Fred Jacobs, Jacobs Media, and Jack Apps...
Yes, Jake Apps, actually.
No, but you know, everybody mispronounces it.
See, I just mispronounced "mispronounced."
No, everybody mispronounces it which is actually sort of one of these strange little memory
trips things.
Yeah, we originally named it with a Jake... so I don't know, maybe that connection didn't
quite get made but a lot of the apps we make are for radio stations so it worked out pretty
well.
In your years of watching radio transform, what's the most surprising thing that you
can say today in 2014, wow, I did not see this coming.
I think it's the connected car.
I mean, we saw the internet coming, we saw smartphones coming, we saw social media coming,
I mean maybe not from the beginning but it was pretty clear that this was going to grow
to become something bigger than what it started out to be.
But the car is really an anomaly because we've taken that for granted, right?
We've always had ubiquity in the car, it's always been simple, two knobs, twelve presets,
just us, with maybe the exception of an occasional intruder like an HRAC player or cassette...
right, right.
All of a sudden, almost like a tsunami, the car is changing so rapidly and all the car
companies are just killing themselves.
They are spending so much money to develop new technology for the center stack and what
that really means to radio is is that the party's over.
You just don't compete against the station on the dial, you compete against absolutely
everybody.
So I think that's one of the things that really has snuck up on the business.
Every time I do a straw poll at these conferences as I just did here at CMW and, show of hands,
how many of you own a connected car and have drive one?
And it's no more than 5- or 10% of the room.
So yeah, it's like an epidemic.
It's a real concern that radio gets up to speed on this connected car topic.
Would you say there are any other issues or challenges that affect radio that are even
close to the connected car crisis slash opportunity?
Well, I don't think there's anything close, but I think another challenge slash opportunity
is social media.
So if you think about it, the ways that you would interface with a radio station, what,
a decade ago, were pretty much you would call the request line of the studio, right, or
the station would be at an event and you would see a DJ.
And not everybody did those things, but that was really the connection.
Well now, people have all these different ways of interfacing with the station and in
fact, a lot of them want to do that.
They want to have input, they want to be heard, they want a feedback, they want to do all
these things and radio has never really been accustomed to that.
It's always on our terms.
We broadcast, you listen.
We do it when we want to do it.
When we want to put it out there, we will, maybe we will return your phone calls and
your letters, maybe we won't, we'll see, and now all of a sudden we're living in a time
when people expect to be heard.
They expect to be listened to, and yet even from a social media standpoint, and this is
something that Laurie Lewis is going to be talking about at this conference, the importance
of acknowledging and taking the time to like what somebody has said or respond to a comment
personally or retweet it and one thing that we learned from our new tech survey is that
there is a percentage of the audience that absolutely says if you acknowledge me, I will
listen to you more.
If you had to direct some new people who wanted to start a business that was going to compete
in the world of media engagement, like a radio company, who would you say you should emulate
what these guys are doing?
Well, there are a handful of radio brands that I think are doing an amazing job.
Without naming names, there are some brands that are just hitting it out of the park.
It is the live piece, it is the local piece, it is personality based.
I don't think there's any question that moving forward just being a jukebox in this environment
is obviously not going to cut it.
So they are really re-imagining their brands as multimedia players but still based around
a local experience and personalities so I think that's important.
I'll tell you who I look at a lot these days.
I think what's happening near television is really fascinating right now.
There is actually more risk taking happening in television than there is in the motion
picture industry.
Absolutely.
And when you look at these long form series, so maybe it started with the sopranos, I don't
know, but when you look at these series and the way that they have sucked people in and
the ability to be able to... so I didn't watch Homeland for the first two years but via Netflix
or OnDemand I can go back and do that.
I think that's fascinating and the way they integrated social media into the experience
is brilliant because people are interfacing within these shows on a very, very emotional
level.
So I think that's another piece.
The third example I would give you is in television, but it is all the TV networks and even local
stations that are essentially doing their equivalent of morning radio and quietly stealing
listeners away from us, whether it's Good morning Mrs. Agua, or I don't know if that's
real, but it may as well be, or even like Morning Joe on MSNBC I mean when you actually
look at television in the morning, it looks like radio shows -
So TV's learning from radio, or radio's learning from TV?
Isn't it interesting?
Yeah.
Because it's all one content pile now.
Absolutely.