While this global pandemic has caused everyone a lot of heartache, due to missed family events, vacations, employment and educational disruptions, it has also forced us to make some changes we might want to keep when COVID-19 is in the rearview mirror.
Work From Home (WFH)
Working from home, for those whose job permitted it, eliminated daily commutes. Just this one change has meant giving those families more time together, more money to save or spend on other things and more life satisfaction overall. For our environment, the reduction in fuel consumption has been a plus as well.
Home: The Place for Dinner & a Movie
Staying at home has meant that our giant screen TVs have become our movie screens. This hasn’t been lost on film makers, as they are now making movies more readily available to watch at home.
Additionally, retailers and food providers are now competing to deliver their goods to your home as fast as Amazon Prime does.
Road Trip America
Since COVID-19 has seen countries around the world take down their “Welcome Americans” signs, we’re discovering America’s great outdoors. RVs & camper sales are up, and the nation’s parks and campgrounds are full, as we take to the woods where social distancing has always been part of the experience.
Restaurants & Broadband
While dining al fresco is fun and provides social distancing for diners, many cities are closing down their main streets to vehicle traffic in order to make them both pedestrian and dining friendly.
Much like we are using our smartphones to order restaurant take-out, high speed internet service is now essential for work, education and entertainment in our homes.
Small Business Survival
Dion Rabouin, author of Markets, writes that “small businesses are losing confidence in their survival.” We’re six months into this global pandemic and American small business is nowhere near returning to “normal.”
The current unemployment situation reveals that in every state, more people are unemployed than jobs available. That means moving to another state won’t make a difference for an unemployed person because the same problem has hit every single community in the country.
K-Shaped Recovery
Maybe more worrisome is that we are seeing a K-Shaped Recovery, taking place due to COVID-19. Which means a recovery where the rich become richer, the big become bigger, the poor become poorer, and the small become extinct.
We’re seeing this now with Wall Street’s growth, versus Main Street’s demise.
Following the “Great Recession” of 2008, we saw something similar happen as America went through recovery. Though it happened gradually and occurring almost unnoticed by many,
This global pandemic is the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire, it acts like an accelerant. Things that were going to come to pass in time, are now happening at warp speed.
While big box retailers and Wall Street are dancing with delight, mom-and-pop shops and local service establishments are fighting for their very survival.
Local Radio & Newspapers
Having a K-Shaped Recovery means that local media enterprises, that depend on Main Street for their advertising revenue, will suffer the same consequences.
Big media companies having more access to the technology that’s playing a role during COVID-19 will shape the recovery. Big media companies are less dependent on Main Street, as the bulk of their revenues originate on a regional and national level.
The same inequality that has been bifurcating American society since the early 80s and has made achieving revenue goals for local media companies more difficult with each passing year, is reaching a tipping point with COVID-19. The very rapid evolution of society during this global pandemic is exacerbating inequality; of people, businesses, health, education, and opportunities.
Even after we have discovered therapeutics and/or a vaccine to deal with COVID-19, the way the world was pre-COVID won’t be returning.
The answers to the challenges of the future will not be found in the past.
The truth is that we need to continually innovate how we innovate if we expect to ever return to an era of renewed productivity growth.
-Gregg Satell
The first mass-market car radio premiered in June of 1930, but due to a second World War it wouldn’t be until the 1950s that car radios became common.
With the evolution of self-driving cars, you can expect that more and more vehicles will come with video capabilities as well as audio, and also that the competition for who can provide the best in-car entertainment will be fierce and passionate.
If someone had asked you, “Where do you see yourself in 5-years?” I seriously doubt anyone could have imagined they would be smack dab in the middle of a global pandemic. But that’s where we find ourselves at this moment in time.
I recently sat in on the Edison Research webinar about people born between 1996 and 2012, known as GEN-Z.
NuVoodoo does some really wonderful research about radio listening. They particularly focus on reaching people who are most likely to keep a radio listening diary or wear a Nielsen Portable People Meter, aka PPM.
In 1963, Bob Dylan wrote the song “The Times They Are A-Changin” which would become an anthem for frustrated youth who were anti-establishment and wanted change. This marked the beginning of the upswing of a “Me” cycle. 1963 was the rise of the Baby Boomers, a generation that would grow to seventy-four million teenagers at its peak. A generation raised on radio.
South from where I live, is a little community by the name of Bumpass, Virginia. As far as I can tell, the FCC have never licensed a radio station to this little community of 8,792 people.
and perspectives. It also works with some of the country’s largest newspapers, magazines and television networks to broaden its scope of news coverage.
Two such operations that come to mind are: “yourKawarthaOLDIES.com” and “1059WMEX.com” that are filling a gap left by Big Box broadcasters. WMEX-FM 
recently added an LPFM to its operation, this allows locals in Rochester, NH to hear the station easily when in their cars.
Once upon a time, radio was pretty much like the TV show The Voice. We only knew what we heard coming through the speaker on our radio.
BIA Advisory Services conducted a rather insightful webinar at the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic. While every media sector was predicting huge downturns in sales revenues, what struck me most were comments like, ‘but radio sales executives are the most pessimistic,’ or ‘23% of radio sales people don’t feel they
will be employed by the same company in six months.’
Your local radio station, like your hometown newspaper, depends on local businesses and their advertising dollars. Eighty to ninety percent of their ad revenues come from local businesses, those small “mom & pops,” as we like to call them.
day we see another local business decide to close down permanently rather than sink further into debt.
People are adapting to working from home, home schooling their children and doing things like baking, learning to play a musical instrument, streaming their audio, video and print content. Our habits are changing and it’s quite likely they will become permanent.
