TORONTO – The director of digital media for the number-one billing radio station in North America offered some words of advice to attendees of the Ontario Association of Broadcasters’ Connection 2014 conference last week.
John Meyer, who directs digital strategy for all-news radio station WTOP of Washington, DC, said radio brands can thrive in the digital world by being pragmatic and avoiding the traps associated with moving to digital platforms.
“One of the ways that I think we’ve been successful at WTOP is we are very pragmatic about everything we do. One of the risks I think digital has is there are a lot of exciting things that you can do,” Meyer said, adding that trying to be on the cutting edge of the latest cool new thing doesn’t always make sense.
He said radio companies need to avoid siloing their broadcast and digital businesses, both internally and externally. “Our audience expects to get our brands on whatever device they have,” he said. “There’s the expectation that people are going to get us on the phone, on the tablet… on their laptop or their desktop at work.” (Ed note: Some phones, like the screen-capped HTC One pictured, even have FM tuners built in, making it a regular radio. Do your listeners know this about their own phones?)
Now with the emergence of the wearables market, users may expect to hear radio on a watch, he said. “I don’t know about you, but I sometimes can’t even get my web site to work when I run it in Explorer, so I don’t have high hopes about having things work on a watch,” Meyer said.
The WTOP.com site was launched in 1997, and it currently boasts 20 million page views a month, with about two million unique users. About 7% of WTOP’s total billing is digital, with 95% of its digital revenue coming from display ads, he added.
WTOP has no dedicated digital salespeople, instead giving digital budgets to 17 of its broadcast salespeople, he explained. However, the radio station does have a dedicated digital sales manager and two people devoted to digital ad creation.
On the news side, WTOP has decided to dedicate 15 journalists just to digital content, on top of the station’s other broadcast reporters who also have digital responsibilities. Meyer added that WTOP is moving to a “digital-first content model”, experimenting with four or five reporters whose first priority is to write something for the web site before their stories are broadcast on the air.
WTOP also uses social media such as Facebook and Twitter to promote its news station.
“With Twitter, we tweet out everything before we go on air with things. As soon as a reporter is on scene, we use it to establish that we have this story. Then we add stuff along the way,” he said. “Facebook we use primarily to drive traffic to our website. It’s a huge driver.”
“The good news is it’s pretty cheap, and you can do super-hyper targeting and you get immediate results.” – John Meyer, WTOP
The station has also been experimenting a lot with sponsored posts in its Facebook newsfeed, too. “The good news is it’s pretty cheap, and you can do super-hyper targeting and you get immediate results.”
Meyer warned his audience, however, about avoiding some of the “shiny object” traps that digital can present. “I think we probably all fall victim to the shiny object, and I think this is the biggest trap that all digital has,” Meyer said. “If it’s not helping ratings, or building audience, or improving revenue, then it’s not worth doing.”
However, there are a few examples of digital strategies that may appear shiny but could also have some value to them, so should be approached cautiously. “The first is podcasting,” he said. “A download doesn’t mean a listener. There’s not a lot of stuff out there about great results in podcasting. Just doing it takes a lot of time.”
Podcasting might make sense for a station that has a great morning show and great content, “but just tread lightly, I would say.”
On-demand audio is another item that Meyer said might not be worth the trouble. WTOP has stopped posting audio to its web site, because it was taking up a lot of the site staff’s time and no one was listening to it. “I think we have to look at how much time are we putting into something, and what else we could be doing, versus putting something up that eight people might click on,” he explained.
Meyer then came to his next point about on-demand video. “You read a lot about video… it’s in high demand. And you hear about all these great CPMs, I’ve heard everything from $26 to $60, depending on what you have out there,” Meyer said. “But let’s do the math for a second. Say it was $26, and you want to make $10,000, which is a decent amount of money. You need to have that video seen 400,000 times, and there aren’t a lot of things that you can create that can be seen 400,000 times… It’s hard to strike that viral nerve very quickly.”
Meyer said one of the big mistakes WTOP made three years ago was to hire a full-time digital reporter to produce videos for its site, which nobody watched.
“Do video if it makes sense,” Meyer said. “But it’s going to be hard to make it financially viable, because it’s not cheap and it takes a lot of time.”
