As I told you, Step Number One, Reestablish the Relationships with your Top Clients, is the most important of the Five Steps I’ll be giving you in this Radio-Info series, “New Tricks from an Old Dog.” However, to be quite honest, this one, Step Number Four: Settling Old Scores, is, for many of us, going to be the most fun! Serious, but fun. Serious fun.

As an industry we’ve taken a real drubbing from many quarters in the last few years. Frankly, quite a bit of the bad ink we’ve gotten has been deserved; we do have to get our house in order. Much of what we have done in the years of consolidation has been wrong-headed. However, virtually no one of consequence is predicting the death of local Radio; we have a strong future if we handle it correctly.

On the other hand, some of our biggest competitors are on their way out, ready to join the junk heap of history, along with buggy whips and biplanes. Let’s help them along, eh?

Newspapers are in a literal death-spiral. Seriously, they are dying and need an entirely new business model to have any chance of recovery. In the past I've been pretty polite when discussing this, usually saying, “Let’s get together in their moment of weakness and, as an industry, hold a pillow down over their face, OK?” Now, I've decided it is way too late in the game for politeness. Instead, I'd like you to follow the dictum of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc that I recently heard quoted by Wisconsin’s Roger Utnehemer:

“When your rivals are drowning, shove a hose down their throats.”

For as long as there has been commercial Radio, our number one local competitor has been newspaper. Oh, I realize that TV has taken quite a chunk out of our hide, but it is the papers who just never went away, always taking WAY more than their unfair share. And here’s how they got that share:

Newspaper’s business model was always based on a simple but powerful formula, one we couldn’t beat: 50% of their revenue came from display (that’s the part we’ve competed with) and 50% came from classifieds. The profits from these papers were huge. But then came trouble, in the form of the Internet. First came Auto-Trader, then eBay and finally, the coup de grace, Craigslist. Today, in some markets revenues in the classifieds are down as much 60-70% from decades past. That’s Seven Zero. Go count the number of individual “used cars for sale” listings in the newspaper and then count those in your local Craigslist. You’ll be stunned at the difference.

Meanwhile, local department stores, long believers in the full-color, big white space, double truck have either gone the way of the dodo or been consolidated away. And newspaper readership below age 35 is almost literally non-existent. Did you know that the much-ballyhooed “Newspapers in Education” program, supposedly meant to teach elementary and middle school students to read, is actually used to prop up both circulation and demographic numbers for the papers? Really!

Right now, this very day, important advertisers in your markets are trying to figure out their advertising strategies. Many of these strategies have always been based on the primacy of newspapers, but no longer. Those budgets are in play, and you need to make a frontal assault on them. Don’t circle around hoping for scraps or even for your FAIR share; instead, go after the whole Magilla. It may be a reduced pile because of business stress, but when we come out the economic doldrums, you want to be the one protecting the cash, not the one in pursuit. Go for the throat; make the kill.

If you think the newspapers have a problem, wait ‘til you think about the Yellow Pages. Between the internet, huge production costs, cell phone only households, totally untracked and unsubstantiated usage and distribution patterns and an image as an environmental and recycling monster, the Yellow Pages would appear to have about ZERO going for them. Except, of course, for a 70% profit margin and automatic annual renewals with automatic rate increases. This is near thievery of titanic proportions. In many markets today, the Yellow Pages, in spite of their bleak future, have become the largest local advertising medium, passing the newspapers!

However, selling against the Yellow Pages is a surgical operation as opposed to the bludgeoning required to go after the newspaper. Contracts renew just once a year and cancellations can only be made during very specific windows and in very specific ways. Do it right, or else that auto renewal and new rate kicks in. Radio can compete with Yellow Pages, but it takes expert assistance. Go get some. Once you get involved, you’ll find that competing with the Yellow Pages makes you one of the good guys in the eyes of your clients. In the more than 40 years since I began selling Radio, I’ve never seen anything like it. You get to be the hero on almost every call.

Newspapers and the Yellow Pages are at the end of their life spans. While they are trying to figure out how to recycle themselves, let’s work, instead, to finally toss them out of our way.

As I said in the title, it is time to “Settle Old Scores.” Sharpen those knives.