What If Radio Tried Something Right Out Of Left Field?

Photo: Quaker via Marketing Week

Over the past decade or two, broadcast radio has struggled getting its message through to both advertisers and the audience at large.

You often hear radio leadership lament the fact that while radio has many wonderful qualities, it has failed in telling its stories to the constituencies that matter.

Maybe part of the problem is that no one seems to agree on what the main message about broadcast radio should be.

Is radio the local medium?

Is it the live medium?

Is it both of the above?

Is it the medium to turn to in emergencies?

Is it about radio’s ubiquity?

Is it that radio is free, sans subscription fees.

Or is radio something else entirely?

As we know from our very first Marketing 101 class, not being able to agree on a message is a fatal flaw for any brand. Clearly, broadcasters need to get on the same page—or at least read the same book.

Then there’s the matter of attitude and vibe. And in that context, radio broadcasters have struggled, too.

Many went with the bombastic approach, pounding the chest and using Mr. Big Voice to proclaim the medium’s 93% (or so) reach dominance.

The other approach has been a combination of logic and data. Using research like Nielsen ratings and the Infinite Dial, the strategy is to make a case that the broadcast radio medium is an essential part of most marketing campaigns.

Both are well and good, except for one thing: the audience and advertisers don’t seem to believe it.

Regarding listeners, we confirmed this back in Techsurvey 2020 and again last year when we learned that even core fans believe AM/FM radio (far right below) reaches a much smaller percentage of adult Americans than it actually does:

Comparing 2020 perceptions to 2024 opinions about radio’s reach shows the medium actually lost ground in this four-year span. Meantime, SiriusXM, Spotify, and podcast reach perceptions are all more positive than their respective “reach realities.”

This indicates people aren’t buying radio’s story. So maybe it needs to be told in a different way.

And that sometimes means looking at yourself in the mirror and leaning into what people really see when they look at a bowl of Quaker Oats.

It’s ugly. But good for you.

That was the approach taken by Quaker Oats in the UK for a magazine ad designed to both capture attention and bring home the main message that while this food isn’t pretty, it is delicious and wholesome.

According to Marketing Week, the ad included the photo you see at the top of today’s post, accompanied by this message:

EASY TO MAKE.

IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE BEAUTIFUL.

QUAKER

DELICIOUSLY UGLY

In a world of products competing against each other to prove their youth, their beauty, and their hipness, Quaker Oats went the other way—a self-deprecating ad that admits the stark reality that oatmeal is ugly, but it has other values: history, authenticity, and it’s real.

Quaker tested the ad by measuring how 750 consumers weighed in on the ad in a study called Kantar’s “The Works.” It not only measured their perceptions but also tracked “facial expressions and eye movements.” The result is the heat map below:

Ad/”heat map” courtesy of Kantar

Marketing Week reports this ad—oozing out self-deprecation, finishes in the top 1% of ads measured in the UK for “credibility, relevance, predisposition” and also demonstrating difference between it and other marketing efforts.

This last point is so spot-on for broadcast radio where being different from all the shiny, flashy, and impersonal digital media is precisely what the medium needs in 2025.

In the Quaker research, respondents recalled the line “deliciously ugly” as it provides a feeling of attachment for a brand that comes across as both “meaningful and irresistible.”

The broadcast radio industry could use an injection of both of those attributes.

I don’t know what the positioning line might be but I’ve been playing with a few: