Geek Soap Box

It’s ironic that I spent all of last week at a conference dedicated to the evolution of media in the context of advertising.  There is great speculation about how the future consumer will interact with brands and content; will traditional television advertising go the way of the dodo bird, forever abandoned to the realm of digital, interactive, and mobile, or is a more-integrated approach the way to go?  The debate continues to rage unabated.

Notice, though, that nary a mention of radio enters into the conversation.  What was once a mighty powerhouse, home to fireside presidential chats and hoaxes that terrified the entire nation, is now a barren wasteland of sagging ratings, incessant commercials for lousy products such as “Ashley Madison’s Cheat on Your Spouse Web Matchmaking Service” and “1-800-KARS-4-KIDS,” and vapid programming barely worthy of a drive-time listen.

For this humble blogger and formerly devoted radio listener, the final nail in the proverbial coffin was hammered into place today with the firing of infamous New York shock jocks Opie and Anthony — my personal favorite listen for no less than a decade now — and yet another reformatting for the station located at 92.3 on the FM dial.  WXRK — or whatever the call letters will wind up being — has undergone no less that three separate reboots in both content and management in the past four years, each of which has served to only further splinter its once-decent customer base.  In between two stabs at the modern/classic rock hybrid format came the excerable “free talk” radio of loudmouth phonies (and David Lee Roth) and now the old standby, Top 40.

Satellite radio once promised a robust alternative to the barriers of the terrestrial product.  XM and Sirius was a world filled with diverse content, commercial free and fine tuned to the listener’s tastes, all for a mere monthly price.  Unfortunately, in an age of broadband downloads (legal and illegal) and Pandora Internet Radio, even this business model has proven untenable, and the satellite oligopoly has entropied into one bankrupt mess.

So where do we go from here?  Radio still has a place in the media mix; after all, it’s the only broadcast system capable of following the consumer from home to car to work and back again (for the time being).  The real question is, can program directors find a format that still resonates with a large audience base — and will they have the patience and good judgment to actually stick with it long enough to allow it to work?