BRX Pro Tip: Unintended Consequences of Cosmetrics
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. You know, Lee, just because you can count something doesn’t mean that it counts. Let’s chat a little bit about the unintended consequences of prioritizing, what you and I call, cosmetics.
Lee Kantor: Yeah. These kind of vanity metrics that a lot of companies, especially traditional media companies, promote or kind of exaggerate really has created something really bad, not only just for media in general, but I think it contributes heavily to the distrust that people are having with media. When they prioritize some of those cosmetrics, like listener’s downloads and clicks, what happened was that a bunch of technologies were able to figure out how to game that system. And then, they were able to create bots and a lot of inauthentic ways to inflate those numbers.
Lee Kantor: And the media companies didn’t care because that’s how they were getting paid. So, by showing inflated vanity metrics, even though their clients weren’t getting any more business, was good for the media company’s business. So, they weren’t in a hurry to really disassociate themselves from these inflated numbers.
Lee Kantor: And this is one of the frustrations we have at Business RadioX because we’re not really in the vanity metric business. We’re in the real ROI for our client business. So, our clients, the promise they get from us is that we help them with ROI, not kind of inflate some metric that can be gamed. And if the clients kind of demand that the media companies focus on real green dollar ROI metrics rather than phony cost metrics, maybe the traditional media industry wouldn’t be as kind of less relevant as they are today.
Lee Kantor: But at Business RadioX, we only focus on green dollar ROI. We never sell ads or talk about cost per thousand. We put our clients in real relationships with people who matter most to them, not nonsensical, anonymous top of the funnel clicks or downloads that other media platforms really brag about and promote. We are about helping our clients build and nurture real relationships with real human beings in a way that’s going to move the needle in their business.
