Last week, Apple introduced its latest version of the iPod Nano, a multimedia player that’s smaller than a business card and weighs 1.28 ounces. It’s small enough to slip into some running shorts and skirt pockets.

While the radio is a welcome addition, the new Nano has some other features geared toward the active set. There’s a pedometer and, like previous Nanos, it is also compatible with the Nike Plus system that tracks your distance and other running or walking stats.

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Rival Sirius launched its service in July 2002. Over the next five years, it would have fewer subscribers than XM but would grow nearly as fast. Sirius also took on tremendous amounts of debt to support its operations. As both companies ran low on money, they announced a merger on February 17, 2007. The FCC reviewed the request for thirteen months while the companies were bleeding cash. Subscriber growth had slowed, most likely because of new and more popular consumer electronics devices like the Apple iPod and multimedia cellular handsets. Shares in Sirius, which had traded at $63 in 2000, dropped to $.05 earlier this year. In the first quarter of 2009, the number of subscribers for the combined service declined by 400,000 from the previous quarter to 18.6 million. Neither Sirius nor XM ever made a dime.

Get the complete list of the 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade Here.

Here are some surefire radio advertising strategies that can transform the fate of your business in weeks - not months and leave your competition wondering how you do it.

Define Your Campaign Goals

• Before you start a radio campaign, you need to have simple, straightforward, and measurable goal. It is not enough to say “I want a commercial that will bring in customers.”
• Before you write your commercial, tune in and listen to some other commercials.  Notice how they all ask you to take a specific action?  To have a successful commercial you need to know what SPECIFIC action you want your customer to take.  Do you want a phone call, a visit, a hit on your website - be specific.

Keep your message simple.  You don’t have time to be complicated, cute, or tricky.  Your commercial should:

• Talk about Benefits - not Features
• Show Undeniable Value
• Ask the listener to take an action

If you think you can do more than that and still have a good commercial you are kidding yourself.  These three things are a LOT to get done in :30 seconds.

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Take a listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103582527

While it may be smart business to cut back during tough economic times the first area most companies reduce is their marketing budget in order to save money and try to keep a normal level of profitability.

A common assumption is because money is tight everywhere, customers will be spending less; and therefore, money spent on advertising will be wasted. The fact is families will continue to eat, entertain themselves and buy other goods and services.

History has proven that business success can still be had during a recession, with a sound advertising strategy. Businesses that aggressively increased media advertising expenditures during the last recession (just 25% of all businesses) increased their market share 2 ½ times the average for all businesses in the post recession period (CARR Report, Aug 13 2001). More recently, Hershey’s 2008 fourth quarter profit was up 51% after increasing their ad investments by 23% for fourth quarter and 26% for the year.

But it’s more than simply maintaining or increasing advertising investments, you must have a sound strategy.

Here are a few tips to consider when analyzing your marketing plans for the remainder of 2009.

Read the full article at Radio Business Report

You heard it here first: Radio is the wave of the future.

I’m in the minority on this one. All the buzz in advertising is over Facebook, Twitter and social media. Yet radio technology is burgeoning. The appointment audio of the podcast is catching on, and satellite radio, HD radio and streaming mobile radio are all gaining interest and audience. So, too, is Internet radio: according to research firm American Media Services, 38% of adults surveyed six months ago said they expected to listen to radio on the Internet at some point in the future; more recently, the figure was 48%.

Listening to President Obama’s inauguration speech again on YouTube recently got me thinking about stirring orations. Because I’m a Brit, naturally Winston Churchill’s 1940 “Fight them on the Beaches” speech to the House of Commons came to mind. Even today, when I listen to it via a scratchy YouTube recording, I am struck by radio’s power as a storytelling medium. I can’t help but wonder: In our visual age, have we lost the art of audio communication?

I’ve long been a believer in radio.

After nine years in this business (and 20-odd as an avid radio listener), some of my favorite effective brand communication has come over the airwaves. Sure, they’ve been jewels nestling in the swill of sales announcements for Bob’s Discount Furniture and Joint-ritis, but they stand testament to the fact: It is possible to do really wonderful radio.

Many people tell me that radio is a dying medium. Certainly, it long ago ceded its top-dog status to TV–and just last year, according to Zenith Optimedia, was surpassed for the first time in the U.S. by the Internet in total media spend. Of the seven categories of major media, radio fell down a notch to the fifth-largest.

And it’s not surprising to hear that radio has lost status with Americans in the past five years: A 2007 study by eMarketer revealed that only 17% of those polled call radio their most important medium, down from 26% in 2002. The Net, in contrast, has jumped in popularity as the most important medium, rising from 20% to 33% in the same time period.

True, radio is no match for the infinite utility of the Internet. But radio still has a purpose, and a following. Sixty-four percent of the U.S. population tunes in once a day, and 94% of adults tune in every week. That’s a cumulative audience of 283 million weekly listeners. It may not be seen as essential, but it does seem to entertain a substantial majority of the population.

The good news in these tough economic times is that radio is relatively cheap to create and produce. Moreover, its short and simple production times allow brands to be opportunistic and flexible in their media buys–a noteworthy advantage over the more-than-four week production lead times of out-of-home, magazine and newsprint, and TV’s eight-week minimum.

Most important, however, is that great radio work can have a huge impact. Best-in-class examples: Bud Light’s Real Men of Genius, or CDP’s Hamlet cigars. A 2005 study by research firms Millward Brown and IRI found that radio provided 49% better return-on-investment than TV. In recent years, numerous studies conducted by third parties prove that radio is more personally relevant, more persuasive and just as emotionally engaging as TV. Some particularly thorough researchers have gone so far as to use facial electromyography to track emotional response!

Radio as a medium is tailor-made to the challenges of our multi-tasking, ADD age. Consumers might be working, driving or gaming, but they can still listen. Acceptance of radio ads is higher than that of TV ads: 51% of the listeners queried by American Media Services claim they do not switch radio channels when commercials come on. I recently worked on Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign. In qualitative groups, my colleagues and I were shocked at how many respondents recalled lines from the radio–even more so than the TV.

With so much to offer marketers, where are the new opportunities for brand integration in radio programming? In the 21st century, radio and brands should have a more evolved relationship than “Prairie Home Companion” and Powdermilk Biscuits. Where are the custom sound skins on podcasts rather than the usual sponsorship messages? Why not bring real brand integration into programming content? Or savvy communications planning, where ads complement content?

“RadioLab,” National Public Radio’s show about curiosity, recently aired a segment that dealt with the results of an experiment conducted by Yale psychologists. Participants bumped into a lab assistant carrying books and a cup of coffee–who, when jarred, asked for help with the drink. With one group of participants, the assistant’s coffee was cold. With the other, the coffee was hot. Curiously, those participants who held the cold cup were more likely to rate a hypothetical person they read about as being colder, less social and more selfish than the other group. So why didn’t Nescafe or Starbucks sponsor the show?

There it is: Clinically proven to be entertaining and economical, innovative democratic and about as underleveraged as a medium can be in our frenzied multichannel universe. I may be in the minority on this one, but I do think that in today’s economy, radio affords some of the juiciest creative opportunities, at a bargain price. A radio revival could be just the thing to beat the recession blues.

Comments at MediaDailyNews

The trend lines are encouraging for Radio broadcasters, with 72 percent of respondents saying they listen to Radio at least as frequently as they did five years ago, if not more.

The American Media Services phone survey of 1,017 adults in the first half of September confirmed some conventional wisdom about Radio — but also contained some surprises.

One finding that may strike Radio skeptics as counter intuitive: adults 25-34 actually report listening to Radio more than other adults, with 79 percent saying they listen every day.

The phone survey confirmed Radio’s primacy in the car, with 74 percent of respondents saying they listen there.

- Source: Media Daily News