When You Always Chase the New-New, You May Miss the True Blue
With all the hullabaloo swirling around new media, I’m often taken aback when I read about a legacy medium continuing to perform well. Statista’s data journalist Felix Richter says, “It’s easy to forget how powerful traditional platforms such as radio and television still are.”
Sometimes when you chase the new-new, you forget about the true blue. This is certainly the case with radio.
When you look in terms of pure reach, radio is the overall winner – above smartphone usage and gaming consoles. Reach refers to the total number of different (non-duplicated) people or households exposed to a medium during a given period. Radio wins with a 92% reach, but TV is right behind with 87%, driven by average daily use hovering at more than 4 hours a day. Now look at effective weekly reach for PCs (54%) or tablets (46%).
It’s easy to get caught up with the new-new, yet remember in media planning and buying, you have to go with the data and leave emotion out of the calculation.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle.
After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant.
He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.”
Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.”
One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College.
Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board.
Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.