It’s all over the radio trades in the USA this month. AdsWizz has released a research study that tries to measure what they call Cost Per Action, or CPA. That means, how much it costs to get an action from a listener. The action is either a click on a website link or make a purchase made. Bottom line figure: If the product is Food or Groceries, it costs an audio advertiser $5.54 to get a listener’s action. It costs $18.20 to get a Facebook action. It the product is Clothing, it takes $15.71 to get an action with an audio ad and $19.29 to do it with a Facebook display.
Now, this study does not include broadcast-only advertising. It would be relatively easy to gather on-line listening/action data because the subjects were connected. 1) The computer knows the IP is receiving the stream. 2) The computer registers the user clicking on the advertiser’s link; an Action. It is way, way harder to measure the same thing with broadcast radio ads. Here’s how much the same thing has been measured in the past. 1) The advertiser spends $10,000 on a radio campaign and measures his sales. 2) The advertiser then spends $10,000 on a newspaper (or magazine, or direct mail, or TV, or billboard) campaign and measures his sales at the end. I recall seeing the results of similar studies over the decades and radio ALWAYS came out as the most effective, most cost-efficient advertising medium of them all.
The problem we’ve always had is “air” is such a hard thing to sell. Air, as in audio only. The advertiser can’t see it. He can see his Store Name in the newspaper ad. He can see his picture on TV. Not so, radio. It’s gone in sixty seconds or less. Yeah, so is the TV ad but on the tube the guy gets to see his product, his picture or both and that gives the TV ad seller the biggest advantage over his radio counterpart. The advertiser will almost always pay more if his pictures and pricing are going to be on view, wherever it may be.
Radio is never going to overcome the ego gratification the advertiser gets from seeing his self or his logo. There was an old Radio Advertising Bureau campaign entitled: Radio Gets Results that was preaching the facts. That’s what we gotta do, as always. Sell Results.
