GUESS WHO RADIO’S TOP ADVERTISER IS?:  Yesterday you may have seen my rant about AM/FM Radio accusing Pandora of increasing its ad load, which is an unbelievable hypocrisy given Radio’s own bloated stop sets.  Then I came across the attached RadioInk article which perfectly summed up my argument and made me feel better.  During the past week iHeart Radio displaced Home Depot as the “top radio advertiser” by running 42,418 house ads in a seven day period.  Think about that for a minute – iHeart exposed it’s listeners to 2,545 hours of unnecessary commercials in one week to promote itself.  I just have two questions on this . . . Why is iHeart’s sales team leaving so much unsold inventory on the table?  And second, if the Radio industry is so concerned about ad clutter why wouldn’t they just stop running house ads and play more music?  I’m guessing iHeart’s audience would rather hear songs instead of ads for their streaming service, music fests, etc., but that’s just my humble opinion.

THE DEATH OF THE FAT FINGER:  Everyone who’s ever seen a digital ad knows the “fat finger” problem – you try to X out of an ad but inadvertently click into the site being advertised, and then have to quickly back track to return to where you wanted to be in the first place.  It’s annoying for users and even worse for brands who end up paying for fat finger clicks.  In an effort to clean up this problem publishers like Facebook are trying to tighten the guidelines on what’s counted as a click.  FB’s solution is to require users to stay on a site for two seconds after the click before it’s registered as valid.  Right now this new standard is only being applied to the Facebook Ad Network (FAN), which is currently home to many click bait ads served by 3^rd party networks.  It’ll be interesting to see if this new standard takes hold, and if other publishers follow FB’s lead.  Anything to reduce or even eliminate fat fingering would be a step in the right direction for all of us.

INTERESTING TECH, BUT CAN THEY PULL IT OFF?:  Here’s sort of a novel idea from NextRadio.  (For a refresher, NextRadio is the Radio industry’s app which aggregates all participating station streams into one platform.  It’s sort of a noble effort spearheaded by Emmis CEO Jeff Smulyan to drag terrestrial radio kicking and screaming into the digital age.)  While NextRadio’s scale isn’t significant yet, they’re working on some connected car tech which is worth being aware of.  According to the attached MediaPost interview article, NextRadio’s engineering team is working on functionality which will allow listeners to press a button on their steering wheels to save an audio ad as they hear it for playback later when they’re not driving.  This could solve the age-old dilemma of Call To Actions (like “call this number” or “click this website”) during an active driving environment.  Realistically speaking, this seems like a very difficult hardware solution to implement.  Can you imagine getting 25ish OEMs to add steering wheel buttons to hundreds of car models any time soon?  But maybe it could be a touchscreen button on a in-dash app instead.  Regardless, it’s an interesting concept to ponder.

Have a great Wednesday guys!