Welcome to Advertising in America, the podcast where we meet entrepreneurs where they’re at in their marketing and bust through their bottlenecks, breakpoints, and blind spots. Hosted by Wizards, Ryan Chute, and the Royal Torbay twins, where we put the fun in marketing fundamentals.

Watch the video above or read the text version below.

Subscribe: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Ryan: On today’s episode of Advertising in America, let’s talk about the 800-pound gorilla that Wizard of Ads Partners love dragging around.

While some people know it as traditional media, terrestrial media, old-school media, or even Boomer Bangers, I prefer offline media. But many people continue to wonder if TV, radio, and billboards are a worthwhile investment of their marketing dollars. Mick, what say you?

Mick: There was a time when we only had four or five good media to choose from, and they all worked reasonably well. Radio, TV, print, outdoor. And if you didn’t do any of those properly, well, there were always the Yellow Pages. Any of those could give you serious traction. So, I remember when they started talking about digital advertising. Sounded like it was gonna be a fifth major advertising medium that we’d all have to deal with, and with luck, it would know its place and only ask for its fair share of marketing dollars.

Well, It didn’t work out that way, did it? What is digital media? Can you even define it? I mean, is it pay-per-click? Is it GMB? Is it LSA? Is it social media? Is it YouTube? I mean, Billboards are digital now. Is that new media or is it just the same thing? It’s always been, only with tiny light bulbs, instead of paint.

There’s no question the landscape has changed. I think the same number of people listen to the radio as they did when we were kids or broadcast TV, or cable TV like they did in the olden days.

The TV people will tell you viewership is down. Radio Reps will admit that not as many people are listening as they did in days gone by. I mean, yeah, you can still make progress using nothing but traditional media, and I suppose you could churn your own butter too if you really want that pioneer experience. But when it comes down to media choices, wake up and smell whatever Instagram smells like.

Ryan: I believe, it’s teen spirit Mick. Chris, what are your thoughts on this contentious subject?

Chris: I’ve been doing this job for nigh on 30 years, and since the day I started, the marketing media have written the same article every year.

The 30-second TV ad is dead. Okay. First, it was people delaying on VHS, then it was DVRs, then it was Blockbuster, then Netflix, and now the streamers and all the YouTube content. Every year, broadcast is dead. And the same for radio. Oh, people have CD players now, they can listen to their own music. Then it was iPods, then Spotify.

No one listens to the radio, you say, over and over again, and they are wrong every time. We know what the numbers are. TV ratings are measured by Nielsen, an independent company that tracks who is watching what and when. Nielsen will tell you how many people are watching, who they are, and they will be there. And until they’re not there, the argument doesn’t hold.

And yes, everyone knows viewership and listenership is declining or diversifying. And yes, people will also Google your business or, you know, your product, so you better have a digital presence, and it better work well. But don’t confuse trends in viewership with the truth of who’s where now.

Regardless of what people may also be viewing and what they may be down from in terms of its peak, we do know how many people are watching things on traditional media. And for many advertisers, those numbers are still great. The question you need to ask is, how expensive is it to reach those people at a reasonable frequency?

So they remember your brand, compared to digital options. How much for how many sets of eyeballs? Because all these fancy computer options aren’t cheap.

Ryan: All I heard Chris say was, I’m really old. Ryan’s Fun Facts. Fun fact, guys. While cable and broadcast TV have seen a decline in overall viewership in the past 15 years, did you know that only 10% of the country has eliminated cable television altogether? 10%, that’s all.

Chris: So 10%, you’re saying this whole movement towards cable cutters, we’re all supposed to be scared of, is only 10% of people have actually cut their cable?

Ryan: They’ve, certainly, taken it on the OTT and the streaming, but yeah, also not a good thing.

Interestingly enough, young people have not even seen the cable. They don’t know what the cable is, so they haven’t cut it because it’s never been, that’s one of the weird things about this whole thing. Cable and broadcast still don’t need total viewership by a landslide, and while adding additional streaming and OTT advertising solutions to augment overall viewership solutions, television can still totally dominantly capture, in excess of 50% of any market in North America today.

Chris: Wow. Right? Over 50%. Well, which is what I was saying if you look at what, like Nielsen will tell you how many people are still there. And while things may be fluid, maybe even moving around, the truth is, many of those markets remain.

And until they are actually gone, until the numbers show they have left, we can fearmonger all we want about, oh, I think people are going to go. And to me, that’s what’s been happening for 35 years. That’s why that article gets written every year. People say I think this is the year that all the people are going to stop watching TV. And they never stop watching TV.

Mick: I think the mistake that we make is that we use things like, nobody does this, nobody does that. It sounds like a little thing, but it’s a big thing. Because when you say words like nobody and use these absolutes, that’s actually the message you convey to that person, and then they get this twisted sense in their head that this used to be a thing that people did, and now they don’t.

And the truth is, what we’re talking about is trends. We’re talking about, do more people do, or fewer people do it. And if fewer people do it, well that’s fine. The only question is how many, and how much does it cost? And the crazy part is, is that because of this perception that nobody listens to the radio, nobody watches TV anymore.

What that has done to the cost of those commercials is, that it becomes an even better value because disproportionately, advertising has been cut on those two media disproportionate to the amount of viewers that they’ve got. So since all media is purchased on supply and demand, if fewer people watch, but even fewer than that people advertise, the price has come down and it actually becomes a better value to buy television today than it was 15 years ago.

Ryan: Interesting perspective, I like that. And, and this all goes around this, yeah, but I don’t watch TV anymore. I don’t listen to the radio.

Does anyone listen to the radio anymore? Billboards, I don’t even know what any of them look like. You’re instantly forgettable. Another fun fact. Fun fact, North Americans listen to the radio on average two hours and 43 minutes a day. Two hours, 43 minutes. So for everyone who says, I don’t listen to the radio, think about that.

Some of your charted audience has to be listening to the radio for more than two hours and 43 minutes a day.

Chris: And again, that’s the classic thing too, is treating yourself like the focus group of one guy, which is you say, well, I never watched that channel, so I don’t think we should advertise on that channel.

Well, Nielsen will tell you the kind of person who is viewing that channel what shows they watch and how frequently they watch it, et cetera, etc., and your viewership habits are not indicative of that. And just because you don’t do it and your two friends who are just like you don’t do it, doesn’t mean, that’s the way the world has gone.

Nielsen will tell you the way the world goes by and is.

Mick: This is why when you’re buying media, you absolutely have to be dispassionate about it. And that’s why regular people like you and I actually can’t do that. And that’s because, and I cannot give you enough examples where a client says, but I listened to the sports talk station and everyone I know listens to the sports talk station. How is it possible that you’ve gone and done a media buy that didn’t include the sports talk station? Literally, everyone in this town listens to the sports talk station. It’s like, no, it’s you and your friends, and everyone you know. And I believe you.

And, the truth is, the sports talk station you’re talking about, I’m not talking about any particular media. They’re overpriced. They cost too much per listener per year to reach, and so that’s why you need someone who has no vested interest in this is what I listen to when I go to work. It’s like all I want to do is reach the most people for the least amount of money, and it doesn’t matter what freaking format they’re listening to.

Ryan: And we did see a shift in podcasts and streaming services for audio of 6% cannibalization over COVID. But we’ve started to see that number creep back down again, bringing it back to its more original percentages. Now, there’s still a problem with sports talk because there’s nothing to talk about.

Chris: Everybody’s still hunkered down.

Mick: I got it. No one wanted to own the sports talk station for about a year. What are we going to talk about? Last year, the team was very good.

Chris: Your favourite quarterback was golfing again today.

Ryan: Let’s talk about quarterback from 1975. Right? Yeah. Now listen. And it was a lot of people at home. They were listening, they were, investing in themselves. We saw companies like Masterclass and training platforms, which I’ll see during that time, as well, and we haven’t seen a complete reversion of those percentages, but it’s about half. And ultimately it means that, yeah, radio is still as poignant and sticky and prominent as it ever can be.

Chris: And people still have a role for it. I mean, like anyone else, I would love to go on a road trip and bring my own playlist, right? Whether I, in the old days, we’d bring a sleeve full of my you know, favourite 10 CDs.

Ryan: And let’s not pretend it was a sleeve. That was a crate that you literally had a milk crate for.

Chris: It was a necklace, or whether you do it on Spotify now, you create your own playlist or you, and you just call up a playlist of your favourite band and they whatever. Love to do that. But also I think, people still like to expose themselves to new content. And so, you know, if you listen to top 40, you’re going to hear the new stuff, right?

I’d love to listen to the artists that I know I like. But after a while, it’s, okay, so I wondered what artists I will also like in the future. And the only way I’m going to do that is to listen to the top 40 and find out what these kids that I listen to discover somebody new. And so, as much as you may replace some of your listenership, and this has got to be true of viewership too, with stuff you know you’re going to like, the comfort food of viewing and listening, you’re also going to have times in your life where you go, let me hear what’s on.

Mick: But there’s also, I think it’s easy to just sort of consider our viewing habits as our preferred viewing habits or listening habits.

And that’s not the only thing we do. We don’t only listen to what we want to listen. I don’t only listen in the car driving to work. I’ll only listen to what I want to do. Sometimes, I’m in the car with my wife, and then I have to listen to her shitty station.

Right? So, And it’s the same thing with TV, right? It’s not only the things I like to watch. Sometimes, you’re in a home with more than one person, and then you have to you’re forced to engage in a viewership habit that’s not to your liking. You still watch the freaking commercials though! And that’s why, you know, there’s so many examples, where people say, well, I don’t listen to the radio, and say, well, I like commercials from these people.

Oh, I hate those commercials. Well, How do you hate when actually hear them for the first time?

Chris: And this is why self-reporting and this is why that focus group of one thing is the whole thing can be completely useless, is that people say, oh I listen to, not listen to the radio. And I’m just like, well do you listen to it when you’re driving into the workplace?

And they’re like, okay, well I listen to that, but I never listen to it on such and such. And Nielsen will tell you where people are actually listening. If you ask people to self-report, they are going to give you the idealized version of themselves, not what they actually do.

Mick: If you talk to somebody, okay, radio. People who say they never listen to the radio.

I’m talking directly to you. I never listen to radio people. Do you hate the cars for kid’s songs?

I win.

Ryan: But it’s sticky.

Mick: Yeah, it’s sticky.

Ryan: You know, and I think, this really kind of is important for us to think about what is the right question to ask? I know that earlier, we talked about you saying, look, this is a moving point that media, the channel that we’re speaking about, it’s really just another way of deciding where are we going to listen to it.

But what we’re really talking about here is that the radio is the channel, right? It’s the delivery vehicle. Right? Right. So, If it’s the delivery vehicle, and you don’t do the delivery vehicle right if you don’t have the right frequency, if you don’t have the right message, that’s why traditional media suffers more often than any other medium.

I think we, know statistically speaking, that we’ve got tons and tons and tons of these people in our audience listening to it. We know that in every single city in North America today, we can reach over 50% of the population on TV and radio.

So, the question isn’t whether or not the channel is dead or works or doesn’t work. The question really has to be —

Chris: Are you going to be the one on that channel that stands out from all the others? Because there’s always, the beauty of advertising is, there’s lots of mediocre advertising out there that just takes up time. Most of it is mediocre, if you’re the one who’s got something interesting and sticky and memorable and compelling and that talks to you as a homeowner, or a guy who’s about to buy a diamond ring for his fiancée or whatever, you are going to stand out in that media.

Let’s stop worrying about the medium and just spend most of your time being the one within that medium who gets remembered.

Ryan: I love what Johnny Molson, one of our partners, says, we’re media agnostic. We do not have a feeling about radio that is different than TV or direct mailers or a plane towing a sign.

What we care about is, what is the strategy. What’s the message that we’re going to use? The job that we need to do? And, do we have the frequency or the saliency, the impact value quotient, that is going to punch hard enough?

‍Mick: We’re paid based on results. We’re not paid by anything else except growing our client’s top-line revenue.

So, if we make a recommendation that you should switch your dollars from dominating this medium to moving it over here, it’s simply because we are self-incentivized to do the thing that will make us a little bit more money. We only make a little bit more money if our client makes a lot more money. So that’s sort of the proof of that.

Chris: One of the reasons that I agree with being media agnostic, the reason with that media agnosticism, there is still a love for television and radio and some of those traditional media is that, what we have also found is that there are certain things you can accomplish with certain media that you can’t accomplish with others.

You can get the name out there in pay-per-click or display advertising or all these other sort of, Google My Business, all that kind of stuff. What you can’t do is build a relationship. You can’t convey the character of the person who runs this company and why that’s the kind of company that I want to work with. Or tell a long-term story where you’re interested in this guy and you’re watching the growth of the campaign and you’re drawing people in and, hey, it’s these guys again, I love their ads. You don’t get that in certain media.

Where you get that is in those broadcast media where you have 60 seconds to do a radio commercial, and 30 seconds to do a TV with images. And those things are not necessarily possible in other media that reach consumers, but they don’t reach consumers in that way, in storytelling content.

Mick: Now having said all that, I think, there is a thing that we do need to acknowledge, because there is one way that has legitimately changed, and we can’t pretend that this part hasn’t happened.

20 years ago, you could build a campaign solely on one of those media. Yeah. You could just do radio, and you’d be fine. Just do TV or print, or you know, whatever. Today, because of the buying habits of the consumer, there is no option to not have a digital presence. Absolutely. You cannot just say, well, I’m going to opt out of pay-per-click. I’m going to opt out of that stuff. You have to opt in.

Now, where you have a choice to make is how much of your media spend are you going to dedicate to that last-minute consumer, who is at the palace of being ready to buy, but does not have the preferred brand. Absolutely. It’s the same arguments, exactly the same argument, 20 years of the Yellow Pages.

Chris: Yeah.

Mick: Now, what I would say is that I said this at the time, the Yellow Pages is the option for someone with no ideas. If you have no marketing plan, you can always get somebody at the last minute with the Yellow Pages. Our goal is to actually win the hearts and minds of the consumers before they’re at the place.

Chris: And I would add on to that because even more insidious about the Yellow Pages back in the day and about Google and other online solutions today, is that our habits are to still go to those things at the last minute. And so, I may have a tow truck company in mind. I’m going to call it, Jerry’s Towing, because I hear their ads all the time. My car just broke down, and I may not remember the phone number from the ads. And so I’m going to go to the Yellow Pages and look up Jerry’s Towing. These days, it’s like, you know what gotta call that Jerry’s Towing guy. What the heck was his number again? Jerry’s Towing put it in Google. And so Google is still necessary.

You better come up, as soon as I’m looking for Jerry’s Towing.

So that presence has to be there, but you are in a much better position if I’m going to Google and in the old days going to Yellow Pages, knowing what I’m looking for. I am not devoid of a preference.

Ryan: So while the delivery vehicles have changed as technology evolves, the brain really still just has those 12 different ways that they can go perceive communication.

We have five senses. We have 12 ways that our brain perceives it. That’s not changing, right? So as long as we’re using these 12 languages as a litmus test, we can fit into any media channel that is necessary, given the strategy that we’re looking for. Is it great to go and solicit for leads on Facebook, where people are looking into Doom Scroll and dopamine inject? Or is it better to go to intent-based marketing? Strategically speaking, is it made more sense to step up to the roulette wheel of casino Google, and put your number chips on a couple of numbers and hope for the best? Or is it better to have them know like, and trust you before they show up?

The fashionable delivery mechanism is going to change, but people aren’t. It’s just going to be paying attention to where we can have the greatest effect for the least amount of money.

Mick: And be aware of the fact that when you’re discussing media, you’re discussing, how am I gonna say it, and how loudly am I gonna say it. Yeah. And that’s important.

It’s not as important as, what the heck am I gonna say? What am I saying should be your first concern. And your second concern should be, how am I going to say that? If you’re thinking of media first, you’ve got it backwards.

Ryan: But it’s because the message is going to inform the media, right? You’re going to say something different on a pay-per-click ad on Google than you would on Facebook, than you would on a radio ad, than you would on TV.

Mick: Absolutely. Because with Google, you’re talking to a different mindset. You’re talking to a person who’s ready to buy. Mindset’s very, very different. When you’re advertising on television or radio, you’re talking to a person who’s not in the buying mindset. You’re trying to put them into the buying mindset.

So what you would say, if you’re Budweiser, what you’re saying to a person watching a football game is something very, very different from somebody who’s Googling beer.

Ryan: But it’s just one of these many questions that entrepreneurs constantly ask. They’re saying, Hey, what media should I use? It’s the same mistake they make with branding. They go, well, I want to rebrand my company, what truck wrap and logo should I get? Right. That’s not bringing your supplier.

Chris: The idea, what’s most important is the strategy and idea.

Ryan: Right. So the strategy dictates the story. The story dictates what the truck wrap will look like because a truck wrap is a channel. It’s not an actual brand. The logo is an iconic piece of the brand, as are the colours fonts and everything else. But way more important is the words we’re going to use to influence people to do the thing, we want them to do because we’re doing something distinct or different. So the fascinating, little world that we’re in is not binary.

Chris: And here’s the other thing that maybe is an interesting closer. And I almost put this in my rant. I sort of thought of it after having written it, because it’s something that’s happened just kind of in the last year or so. So we’ve been talking about how for the last 35 years, people have been saying that’s it, people are turning away from these traditional media. No one’s gonna watch broadcast TV because they’re all going to watch HBO, and you know, that wasn’t the whatever. And it just continued to happen. It’s interesting.

Guess what’s happened in the last year or so? Suddenly, there are 30-second ads on Netflix. There are 30-second ads on Amazon Prime. If I listen to my podcast because no one listens to the radio anymore. What’s in the middle of your podcast, 30-second radio ads, right in the middle of your podcast. So this whole idea that you can’t use these media anymore maybe over-the-air channels, there’s certainly fluidity, there’s certainly evolution, but, interestingly, all of these new media are coming back to the same advertising within them, and that’s weird.

I would be interested to see whether, in fact, the prevalence of TV 30, the prevalence of Radio 60, and those sorts of things, actually start to grow again, because they are now being used in the media, it’s supposedly killed it.

Mick: Turns out people like getting their content for free you always have, probably.

Ryan: Yeah. Mick, you’ve always said that there is no such thing as “new media.” That TV show on Netflix is TV.

Mick: To the consumer, I mean, we, as advertising people know what OTT is. Would consumers recognize that, well, that’s a 30-second ad on a streaming service? Whereas, television is a 30-second ad in the middle of Jeopardy.

Chris: Yeah,

Mick: Would the consumer say? Oh, that’s a very different thing and it’s worth paying… Well, I don’t see it.

It’s a commercial than the thing I’m trying to watch.

Chris: And we’re used to having commercials interrupt the things we’re watching.

Mick: Yeah.

Chris: And sure enough, in when we all switch to new media, somebody says, you know, we could interrupt these things with commercials, and then, the streaming services says, and I can make money.

Sure. I’ll set, I’ll set that up.

Mick: Yeah, and young people who say, You know, I love Netflix. I don’t love paying for stuff. Can I have Netflix and not pay for it? And Netflix is, like, you betcha! And so now,

Chris: You have to get to the thing called a 30-second TV commercial. Okay!

Mick: Wait, is this going to be exciting?

Chris: Good going, Gen Z!

Ryan: And this has been a standard business model for pretty much every SaaS product that we have seen, that is customer forward, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Prime, Disney. All of these guys have been planning this all along. Jeff Bezos had no problem losing money for 20 years to get to this spot. Because now, he’s the second or the first richest person in the world depending on the day. And it’s fascinating that we are very, very willing to do that.

So ultimately, what it comes down to: is traditional media dead?

I would argue that it is definitely not dead, that it is, it’s different, and that we have to pay attention to a multitude of different channels that work in concert with each other. We’re looking at what’s called the cross-cumulative traffic of those channels. So that we are speaking to the people that we want to speak to and influence and persuade at a hundred percent.

The biggest challenge that our clients face when we come into it that we can solve very quickly, comes down to that exact problem of spreading your marketing dollars too thin, and getting it so watered down that they don’t remember it.

It doesn’t get past this electrical memory and into the chemical memory where you can build something up. Now, you pair that in with an impactful message that makes people feel, now we’ve got something that’s pretty darn, really pretty, potent. Digitizing in marketing is, without a doubt, going to be the future.

That’s not even a question. But that doesn’t make digital marketers the authority by any stretch. They’re very often channel salespeople.

Mick: And digital marketing, if you spend enough money, you can get your fair share. It’s very expensive, but you can get it. Our clients are not interested in getting their fair share. They want to get way more.

Ryan: You have to get way more than your fair share if you ever hope to become a household name, not just name recognition or somebody that they pick from a random list, on Google, or wherever. And that means, having this comprehensiveness of both online and offline, marrying together and working together.

There are efficiencies that we’re starting to see on places like social media, where we’re able to push through frequency at a better rate. We’re using different strategies to really lift up and get that same kind of viewership on your ads. And we also have to be conscious of the ads that you’re running.

People have a different temperament when they’re in that area where they want to be entertained and soak in some of that dopamine. We love, by the way, working with digital marketers, particularly those who are talented. It’s a digital presence.

Yeah, the big things we’re interested in working with are those that are morally sound, right? They’re the guys, the girls out there who are doing really, really talented, great work, but they’re also not trying to take advantage of the situation due to the lack of understanding of this dramatic thing. But the other thing that we find morally kind of a bit challenging with a lot of folks is, when they sell a channel, the only solution is the channel.

Every single thing is a nail, but the only thing they have is a hammer, right? Right. Right. We have an entire suite of tools, and we’re looking at, what are all the ways that we can put this together to make the most beautiful company that we’re making. So, it is very fascinating how we actually drive this forward, and it’s so much more complicated.

Be it a startup, straight through to a giant company, a billion dollars, right? They’re all going to have their unique challenges.

Do you know that Apple spent 7% on their marketing budget?

Chris: That’s 7% top line revenue.

Mick: And that’s more than most of mine.

Chris: And that is the company that is the best known already. Right. That clearly has not, we’ll learn about it just by looking at the people around them. Hey, the cool new phone you got there. Tell me about it. And then that person, we’ve got to tell them, they are still advertising.

Ryan: Absolutely. So it’s an indicator of, look, we’re not going to advise our 3 million dollar operators to, you have an omnipresent strategy like Apple. But what we are looking to do is, figure out what best we can punch hard right at the gate out of the start so that they can get the maximum result for the least amount of dollars, based on the ambition of the business owner. Cause that’s a big deal.

If you have the ambition to double your business, versus have the ambition to become a hundred million dollars, we’ll be dominating the market leader. Those are different strategies.

If you’re planning on selling in five years, that’s a different strategy than if you’re planning on passing it down to your kids. All of these things have to be taken into consideration. And we don’t want to give advice in a vacuum. We need to make sure that it’s the right strategy for you. Because the strategy will inform the message. The message will inform the media. The media will be the money that you spend to get the customers to bring your company.

This has been a really interesting conversation for nerds like us. And I’m looking forward to having more of these.

The real question becomes, what the heck are we trying to achieve? And what can we say about, what we can do constantly and better than our competition?

That message will inform the delivery vehicle, not the other way around. With this approach, we get laser-focused on exactly where to spend those marketing dollars. And we don’t have to guess anymore, which part of your marketing isn’t working.

That’s it for this episode of Advertising in America. Thanks for tuning in.

Latest posts by Advertising In America (see all)