Shingles and nails are the stock and trade of a roofing company. Or, so I thought till Carl Boyer at Ideal Roofing opened me up to a different way to thinking about 15 years ago. Carl said he was really running a marketing company generating phone inquiries; he sub-contracted the work, had suppliers deliver directly to jobs, and had only to close the agreement and inspect the finished work. He’s a marketer, not a roofer.

Radio is in the portable entertainment business. It shouldn’t be in the broadcasting business anymore because that model is sliding toward obsolescence. You can hear it in every promo directing listeners to a station’s streaming website.

Already Arbitron and Edison Media Research report that while radio
ratings remain flat to down, internet radio listenership has climbed to
29 million a week, up from 20 million three years ago.

Technology is the dam holding back a flood of change. And, the dam is leaking. When the internet is able to deliver radio to cars effectively, broadcasting as we know it will be lost in the flood.

SanDisk’s Sansa Connect picks up Yahoo online stations in wireless areas. Sprint Nextel is working with Pandora Media to bring a personalized music service to its phones; Pandora is developing their own portable player too.

Most promising of all is Dallas-based Slacker, which will have an in-car player in the market by the end of this Summer, according to The Wall Street Journal. (Subscription Required) Even though their player receives via satellite and stores to a hard-drive, the source material comes from the internet.

While Internet radio remains a nascent industry populated by small players and zealots, they’re the same kind of people who pioneered broadcasting. Maybe radio today could learn a lot from a roofer named Carl.

Saturday morning cartoons and sugary cereal are a tradition dating back to the dark ages of our childhood. It is a perfect example of advertiser needs trumping customer concern; they want to sell cereal to your kids without regard to your dietary standards. Till now.

Kellogg’s is now increasing the nutritional value of their kids cereal and snacks–products which represent 27% of Kellogg’s product line. And, if they can’t be fixed, Kellogg’s will stop marketing them. They’re also making immediate changes to online promotion of all products in conjunction with this initiative.

Score another win for the age of alignment. Parents and advocacy groups have argued for years about concern for child obesity. So, why now? David Mackay, Kellogg’s president and CEO, says increasing concerns about marketing to children prompted the action. But, haven’t those protests been going on for years?

A company’s ability to push product is declining as consumer messaging control increases.  Kellogg’s read the corn flakes and realized they had to align with consumer concern or risk losing it all. Getting a durable bond from alignment demands an authentic shift. The authenticity of Kellogg’s alignment will determine its success.

Now, if we could only get the TV people to fall in line with Saturday morning programming with higher nutritional value for young minds.

When the facts are with you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. At the risk of Perry Masonizing, it seems a case of denial is playing out in the legacy media and it’s an open-shut case. The Associated Press reports:

In TV’s worst spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year, statistics show.

Blame technology: DVRs and TiVO mess up ratings
Blame economics: people are working harder, watching less
Blame weather: daylight-savings has people outside later
Blame calendars: end of school… people are crazed.

Blame it all. Blame George Bush–just don’t fix the content.

Sitcoms. Reality TV. Dramas. News-magazines. Contrived content. Phony-baloney doesn’t cut it anymore. We’re living in an age of authenticity. Give viewers something worthy of watching and they will.

I’m not a fan of American Idol, but you can’t argue results. In a special production, American Idol Gives Back,  major stars performed to benefit a charity. It was genuine and authentic and entertaining and it drew an audience almost larger than all four of the other nets COMBINED.

It’s an example of alignment, the beginning stage of attraction marketing. When you become aligned with consumer desire, you create a magnetic draw and pull business to you. Because alignment’s draw is  authentic, this business don’t just buy, they bond.

Bonding is a deeper step of the process we cover soon. Till then, take stock of your messaging and see if there’s enough evidence to convict you of being aligned with your customers.

Every good priest, politician and comedian understand something you should know:  attracting people’s attention means talking to the room. You know this, right? After all, you don’t speak to every customer the same way; each comes to the conversation with a unique angle of approach. Words are important. Effective communication begins when your messaging speaks the consumer’s language. When your branding makes this leap, you’ve gone from advertising to attraction.

Messaging is strongly affected by its venue. Just as you tailor messaging to specific personas, messaging should be relevant to its setting. Writing for print is different than writing for broadcast–and writing for broadcast is wayyyy different than writing for online. Recognize the room you’re in and speak to it.

Want more effective online messaging? Read this.