Not a radio fair
but still so worth it !
The range of topics goes from futurism and how we will use space-technology to save the world, to down to Earth management tips and tricks, used by Google managers. And really everything in between.
It has nothing to do with radio, and yet, you can get so many things that can be applied right now!
What could be noticed was, that the „future sessions“ – which where planned to take place in the biggest venues – are something most people don’t care about. But those practical sessions, the things I can use right now – those sessions were fully packed. Always.
When the impression of the whole fair and the set-up settles, there are always only a few sessions that really change the way you think. That really inspire you, or give you an idea of how to tweak something in your daily work or even in the strategy.
The Sessions
If you want the check what the conference is all about – this YouTube playlist has most of the talks from this year.
And if you don’t have time to check them all, this is the session that stuck most with me.
In this session, Maykel Loomans, the product designer at Facebook, covers the interplay between vision, research and the metrics – and how to make sure that the numbers you seek to improve are meaningfully aligned with the mission of your team, and the goals of your customers.
And it immediately resonated with this moment in our industry.
We have the vision – the idea of what we want to do, what we want our program to be. These are the opinions of the people who work in the radio business.
We also have research – the insights into what people want – what they want from our program, and how they feel about it.
And as a third part: today, we have lots of potential metrics because we are more and more broadcasting on different digital channels. And people are more and more listening to their smart speakers and mobile phones. Tools like STREAMALYZR come in handy as a great help in understanding „the system.“ With this kind of metrics, we can understand more easily how people are listening. What is their behavior? What can we tweak to make our program better?
And in the end you need all three things. Without opinions and vision, you will always be doing the same thing. Research is all about empathy and understanding the people. Metrics can help us monitor those things that people do, even if they don’t say it. There are so many things we do that we are not aware of.
To sum it up: We should never blindly follow the data. But also, we should never blindly follow the research. And we should never blindly follow our opinions. But if we combine the vision, research and the metrics – we will have a very helpful sanity check.
