When recovering from an illness that caused me to not use my jaw (bad for someone who always uses his mouth in sales or on air), I had time to reflect on the changes within the industry coming fast and furious these days. As a non-traditional broadcaster, I was looking at different ways of staying LIVE on the air rather then the typical canned rotation and the new revenue opportunities this would create for my sales team as well as possibly saving cost to my station for on air talent.
I was wondering if any of you are currently using syndicated programming and if this is opening up any revenue streams for your sales teams.
While syndicated programming will cut expenses, I firmly beleive you will make less profit. Syndicated programming eats up a lot of commercial inventory. Syndicated programming's goal is to increase their network of stations. I'll bet that's not your goal. Syndicated programs will also heavily push traffic to their own website, cutting the number of visits to your own website, and decreasing your revenue there.
One of our stations is a newstalker and we do have some syndicated programs there. We have some advertisers that refuse to advertise on this station because they fear what a national host may say and we have even more who will advertise on the local shows only.
I have heard of some software that automatically cut to local commercials or newscasts at scheduled times so they are only dealing with the live feed content not the advertising. However you are correct and I have not found a suitable solution for driving some traffic to their own show pages or FB pages while trying to keep an interactive communication going. That will be a work in progress.
