Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

Quick note. The fun thing about traveling for CelleCast is talking to cab drivers (always fairly recent immigrants) about the concept of hearing news and entertainment from their home country while driving around town. I get 100% enthusiasm about it. Now it is just a matter of gathering the long tail of shows into our system.

It will still take a few more months for all of us to once again get in the habit of reading these reports, but we will all be the better for it. Take a few minutes to read the Bridge Ratings 2010 Radio Predictions. You’ll thank me later!

If you have never seen a Bridge Ratings Report before, you are in for a treat.

After another year of reading of the continued, gradual (and predicted) decline of radio in all its various manifestations, there are few radio writers that have stood out to me with a unique ability to bring the news into a practical balance. Whether you are “in” radio or a supporting industry like ours bringing talk radio to mobile phones, I suggest you join me in listening to Eric Rhoads. Here is his recent summary of the state of radio in 2009:

First, the bad news.

• Radio will be down 18-20 percent in 2009 and is expected to finish the year at $15.5 billion, down from $21.5 billion in 2006.
• Radio has lost over 10,000 jobs, and that number could increase.
• Several radio companies are facing bankruptcy.
• High fixed costs (much of which is debt), perishable inventory, and overcapacity are creating a deflationary spiral in rates, which continue to fall.
• We have commoditized the radio business because it’s easier to stimulate demand through price than to train people and hold them accountable for selling value.
• Much of our industry has been forced to eliminate valuable localism, strong sales organizations with accountability, and much-needed promotion.
• We face low-cost competition from online media, which is seducing advertisers with brilliant technology that makes offerings highly targetable and attractive.
• The likelihood of increased federal regulation appears to be looming, with deeper controls on content and potentially increased costs through performance royalties.

Now, the good news.

• Unlike print, newspapers, and television, radio listening is alive and well, and radio continues to have a strong hold on audiences. Our audiences are not eroding.
• New data suggests that radio has not lost its grip on the youth market and remains relevant with 18-34-year-olds.
• Independent broadcasters and many small-market operators have been able to prevent severe declines in business with strong localism strategies.
• Some radio companies are starting to wake up to the fact that digital media plays a significant role in our future and are integrating it deeply into their organizations.
• Desperate times spawn great innovations. New plans seem to be emerging that will change the very nature of how we operate our business.
• Bankruptcies and further consolidation will weed out many of those who have had a negative impact on radio.
• There is money to be made even in a declining industry, and most industries cycle back eventually.
• Breakups of some larger groups will spawn more independent, true-to-the core broadcasters.

Integrating digital strategies deep into the organization? We are ready to help!

When we started CelleCast in 2007 we knew right from the beginning that there were two essentials to making mobile phone radio work for the industry. Not that these two stood alone, but we felt, and have been thoroughly vindicated, that without these there isn’t a rats chance in a beauty contest of success in bringing a significant radio audience over to new mobile devices. Once I cover these two self-evident points for reference sake, I’ll get into how the train got derailed for all of us by those who ignored them.

Behold:

1. Universal Simplicity

Radio works because it is easy, and will remain ubiquitous until it gets complicated (hence, the unintended consequences with satellite and HD). You turn it on, you scan through stations, you find what you want to listen to, and make presets of your favorites so you can avoid commercials, etc. Not only is it second nature for you, you also expect it to be easy for everyone else around you. The universality of people who are comfortable with it makes the simplicity means something. Even complex things are made simple on an individual basis with acclimation and repetition, but the list of things in media life that everyone ‘gets’ is still limited to the things that have been around a while. Without this, the media is not sharable. There is no community without sharing. Hearing radio over a mobile phone is sharable only to a very small niche community when an iPhone app is required. Hearing it only when an sms text message is received also creates limitations that violates the Universal Simplicity standard. This is something radio people get that cloistered new media geeks tend to dismiss.

2. On Demand, Personalized Delivery

This is an essential because frankly there is no reason for anyone (producers and listeners alike) to break from the status quo unless, in addition to the simplicity standard above, other compelling benefits cannot be ignored. What new media brings to the table for radio going mobile is portability and personalization. These are the same qualities mobile breakthroughs also bring to apps and the mobile web, BTW. When listeners can truly just push a button and hear a personalized playlist of programs auto-queued to play only the most recent unheard episodes, then the listener is in control in a similar manner that they are also getting accustomed to with DVR’s for TV.

Falling Short

Now, hopefully you are aware of the essential value of each of the above as pre-requisites toward a wonderful revolution in mobile radio. So why are we not much closer to seeing this transformation toward personalized radio come to pass? If you think it is the technology, you would be incorrect. I submit to you that it is actually the misstep of technology misapplied. Other ‘features’ (aka shiny objects) were regarded more highly than the core essentials of simplicity and personalization. Because too few have sought to hold to these as standards, what has suffered unfairly is the perceived viability of mobile radio personalization itself. Now, I am tired of that. Not just as a believer/innovator seeking to equip the industry for positive change, but also personally after seeing inferior tools dressed up with confusing rhetoric misguide people. Because of this, the promise of radio personalization has been broken, and the reality of it, postponed.

Cases in point: Foneshow.com and lexy.com. I am not in the habit of calling out competitors like this, and I have been able to resist the temptation up to this point. What breaks my silence now is the dread that the ideas behind what all three of us and others have been promising would be passed by due to poor representation. To see these venture funded companies, who have clearly undermined both the simplicity and on-demand standards they falsely claimed to champion, fade in listenership while claiming to represent mobile radio on-demand, is a tragedy to me. To be funded and not to have transformed the industry is an abject failure. I’ll give them credit for getting funded while we have yet to be in that club, but from my perspective today, I’m glad the failed examples are clearing out to make space. As long as the credibility of personalized radio can avoid too much damage now, we’ll be able to make our case while waiting for the right investor to emerge.

How have they violated the core essentials? To put it simply, they claim too much control over the experience, destroying simplicity. (I’ll give lexy more credit for putting their call-in number back on their pages, but for a while it was gone.) The approach they and others have taken is that the user would be enamored with text messaging to the point of accepting it as a gateway to access the audio. When we saw that as the core of Foneshow’s model in 2007, we didn’t even want to list them as a competitor on a product level. If you are making demands of the listener where they don’t get the audio without waiting for a text, then how is that on-demand? Who is making the demands? Imagine if your AM radio was similarly anal. You turn on the power and before any sound comes out, you have to enter your mobile phone number and wait for a screen to come up where you have to tap on a blue 10 digit number. Would you consider that consumer friendly or even good engineering?

One deal-breaking major fallout from this approach is that the content they are aggregating and delivering comes from radio shows that have no decent way to easily promote their content via the call-in based medium. We give each program partner a unique direct dial access number and program page. They can link to us from their site and get more SEO value. They can promote their cellecast number on the air and get direct call ins to THEIR show with ZERO barriers. Now, this is not a competitive pitch here although it sounds like it. To me, it is just bottom line common sense to make it easy for your partners to promote themselves in the context of universal simplicity in personalized mobile radio.

The bottom line problem here is that the biggest barrier for mobile phone radio is already the mainstream perception that it is too complicated to bother with. It doesn’t help that many of the companies trying to solve the perception problem are actually contributing to it. They just make it harder for those of us trying to help.

In the next installment, I will deal with some of the many promising possibilities for on-demand, personalized mobile radio. The standards above are not constraining, but in the long run, the key to radio liberalization and audio-based social media.

Something surprising is about to occur, but I say it is right on schedule. Apple’s iPhone is going down a few pegs in the intrigue market and the app craze will quickly wash into a memory similar to playing pogs and listening to Sugar Ray.

Why will the app craze dissipate? Because the same thing has happened on your desktop already. Installed apps, for a variety of obvious practical reasons, have given way to web apps. Web apps are accessible from any computer. They don’t care what version your OS is. The installation step gives way to a much easier registration step. The configuration and data status information is 100% portable. Think of your email. Where would you be if you could not access it from the web? That’s right, stuck to one PC. How 2004 is that?

Now, with the recent emergence of Android and Palm Pre as competing smartphones to the iPhone, what do all touch smartphone users have in common? The webkit safari browser.. that’s what. iPhone web apps already have had a few advantages over their native app counterparts, but now that the safari browser will be the common denominator among all phones, the scales are going to tip dramatically. Web apps as a sub project will give way to the mobile web app being the core business model. Look how this new real estate application is built around this concept.

Also, in case you are skeptical about all this, Verizon, who has been the odd carrier out in the non-blackberry smartphone world is about to enter in with bang. Droid phones are due out before Christmas with the new Android 2.0 OS. They are also slated to carry the Palm Pre by January. You would not believe the amount of iPhone users who are ready to switch to a new phone only because of how much they hate AT&T.

What this means for radio, is new opportunity that maybe, just maybe, they might not pass by this time. Radio’s long-held media advantage of wider and simpler accessibility is being challenged again and again, but this time and through 2010, the shift will be felt more dramatically. We have been telling radio leaders to partner with us to head off the challenge and bring in new tools to lead in opportunity. Start adapting now, without abandoning your core. We share your ‘accessibility first’ principle, so let’s get moving. The future still marches on.

We are ready to help now by developing your mobile website assets simply by repurposing what you have now on your current website. We can work with your webmasters and engineers in a seamless manner to get a winning strategy working. There are lots of new possibilities for audio as well with a combination of web based, telephony based and mobile streaming tools for mobile phones.

We leave you with a quick video about how the fast and versatile Safari browser works at different speeds for the iPhone, Palm Pre and T-Mobile G1.

Despite an ongoing unprecedented time crunch of late, I need to write about my stubbornly persistent visions of radio personalization — specifically as it relates to talk radio. It is funny that stubborn persistence is required in larger doses in the journey, as people in radio should already be aware that every other form of media is already going that direction. So stay tuned.

As a quick update on what we are doing around here in lately, I have been dividing my blogging time more widely by adding some new posts about our iPhone web apps and the new advent of the local web on our CGI Productions Development blog.

Stay tuned, and look for our iPhone web app for CelleCast in 2010, with all the mad skills we are building up here in the shop.

Andrew

One of the key founding values of CelleCast is to empower people to not only get more from radio on demand on their mobile phones, but also to speak TO the media and to have their voices heard. When we learned of the repression of reporting in Tehran not only of journalists, but of citizen reporting by the shutting down of internet resources as well, I knew that we should open this channel for the people of Iran. I only wish I did so a week ago. Let them try to shut down an entire bank of phone numbers! All anyone has to do is to dial 001 (415) 707-3003 from their mobile phones or landlines anywhere in the world and tell the truth of what is going on in Iran. We feel a viral campaign to get this number into the hands of people in the streets in Iran will be as easy as the system is to use. For every Iranian savvy enough to record and post video and pictures with their mobile phone, I’ll bet there are 50 who would dial up our number and make their own radio report if they felt there was a sympathetic audience on the other end.

I am calling upon all our radio partners to share this channel with their audiences! They should not think of it as competing with their own phone number, as what I need them to do is to simply tell their audience to text the number to friends and relatives in Iran as well as any Iranian who wants to share their voice.

We hope to gather hundreds of voices in the next few days and will continually alert the media of the talkback publications on CelleCast. The raw audio can be heard on our twitter timeline and we expect a whole lot of retweeting to take place.

I am inspired to throw in a quick note today after watching this video on Mark Ramsey’s blog about what agencies think about radio today.

A couple of the points I especially liked were the references to windshield brands and the effective opportunities ahead as radio goes interactive. We have been looking at developing local advertising at this stage and proving this concept as valuable. National initiatives for large scale deployment have been a tough road, but we think we can get more marketing interest thrrough local tests like this.

More information to come. Contact me to discuss what we can do now for your brand in a local market.

Really nice events and milestones are coming and going quickly these days, and the blog is suffering when things get busy. Twittering has also been a fine alternative for getting the word out on events and such. You can and should always get the latest here:
http://twitter.com/cellecast

But here are the recent highlights you should know about…

Our quasi-hidden little demo page now says…

CelleCast Partner Dev created this field report in preparation for 5 minute pitch for tonight. Imagine the ways cellecasting can change the way you think about audio media.
I’ll be giving a live plug for CelleCast in the next hour, and I’ll let the tool itself do the talking, asking…
When was the last time you heard a startup pitch where every last person in the room was able to take a device out of their pocket and immediately use the product?

I was interviewed yesterday on Sun’s BTR show called Socially Speaking. It went for a while and we got pretty deep into the uses of cellecasting for business as well as for radio. I got into the value comparison of current vs live, which is something i want to expand upon soon.

Finally, I got a write up in Radio and Records recently which was excellent. If you got a copy, please read it and let me know what you thought of it.

Thanks.

Relating to radio, the departure of David Rehr as CEO of the NAB will likely be a welcome change.
The industry has been under a lot of strain during his tenure, and although most of what he has faced was outside of his control, the parades he has stepped in front of to lead have been disappointments. Radio Heard Here has been castigated as a flat and lifeless appeal. Radio 2020, even with its laudable tenets which we have offered to help them achieve, were correctly interpreted in action as mostly a shill for HD Radio. The HD Radio parade itself has drifted off onto a country road to nowhere.

I like David and wish him the best, but for the sake of the radio industry, I hope we quickly get someone who will actually sit down with innovators, syndicators and stations together to create solutions that can bring the industry truly in line with the times, and defy the criticism of radio’s detractors.

Kudos to those who saw it coming 6 months ago, and let there be mercy on an industry in genuine transition.