Monday’s Musings . . .

February 12, 2018Uncategorizedgmtartaglia@aol.com

TOP DIGITAL TRENDS: AdWeek is out with another one of their semi-regular Top Digital Trends lists in the attached link. It’s sort of a hodge podge of Olympic drones (#1), net neutrality spoofs (#4), bot housecleaning (#5), and post-Super Bowl searches (#7). One item that caught my eye is the growing market for cannabis advertising (#6), and how publishers are handling the new category. Some sites like Twitter are taking marijuana trade group ads, but Facebook and Instagram are not. It’ll be interesting to see if the industry starts to adopt new standards around this as more states go marijuana legal. I guess it’s all green, right? (sorry)

STREAMING vs. RADIO – A GENERATIONAL BATTLE: If you work in the audio space you know streaming has transformed how we listen to music. What used to be a CD purchase became a 99 cent download, which gave way to the streaming subscription. And that’s just on the purchased music side of the house. An equally significant disruption is happening on the free music side with streaming displacing radio. Since addressable (free ad-supported) streaming is about 3x the subscription market you’d think radio’s audience would be in a free fall right now. But it’s not . . . yet. According to this Midia research blog post streaming has almost completely replaced radio for listeners 25 and under, yet radio is staying stubbornly strong with the 25+ crowd. You can really see how age determines the way you listen to music in the graph below. Of course over time the streaming audience will age up enough to relegate radio to retirement homes, but that’ll probably take about 20 years. It’s also worth noting 25+ adults are more likely to listen to free streaming instead of buying a sub, which leaves plenty of runway for addressable streaming to keep growing. (Special thanks for Pandora’s VP of Sales Development Karina Montgomery for digging this one up – great stuff!)

RETHINKING THE AGENCY STRUCTURE: Over the weekend I stumbled across this AdWeek article about the need for agencies to rethink their org structures. It was written by guest author Rei Inamoto, who used to be the Chief Creative Officer at AKQA before opening his own firm. Although it’s written with agencies in mind, some of his lessons could be applied to any client-facing organization. Mr. Inamoto’s main point is that over time agency hierarchies morph into the needs of the employees and not necessarily what’s best to serve their clients. This can create inefficient and overly-expensive bureaucracies. It can result in examples like 19 different job title levels in one agency or 9 VPs coming to the same brand meeting. Put yourself in the client’s shoes for that one– if your agency sends in 9 VPs to the same meeting does that mean A) they don’t have strong enough people to handle more than one job function, and/or B) are they overbilling you for a redundant staff? Either way the optics, and most likely the inefficiencies, aren’t good. More than ever before leaner and meaner is better for any type of sales org. This principle will help dictate what tomorrow’s agencies will look like.

Have a great Monday guys!