduled — i.e., webcasters submit affidavits to someone who reviews them and submits a single affidavit attesting to all of the other affidavits.
  
  
• Webcasters should try to over-deliver on this campaign! This advertiser deserves to earn webcasters' undying, long-term loyalty.

So, what do you think? Is this dead sexy enough? Would advertisers and agencies be willing take a meeting to see this pitch?

Please use the form immediately below to send me your feedback, or e-mail me at kurt@kurthanson.com.

I look forward to hearing from you! And we'll talk more tomorrow.

TO BE CONTINUED...

BY PAUL MALONEY
A company called Verso Technologies, Inc. is using the reported popularity of online media like Internet radio to promote an appliance that businesses could use to block their employees' access to it.

In a press release for the product -- the NetSpective Internet Access Management appliance with the new P2P/IM/Chat blocking feature -- the company cites Media Metrix research which reveals that "hundreds of thousands of workers each day visit Internet radio stations and music channels," and a November 2002 Nielsen/Net Ratings survey indicating that "Windows Media Player had more unique users than any other application on the Internet, followed by AOL Instant Messenger and Real Player."

(The graph from the press release, in the screenshot above, is apparently from the Nielsen study).

Verso claims their "technology helps organizations preserve bandwidth and improve network performance by blocking (these) streaming media applications and the URLs that serve them."

"In addition to blocking users from downloading media players such as RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, Verso's NetSpective appliance prevents access to sites like Broadcast.com, MTV.com and MP3.com," according to the release. "Even more significantly, NetSpective uses an advanced blocking technology to filter Internet protocols, including HTTP, FTP, P2P and NNTP. This unique approach enables NetSpective to block streaming media, chat, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer sessions more effectively than static database filters by preventing access to both objectionable sites, applications and traffic."