Marketer Seth Godin Tells Radio Broadcasters To Change Before It’s Too Late

From Kurt Hansan and his online RAIN newsletter, "…Seth Godin – famous for his books "Permission Marketing," "Unleashing the Ideavirus," and "Purple Cow" – delivered the keynote speech this morning at the NAB Radio Show in Philadelphia, telling broadcasters that they are at a critical fork in the road and urging them to change their direction."

"With the web and satellite radio and WiMax, radio’s not going to be one-way communication any more — it’s going to be two- or three-way," Godin told the several hundred attendees in the audience. "You’re either going to embrace it or not…."

"…The FCC is the reason you exist," Godin said. "It’s about limited spectrum. If there were a million  FM stations, you couldn’t sell any advertisements." But with the advent of TiVo, Xbox, DVDs, Yahoo!, Escient, home theaters, 400 TV channels, 10,000 magazines, and more, "the TV-industrial complex is going away. What are you going to do about it?"

"…He challenged his audience,"How many podcast subscribers do you have?", notingthat one New York City station has 50,000 subscribers now and will someday have 500,000 subscribers – "and each one of them is someone who’s not listening to you…."

He also asked, "How many anticipated, personal, relevant ads do you deliver?" Responding to the speakers before him — the NAB’s Eddie Fritts and Jefferson-Pilot’s Don Benson, both of whom extolled the value of radio’s localism — Godin noted, "Local doesn’t necessarily mean local on a map; it can mean local based on interests…."