Buzz Ride: Earned Media Thoughts Via Apple

09/12/2018
Posted by: Mike O'Malley
Category: advertising, country radio programming, radio programming

There are plenty of ways to measure success. And Apple, by almost every measure is a hugely successful company.

This past August, Apple became the first company ever to have a market cap of over $1 trillion. Investopedia did the math and estimated an investment of less than $1000 in Apple’s 1980 IPO would have generated more than half a million dollars in value – and doesn’t even include dividends.

Today (9/12/18) Apple will hold its annual September “Special Event” where they will again share a preview of their upcoming products and services to both an in-person and streaming audience. These always generate considerable attention and resulting buzz.

In advance of that, the team at Statista took a look at the degree of said buzz new Apple iPhones have generated over the years. And while buzz doesn’t necessarily mean sales will follow, I’ll bet few of us would consider “buzz” valueless.

Two Obvious Chart Takeaways

Two things are apparent: 1) buzz spikes with the appearance of something new or upgraded, and 2) buzz peaks can diminish over time.

Even the best companies can see consumer interest wane. Certainly this is something formats (music and sports especially) go through. Hot artist and music/hot home teams will drive interest and usage up. The opposite is also true.

But hot music/artist booms are often relatively short-lived. For these few years we run on rocket fuel instead of gasoline. We’re grateful when it happens of course, but most of the time we have to create our own alternative sources of “energy” if we’re going to have regular peaks.

And not only do we need to create peaks on a consistent basis, we need to create peaks that are regularly higher than those that came before.

Consider the graph again and how it might look from 2012 to the present with 50% fewer peaks – or perhaps even no peaks. We’d be looking at a trend of zero to negative growth.

No buzz, no excitement, and no opportunity to break away from the pack.

Warm and Buzzy

Buzz – or “earned media” – traces its roots to actions, like for example creating a new product.

Earned media is different than “owned media” which could include how you introduce your new product or upgrade – like Apple’s September Event.

Earned and owned media have received a fair amount of study over the year, including from Nielsen.

In the Nielsen graph below, earned media is the most trusted.

Besides trust, earned media generates high conversions – AdAge says it can be as much as five times higher than paid media. Plus, earned media has staying power.

“While offline word-of -mouth reaches just a handful of people, online word-of -mouth can reach millions — and will continue to live on through searches and indexed content indefinitely, and your highly satisfied customers will continue to create earned media for your brand for years to come.”

John Jantsch of ductapemarketing.com writes,

“You earn market attention when you produce and promote something people want to talk about, but then earned media takes something and creates the kind of momentum that no amount of paid media can.”

He goes on to note the enormity of the pool of potential amplifiers that includes “anyone that retweets, reviews, embeds, shares, comments, likes and curates your paid and owned media elements generates earned media.”

Where Radio Fits In

Radio is no stranger to creating events and generating buzz/earned media. We contest, do charity work, show up at all the big events and, and have personalities that create original content.

As we saw in the Statista chart above, innovation is a significant driver of Apple’s buzz/earned media. However some of these yielded greater results than others.

So here’s a radio challenge: Subject your station’s most the significant moments/innovations over the past year and sketch how they’d look if we graphed their performance similar to the Apple graph above.

The goal is for multiple high peaks, with many significantly higher than the average talk we generate.

Ideally more of our buzz looks like what surrounded the iPhone 5, not the 6s.

If not, it might be time to take a Buzz Ride.