Inside Music MediaJerry Del Colliano

Panera the high-flying bread and restaurant chain with 1,800 stores has decided to get rid of all food additives by 2016.

Yes, Panera is the chain that ten years ago decided to serve only chicken that was not fed antibiotics.

The market was speaking and Panera listened.

No wonder the company has been so successful and why it is appealing to the changing youth market before they technically have to.

Consumers wanted it.

Panera cooperated with the inevitable.

A recent USA Today story also pointed out other companies that paid attention to changing consumer wants and needs.

Starbucks and Chipotle acting to get rid of food additives.

McDonalds has done little to deal with a changing consumer market and maybe thinks it doesn’t have to but when consumers speak, it is best to listen and act quickly.

But not radio.

Two eight-minute commercials breaks per hour with more junk and promotions built in are hated by listeners. Radio knows this and ignores it. How stupid is that? Deal with it. They hate it.

These things are black eyes for radio yet owners are content to go down with something their listeners hate.

Listeners love morning personalities.

Owners love to cut them out and save salaries.

Listeners want music discovery but will never find it on a radio because in their infinite wisdom they believe playing the same hits over and over is the only way to win with PPM. It was always that way and always will be – they incorrectly posit.

Younger money demos don’t like hype.

Radio loves to tell their listeners their stations are the best. Why openly irritate the audience you want to attract?

Millennials – 95 million of them with the oldest being over 30 and firmly in the money demo radio needs – crave things that are authentic.

Radio doesn’t care – it is going down being a figment of the 60’s.

Consumers get news from their phones and mobile devices.

Radio – when it does news at all – sounds like the listener doesn’t already know what happened. But now they do. Why not find news that no one else has and report it? When audiences didn’t have cellphones in their hands maybe all-news stations were the first source for a story.

It is inevitable.

Why is everything to do with radio starting at the top of the hour when in the digital age there are no hours?

Listeners love live-read commercials that are authentic and believable.

Radio makes the worst commercials on the face of the earth. I’m sorry for having to say that but radio commercials stink. And they generally don’t work.

What if they didn’t stink and stations cared about their advertiser’s ads working?

See, radio cannot get it into its head to cooperate with the inevitable.

The inevitable is, well – inevitable – certain to happen, unavoidable.

If it’s certain to happen and unavoidable, why is the radio industry refusing to get with it and adapt?

Talk radio has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

Younger audiences don’t care about politics. They don’t want to hear any arguing about Obamacare. They want health insurance and maybe don’t like the version President Obama signed. In the past talk radio would throw that red meat on the fire.

But today, younger audiences care about conciliation and compromise not a battle to the end like baby boomers love.

To keep self-absorbed talkers on the air when there are hundreds of topics that would compel younger listeners to listen to talk radio is a self-inflicted fatal wound.

When I speak at Michael Harrison’s Talkers Conference in New York, Friday, June 20^th I am going to share a list of hot buttons that young listeners really care about.

That’s a start.

This could change what we do and how we talk to a new generation of listeners.

We could respect it.

Use our creativity to deliver it to audiences.

And act positively before it is too late.

Register for the Talkers Conference here.