I’ll hand it to the HD Digital Radio Alliance. iBiquity CEO Bob “Booble” Stuble, HD Digital Radio Alliance head Peter “Sgt. Bilko” Ferrara, and his sidekick and soon-to- be replacement Lyin’ Diane Warren sure know how to flaunt their fraud with zeal.
They’ve announced their “Holiday ad flight” – 30 second spots pitching why “HD Radio receivers make great gifts.” The selling points include “clear sound” and “no bills to listen to all the new content like that other radio service.”
They’ve announced their “Holiday ad flight” – 30 second spots pitching why “HD Radio receivers make great gifts.” The selling points include “clear sound” and “no bills to listen to all the new content like that other radio service.”
The spots will also encourage listeners to text SANTA or GIFT to 58011 so they can be kept – as the Alliance puts it – “up to date on the latest HD Radio specials and discounts.” Not that anyone’s asking, mind you.
The flight, which participating radio stations have committed to, runs - at no-cost - from November 5 through December 28.
If you want to scrutinize their killer creative (as in their creative would kill if the product wasn’t already dead) – go to the HD Digital Radio Alliance – and type in User: AWESOME; Passcode: awesome. And, no, I didn’t make any of this up.So here we go again. Those selling against radio will use this campaign as a mission to prove that radio can’t sell products – not even its own.
You and I know that it’s not radio that’s ineffective– it’s a dead-on-arrival product that no one wants, needs, or remotely cares about.
Standard & Poor’s is estimating a 2 to 2.5 percent drop in electronics sales this season.However, just yesterday the Clear Channel owned-Inside Radio claimed in a propaganda piece about HD Radio sales that: Electronics are expected to be the bright spot in what retailers forecast will be a difficult holiday season.
Decisions, decisions. Whose forecast are we to trust?
Standard & Poor’s, a company whose business it is to provide financial data and information?
Or Inside Radio, a daily Internet-delivered radio trade owned by a company with an investment in iBiquity, the developer and licenser of HD Radio? Inside Radio also claimed that – here are the exact words – the Alliance hopes to sell its one-millionth HD Radio by the end of the year.
I never said they didn’t have a sense of humor. I will say that they don’t mean to.
How much longer will the industry afford to overlook the chronic misdeeds of iBiquity and the Alliance?
How much longer will the industry afford to overlook the chronic misdeeds of iBiquity and the Alliance?
I’ll bet Boobles has the iBiquity shredders ready to slice and dice documents and a degaussing machine ready for the hard drives before the FBI, DOJ, and FCC traipse through their records. It’ll be interesting to see who got what out of this sour deal?If pay-for-play was the appetizer, HD Radio is the main course.
A few days ago Clear Channel put a press release announcing the long-term contract renewals with its senior programming team.
Among those in renewal mode is Executive VP of Content Development Tom Owens.A totally irrelevant job for a totally irrelevant person.
It mentioned that Owens “supervised the roll-out of (Clear Channel’s) HD Radio programming, including the co-development of the Clear Channel Format Lab, which created more than 75 original formats and supplied programming to more than 300 HD Radio multicast channels…”
Let’s stop right there.
What the release neglected to mention was that of the 300-plus formats, only 46 remain due to “lack of demand,” and just a scant seven custom format channels are being hyped on Clear Channel's I Heart Music web site.
I’d have to believe that Owens had a team of programmers working with him to develop these 300-plus formats. That’s a lot of time and talent – wasted.
As they say in Covington, Ky., he forgot who brung him to the dance or he can talk the talk but can't walk the walk.
I’d have to believe that Owens had a team of programmers working with him to develop these 300-plus formats. That’s a lot of time and talent – wasted.
As they say in Covington, Ky., he forgot who brung him to the dance or he can talk the talk but can't walk the walk.
Just think. Instead of trying to developing new formats – he could’ve had his programmers fine-tune the accessible Clear Channel formats that can be heard on analog terrestrial radio –instead of the ones on HD Radio that can’t. 
But, nooooo! That’s too logical. We already have too many radio stations on terrestrial AM and FM.
Show me the supply and demand of HD Radio. You can’t. But I can show you plenty of examples of artificial demand.
If every man, woman and child in this great country of ours had complete and total access to HD Radio – it would obliterate the radio industry. You’d have listeners spread out on to too many radio stations for any one station to show effective reach and frequency.
Do the math. This blue sky world for HD Radio would put all radio out of business. No one station would have enough listeners to justify advertising.
28 comments:
Times are tough. I don't like the idea of sending people to a service that competes with our own on-air product, as it only reduces our revenue. I'd much rather send people to our online listening location where our own product is so we'll benefit revenue-wirse.
The HD Radio Alliance obviously knows absolutely nothing about how tough it is to be beating the street and trying to sell radio time on full-power FM signals. Our spots are averaging half of what we got for them five years ago and we are bonusing inventory left and right. We don't need more competition.
You radio people really don't get it. I started out in radio sales, moved to television and now involved in new media. You should read the following column by Diane Mermigas.
The radio industry and the National Association of Broadcasters are THAT STUPID to be pushing this HD radio platform at a time when ALL MEDIA is getting killed on the street.
Here is her column ---
Despite the grim warnings, lower earnings and massive layoffs, it appears the worst is yet to come for big, lumbering media companies. It all rides on what we don’t know. We don’t know how deep or how long the advertiser and consumer spending pullback will be. There is no historical precedent, given the powerful unraveling of the global economy.
We don’t know how much revenues and earnings will drop over the next year. Even online advertising growth is dwindling to single digits. We don’t know how much of the P & L gap companies will move to fill by reducing more headcount, closing operations and attempting asset sales. We don’t know how companies will shuffle their financing obligations to remain fluid and solvent.
We don’t know how challenged business models will hold up under economic stress and a digital sea change. Advertisers may be unwilling or unable next spring to support the upfront model responsible for securing $9 billion in prime-time commitments. Local TV station and newspaper owners will not have community-based or election-related ad spending model to rely on in recession-wrought 2009. Newspapers’ classified revenue backbone already has been broken.
What we do know is that the absence of reliable ROI media metrics will contribute to advertisers’ meager spending. Many of the major advertiser categories, such as automotive and financials, have been permanently decimated. When they resume regular ad spending, there will be fewer advertisers spending far lesser amounts. Other categories, like retail, will remain flat for the next 18 months. Many big and small advertising companies will merge or disappear. Traditional ad spending at prior levels is not coming back, although money will continue to shift to new digital platforms.
What we do know is that consumers will continue to become more fragmented in their attention and loyalties. They will take refuge in their social networks, where they can commiserate with friends. Traditional media consumer support (watching scheduled TV, attending movie premieres, buying books in stores) will continue to wane, but their attention and spending in all places digital will prevail.
What we do know is there will be no federally funded bail for media, Internet, entertainment and advertising. Big media by definition is not nimble and innovative enough to simply dump what’s not working, modify what can be saved, and grow what works.
There isn’t much that big media companies can bank on or reliably forecast moving into 2009. They are hamstrung between deteriorating traditional costs and revenues and evolving digital business models that do not offset the losses, generating less than 10% of their overall incomes. Big media isn’t just being ravaged by recession; it is being sacked by a technological transformation of enormous proportions.
You only need to look at General Electric, parent of NBC Universal, to understand how dramatic and unpredictable the changes will be. The stock market’s 300-point reversal to the negative in the last five minutes of trading Wednesday was partly attributed to erroneous reports that GE might face worse than it has forecasted: flat earnings on a 10% to 15% revenue decline in 2009. That level of skittishness has many wondering whether NBCU’s recently announced $500 million in cost cuts are just the beginning.
The vast layoffs occurring across all media sectors are a predictable knee-jerk response to cutting losses. What really is needed is bold restructuring and reinventing, and even elimination of Big Media’s overgrown, inefficient legacy structures, along the lines of what Ann Moore just announced at Time Inc. The publishing company isn’t just cutting 600 employees; it is radically restructuring its resources and workforce across its branded titles. The result has to mean generating more permanent cost savings and increasing what falls to the bottom line. Time Inc. operating income fell 15% to $218 million on a 6% decline in revenues to $1.2 billion in the second quarter.
It’s called blowing up the status quo, and it will have to occur at more media companies. As U.S. consumers and advertisers strengthen their digital adoption spending, many large, old-line media companies (and even some newer players) will have no choice.
What we don’t know is how many more big media companies are considering such radical, but necessary, moves. Fourth-quarter earnings are not expected to be bolstered by anemic holiday season spending; the normally weak first quarter of the new calendar year could be disastrous. More immediate considerations as big-media reports third-quarter earnings:
How can CBS (considered the most at risk with 70% of revenues tied to advertising) avoid structural change in its core television, radio and outdoor businesses? With local television earnings expected to decline 13% in this election year, where will its owned-and-operated outlets run for cover in 2009?
How will Viacom and CBS eventually be impacted by the credit crisis-provoked loan covenant woes of controlling chairman Sumner Redstone and his private holding company, National Amusements? As Pali Capital analyst Richard Greenfield points out, it has yet to publicly detail its debt to leverage and renegotiated financing arrangements.
How can News Corp. avoid the double whammy of steep double-digit declines and high legacy costs from its newspaper and television businesses? With print assets accounting for one-quarter of its earnings, will it respond with some of its classic business model innovation?
How much will Walt Disney Co. be compromised in a difficult economy by declining consumer spending at its theme parks, products and entertainment businesses?
What are the content assets of a streamlined Time Warner really worth when they are revaluated?
With digital revenues comprising less than 10% of companies’ overall revenues and doing little to ameliorate the cannibalization from time-shifting technology like DVDs and pure-play Internet filters like Google and Amazon, how will entertainment conglomerates respond to what Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang calls “an uphill battle?”
I agree with you on the utter stupidity of the radio industry to move forward with their HD radio promotion and marketing for the Christmas season. It is money wasted, it is inventory lost.
You are absolutely right when you say we have too many radio stations as is without adding any more.
With the ad cutbacks and much more to come and the gloomy outlook for 09 the last thing radio should do is increase the number of stations and pitch a new technology to receive them with.
HD radio is not HD TV. There is no improvement. In fact, if anything bad radio sounds worse.
It's nice to see some clear headed thinking without BS when it comes to this DOA junk technology. I heard that Booble Strew-Bull, Bilko and Lyin' Diane were going open a car dealership to sell used Yugos as their next very successful venture after retiring on the millions they made on this one.
I have to agree that HD radio no matter how good it may be is a product that should be either retooled, rethought or at least put back on the shelf until we weather this economic crisis. The attempt to start more radio stations and trying to sell a new receiver to get them on is absolutely foolish.
The radio industry has fallen apart and the lack of leadership it has only makes matters worse for any kind of recovery.
If TV is doing so badly you can only imagine what is about to happen to radio. This is something that was e-mailed to me this morning from a friend who sells time at a TV station.
:
CBS May Have First Answer: How Far Might TV Advertising Fall In 2009?
A media critique by Wayne Friedman , Thursday, October 30, 2008
THE REAL NEWS ABOUT the weakening TV ad market should hit on Thursday, when CBS Corp. -- the most vulnerable media company in terms of percentage of revenue coming from ad dollars -- tells all to industry analysts.
Specifically, questions will be thrown at CBS CEO Les Moonves concerning the current fourth quarter scatter market, and more pressing first quarter options. CBS gets 70% or more of its TV, radio, Internet and outdoor revenues directly from advertisers.
Bits of information are already drifting in. So far, it's not just the prime-time marketplace that has been weak, but fourth quarter 2008 TV sports programs. In particular, the NFL, has seen a 10% drop in scatter market CPM pricing versus a year ago. If the NFL -- the crème de la crème when it comes to TV sports -- is apparently getting hammered, how is the rest of the marketplace performing?
Don't get me wrong. Companies like NBC and Viacom also sell a lot of advertising -- but a lot of their business comes from their cable networks, which typically derive around 50% of revenues from subscriber fees.
As far as the first quarter 2009 is concerned, some advertisers are, initially, only cancelling the typical 3% or 4% of what networks allow them to pull back. Typically, TV national advertisers can cancel up to 25% of their upfront buys during the first quarter.
But the option period might not be over yet. Usually, networks tell advertisers they need to know about cancellation 90 days before the period begin. Better customers get 60 days; some, even 30 days.
Even if Moonves has good news, there are plenty of hurdles to come. A few weeks from now networks will be hoping a first quarter scatter business develops, which could be a tough stretch for TV networks coming right after this questionable holiday period.
What about the Super Bowl, you say? NBC will tell you it is selling plenty of 30-second commercials at a historically high $3 million dollars. Don't read much into this. The Super Bowl can be an anomaly as TV's single biggest rated show of the year -- going against the grain during strong, weak, and mediocre markets.
The killer for CBS is that it has been doing all the right things -- at far as TV is concerned. It had a proper development season -- other networks did not. It gave TV critics pilots for reviews, to spur much-needed PR. As a result, it is having a surprisingly better season than other networks.
Still, all this is relative. CBS is still down, but not as much as the other networks. That's not the message Wall Street wants to hear.
"Inside Radio also claimed that – here are the exact words – the Alliance hopes to sell its one-millionth HD Radio by the end of the year."
"HD Radio spinners claim a breakthrough year: Pulling a fast one"
"According to a press release from the Alliance 330,000 HD receivers were sold last year. This is a 725 per cent increase from the 40,000 sets purchased a year earlier and therefore 2007 was a 'breakthrough year' for the technology. In 2008 they will sell a million of the things."
http://tinyurl.com/4zgkaw
If/when an investigation is launched on HD Radio, the FCC is a huge part of the problem for authorizing this destructive technology. Remember folks, this is a land-grab by the HD Radio Alliance-owned stations, through jamming first-adjacents, and as investors in iNiquity.
Hey Booble, here are some of the visitors to my blog:
Network Location Visits
cbs corporation 15
clear channel communications 9
ford motor company 9
microsoft corp 9
general motors corporation 7
sirius canada inc. 7
texas instruments 6
FCC 5
us dept of justice 5
sirius satellite radio 4
texas state comptrollers 4
CPB 3
intel corporation 3
NAB 3
congressional quarterly 2
general services administration 2
national public radio 2
nxp semiconductors eindhoven 2
sony ericsson 2
visteon corporation 2
usa today 2
voice of america 2
clear channel (1128170) 1
Booble, this is just the tip of the iceburg, plus 70 foreign countries. If you need any more, just let me know.
We have three department stores downtown. One is barely making it, one is struggling and the other looks like it will not make it past the next quarter.
In that case, let us open a new mall downtown filled with specialty stores to compete with them.
That sums up HD radio.
iNiquity wants your opinion - give it to them:
http://www.jacobsmediaonline.com/ibiquity/
How about that? Nice find.
Wonder if the alphabet soup of government bureaus and commissions are investigating Mr. Jacobs, too? How deep is he in it. What is his kick back?
Any other consultants on the iBiquity payroll?
If there is not already an investigation in progress on iBiquity and HD radio and those involved I hope there will be.
The Telecommunications Bill may have made it next to impossible to challenge a station's license but this is a clear case of fraud.
I urge everyone to write their congresspeople and provide them with news and info on HD radio. There are many web sites to reference in addition to Gorman's.
inside radio has been a joke since tom taylor left. it now serves as the house organ for clear channel & ibiquity. taylor was smart to go with radioinfo. inside radio has no credibility anymore.
HD Radio
Supply = Plentiful
Demand = none
Result = Booble eats it.
(if the Feds dont catch him first)
Where do they sell these radios? I have been into a lot of stores and the only displays I ever see for radio are Sirius and XM.
I think HD radio has another problem. No distribution.
Tom Owens? He never had an original idea in his life. I read his interview. That is not how he talks. They had to have done a major rewrite or he had questions submitted. Maybe the Bain-Lee team that rewrote John Hogan's memo also wrote Owens's lines.
Owens always had a bug up his rear about WMMS. I was in the record business at one time and called on him. All he did was bitch about you and WMMS. Then he stole most of your programming and promotion ideas except for the music. WEBN's music sounded no different than WDVE or WLVQ.
Owens, Romano and the rest of those guys are peas in a pod. They have known one another since the Superstar-Lee Abrams-Taft days.
I have been out of the business for a long time and don't really miss it and would not want to be anywhere near it today. I still love music and would like good radio if I could find a station.
"inside radio has been a joke since tom taylor left. it now serves as the house organ for clear channel & ibiquity. taylor was smart to go with radioinfo. inside radio has no credibility anymore."
Same goes for Radio World - huge IBOC-shills. I get their free bi-weekly publication and just throw it in the trash.
They want to sell the millionth HD receiver by year's end? Shouldn't they concentrate on selling the hundredth first?
"Any other consultants on the iBiquity payroll?"
Yup, Paragon Media Strategies.
I love it how you haters equate the Alliance with the entire radio industry, and though one equals the other. Obviously you're all outside the industry, because you have no clue.
The Alliance says what it wants and the radio industry does what it wants. No relationship between the two. Heck, two-thirds of the radio industry isn't even in the Alliance. Wake up. The only people paying attention to the Alliance are you guys.
Not true. The alliance members are running the on air campaign. They are doing what they are told to do.
I believe Jacobs Media is the client of iBiquity not the HD radio alliance. They are members of the latter. Their $$$$ comes from iBiquity.
I believe the same is true for Paragon Media as well.
The HD radio alliance is a shell as in game.
Tom Owens is a weenie wannabee who got lucky that John Hogan fell for his "expertise" just like Randy Michaels did until he wised up.
Owens is a walking xerox machine. No original ideas. He copies whatever he sees and hears without understanding why it may work for him.
He is a hit and miss guy who can be convincing.
BTW, ask someone who was there when he was in Covington what was on his hard drives.
The guy is a weirdo freak. Enuff said.
HI..............
Really nice article about HD Radio's....
The radio industry will pave a own way even all he media downs.........
=======================
lara
sreevyshcorp
Hi John,
I think you're right on the money it's good to see all of the HDA lies and myths compiled in one place, thanks. I think you might want to use a comparison in your google trends link it puts the small peak HDR had Jan.-Mar.'08 into perspective. You can compare website trends by separating them with a comma. (ie: HDradio.com, Sirius.com). As you can see the HDR “huge” spike becomes invisible when it is compared to satellite radio and SatRad is it’s weakest competitor.
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=HDradio.com%2C+Sirius.com&geo=US&date=all&sort=0
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
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