Rocktober

Growing up, we had a Classic Rock station (it wasn't really "classic" yet, but you get the drift) that adored the month of October. They called October "Rocktober". Combine that with "Two for Tuesday" and you really had something ... the dulcet tones of the band Rainbow singing "Stone Cold" and "All Night Long".

I thought about stopping the post right there, but that wouldn't be fair to you, the loyal reader.

Every one of you has a marketing channel that is dying. Sort of like FM Radio is dying. My favorite station in the Pacific Northwest was KRXY ("Roxy") 94.5 from Shelton. You'd hear Rainbow's "Stone Cold" followed by "Cherish" by Madonna followed by "Loser" by Beck and then they'd wrap it up with something from Arianna Grande. Just random Rock/Pop nonsense.

There was nothing like it.

And then?

Spotify playlists.

On June 30, KRXY didn't sell to some soulless entity and become part of the "iHeart Radio Family". They just shut down. Over. Fin. Bankrupt. Their scraps were ultimately acquired by another local station.

Every one of you has a marketing channel that is dying. For some of you, you don't have the metrics to realize that the marketing channel is dying. You keep paying Facebook and they keep sending you customers eight years older than your average customer and you think things are fine. They're not fine. One of the signs of a dying marketing channel is that the customers delivered by the marketing channel are disproportionately older than the age of customers from other marketing channels. Catalogers know this all too well ... they ran their businesses into the ground trusting co-op marketing channels who delivered 74 year old customers instead of the 47 year old customers they needed.

Identify the average age of all customers acquired in the past year by marketing channel. Yeah yeah, I know, marketing attribution double-counting blah blah blah. Do the work anyway. If the nascent new customer from ChatGPT is 33 years old, the Google Search customer is 43 years old, and the paid social customer from Facebook is 58 years old, you have a pretty good idea which marketing channel is going to become KRXY.