New Challenges For Old Media: Radio

Compared to other media, radio isn't generating a lot of buzz, but the signals are strong.

The ways marketers get their messages to consumers – and, increasingly, the ways they try to get those consumers to enter into a dialog with them and with other consumers – are changing at an ever-accelerating pace. In fact change is about the only constant in marketing communications today. Except, of course, for all the stuff that remains resolutely the same. Like radio.

Radio's the same? What about satellite? The new Arbitron ratings? Online radio? MP-3 players? Podcasts? Won't they have a massive effect? Apparently not.

Radio advertising revenues were up 2.8%, from $20.7 billion to $21.3 billion in 2006, according to TNS Media Intelligence. (However they were down 2.1% in the first quarter of 2007, when overall ad spending dropped 0.3%).
Radio's 2006 share of total U.S. advertising spending inched down from 7.4% to 7.3%. (First quarter 2007 dropped a bit more to 6.6%.)
Radio's 2006 weekly reach of total U.S. population 12 and older was flat at 93% in Arbitron's "Radio Today" report.
Total licensed stations have grown from 13,000 in 2001 to 13,793 in 2006 according to the FCC. Compounded, that's just a smidge over 1% a year.

What's earth-shattering about these numbers is that they're not earth-shattering: they're up a little, down a little or unchanged. In an era in which most other old media are experiencing wrenching transformations, radio just keeps on keeping on. Don't they know there's a paradigm shift occurring here?