Business Survival for Media Creators: Emphasize Your Unique Strengths

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Last week, I had the great honor of talking with Mike McVay, a legendary radio consultant. It was the first time we met and our conversation brought back memories of my earliest days in radio.

Though traditional media has been in crisis mode for a long time, we reflected on the current challenges traditional radio faces with the rise of music and spoken word streaming from Apple, Spotify, Amazon and many others. It’s hard, Mike said, to be strategic when you are struggling to meet payroll for the quarter. While there are scattered local station success stories, far too many are caught in this endless loop of short-term scrambles for revenue.

In the past, stations economized by automating, reducing staff, and streaming content from a distribution network. But, as we talked, I realized that all this did was turn each radio station into a smaller version of Spotify. And you’ll never beat Spotify by duplicating what they do – especially when you have a smaller reach and fewer resources.

This is similar to the challenge that many of us as media creators face: How do we succesfully compete? Well, we certainly don’t compete by doing the same thing everyone else is doing.

Yet, the allure of being all things to all people – as traditional radio used to be – is intoxicating. Intoxicating, but not sustainable. There are too many other avenues for entertainment that are far better funded. The key for radio, I realized, is to focus on being local. By definition, no streamer can  serve the needs of a local community. Only a local radio station can do that. This may be why stations that focus on sports, or a large, local ethnic group, or a specific topic do so well. They are serving the needs of a specific, generally local, audience.

So, why this discussion of radio when all of us are focused on video? Because I think there are parallels between radio and what we do as media creators.

The days of being all things to all people are pretty much gone. There is too much competition. Traditional barriers to entry – expensive gear, complex technical procedures, large production budgets, extensive creative and technical training – are rapidly falling by the wayside.

So, what’s left? Just as radio needs to concentrate on its strengths – serving the local market – we need to concentrate on our strengths:

• Our skills at telling stories with pictures
• Our knowledge of the tools for media creation
• Our deep knowledge of the needs of our clients
• Our real-world knowledge of other subjects. For example, someone with a background in biology will do a better job telling science stories than someone who is an accountant.
• Our ability to work as part of a team
• Our inherent creativity

It isn’t our tools. It’s us. Our talent, our creativity, and our unique ability to turn a message into something compelling. The more we focus on what makes us unique, the more success we will have in marketing our skills to clients. We need to focus on why our unique skills are invaluable in telling compelling stories with images.

In short, the only person who can do what you do… is you. So, tell that to the world.