Drive Time for Radio

If you're in the radio industry, you should read yesterday's piece in MediaPost entitled Possible Automotive Media ReThink.

The article summarizes an analysis conducted by BIGResearch that measures the gaps that exist between how ad dollars are spent versus what consumers say works best when it comes to buying a car.

The big loser is TV, where automotive manufacturers spend at a rate that is roughly 2.5X greater than what is necessary based on consumer inputs.

The big winners are radio and outdoor. The spending model would have radio getting 21.5% of media dollars when it now gets less than 3%. Outdoor's under-allocation is even more pronounced with about 1% of current spending versus an ideal level of 14.6%.

It is important to note that these spending figures cover dollars spent by the Big Three manufacturers. Nonetheless, I think it has tremendous relevance for local dealership spending because it clearly supports the fact that radio is important when consumers are shopping for a car.

Perhaps the best way to get around TV's default as a visual medium, is for the radio and outdoor industry's to band togetehr to create compelling cross-platform programs that go head-on against local TV.

So, get out there and sell some radio time so that I don't have to keep seeing those awful Tom Gill TV spots during every freaking commercial break!