A few days ago ABC announced that they would begin live streaming content in two major markets with more to follow on a new app called WatchABC.

NPR reports:

ABC and other networks have long allowed you to watch their prime-time shows online after they air on TV, but ABC is the first broadcast over-the-air network to let you watch their live feed — including local news, daytime talk shows and prime-time dramas.

Over the next few months, it will expand to cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Eventually, ABC expects most of its affiliates will be onboard.

Is it the exact same experience as what you can watch with everyone else in your market on TV? Well, not quite.

If you’re in New York or Philadelphia, you’ll be able to pull up this app on your smartphone or your tablet and you can hit the “Live” button and see more or less what you see on your TV from your local ABC affiliate. The biggest difference will be the ads — ABC says it has built in the ability to serve targeted ads. So they know who you are, they know what you like and, at least theoretically, you could get different ads than your friends eventually.

So TV is drifting towards live streaming with one key distinction: the ads will eventually be tailored to the target. The ads will be customized. The ads will not necessarily be the same as what you can see on the same program on TV where every viewer sees the same thing.

Radio is, of course, well ahead of TV in this regard. The ability to customize ads on streams is not new. What’s remarkable is that there is still any debate among commercial broadcasters about the wisdom of simulcasting spots vs. targeting them to relevant audiences within the stream.

Guys, this is not your decision to make. Your audiences and your competitors are making it for you. Time and technology and competing alternatives are quickly making the debate moot.

When your TV competitors can target messages in the platforms consumers prefer and you choose not to, how exactly will you compete then?

It’s time for broadcasters to get on the right side of history.

It is almost impossible to count the ways in which playing to Arbitron’s PPM measurement methodology may provide short term gains for radio ratings, but very much at the expense of the health of radio brands long-term.

And here’s yet another one.

It is accepted wisdom that, since PPM supposedly measures behaviors rather than recall of behaviors, then so-called top-of-mind recall is irrelevant.

After all, why remind folks that you’re there when they no longer need to remember what they listened to?

Here’s one reason why.

Because top-of-mind leads directly to word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions, according to the terrific new Jonah Berger book Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

Berger outlines several principles of contagiousness based on extensive research. And one of those principles is called Triggers: How do we remind people to talk about our products and ideas?

People often talk about whatever comes to mind, so the more often people think about a product or idea, the more it will be talked about. We need to design products and ideas that are frequently triggered by the environment and create new triggers by linking our products and ideas to prevalent cues in that environment. Top of mind leads to tip of tongue.

This is related to a second principle: Public: Can people see when others are using our product or engaging in our desired behavior?

Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular. We need to design products and initiatives that advertise themselves and create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people have bought the product or espoused the idea.

Skewed PPM thinking and the convenient need to shred expense like every investment is a hunk of parmesan cheese has led to a situation where reminding consumers about our brands and making them more public is, more than ever, viewed as a Gift from the Marketing Gods rather than a means of connecting brands with the folks who might desire them on an ongoing basis.

As ever, ironic for a business in the business of marketing.

So PPM-inspired thinking leads us to diminish the importance of top-of-mind and any strategies and tactics designed to encourage it. Meanwhile, by its nature, radio must work extra-hard to be public.

I recall vividly my first visits to San Diego in the 80′s and early 90′s when virtually every car was plastered with bumper stickers for the town’s hottest stations. Fans did this to brand themselves in the images of their favorite stations and to publicly display that branding to the world. They weren’t advertising those stations, they were advertising themselves.

Today, good luck finding cars with radio bumper stickers in San Diego.

I recall vividly some of the early efforts of stations like 91X to activate the marketplace in attention-getting promotions like “Show us your X.” These and many other audience-engaging promotions served to make radio brands public and promote top-of-mind and the tip-of-the-tongue it leads to.

I’m not being wistfully nostalgic here. I’m making a point about strategy and intention:

Unless your brand specifically seeks out top-of-mind opportunities, unless you specifically design ways to make an invisible experience into a public one (as Apple did with those white earbuds), then you may win the PPM battle, but you’ll lose the consumer attention war.

And that will be the only war that matters.

This is Part 2 of my special conversation with branding guru and author Tom Asacker. If you missed Part 1 go here.

Tom and I talk about his new book, The Business of Belief: How the World’s Best Marketers, Designers, Salespeople, Coaches, Fundraisers, Educators, Entrepreneurs and Other Leaders Get Us to Believe.

Watch the complete Q&A here, or skip to Part 2 of the abbreviated transcript below.

If consumer desire precedes interest, how does the marketer effectively tap in to those desires?

Well you can only move people slowly. You start with what peoples’ beliefs and desires are today. You viscerally understand what those are, then you move them slowly along a path to a destination that maybe they don’t even fully understand or are aware of.

Steve Jobs didn’t say “let me go out and ask people if they want a phone without a keypad,” but he was so deeply involved in that industry and the technology, he knew how to bring people along.

Now you notice it was still a phone, something you hold in your hand. It wasn’t something you just stick in your ear because that might have been moving people too quickly. You have to start with what people believe and desire right now as your basis for where you move them.

That was the big mistake that JC Penney made. They tried to move people too quickly from what they desired and believed right now and immediately take them to the end destination. There was no path to belief, and that’s why they failed.

The first question to ask is “Are these the customers we want to serve, and can we be profitable serving them?”

So if the organization can be happy and profitable servicing the customer and that’s what the customer wants, then why was JC Penney trying to move them to a different path?

It would be like all of a sudden tomorrow Macy’s saying no more coupons, no more circulars. Why would they do that?

Consumers are not stupid. Consumers say “Okay, I feel good. I got a coupon. I just saved some money. That makes me feel good.” So why take that feeling away if you can be profitable at it?

How does the brand, the marketer, design belief?

First you have to discover it. Insights are what drive all businesses forward.

Now you may say, look, my customers are loyal to me and they’re not jumping away. But consumers are on autopilot most of the time. The only reason people are not drawn away from you is because they haven’t been enticed by something more desirable. As soon as they are, they will jump.

Look at the industries that are being destroyed in the business world. Why? Because once consumers saw this thing that was much more desirable and some competitor brought that to life, they said, “Okay I’m going that direction now. That is what I want.”

To imagine that consumers will not move away to this new desire, that’s just very shortsighted. You’re putting your head in a hole because you don’t want to see what’s happening right in front of your eyes.

Again, you don’t want to believe because you don’t desire to believe. You don’t want to see the future because you don’t desire the change that may be occurring.

Where does passion come into this mix; passion on the part of the person who creates the new product, not just the person who’s intending to consume it?

Passion is one of the greatest persuaders in existence.

To move people to believe you’ve got to exude passion in everything you do. Consumers can sense whether you’re excited about what you’re offering – and not just through your words, but through your design, through your offers, through your advertising.

They can sense passion, and that moves them because they’re evaluating what you do against a broad range of choices today. If you’re competing against competitive options, then you’ve got to bring what you’re making to life, and passion is how you do it.

When I say passion, I’m not talking charisma. I’m not talking being boisterous and loud. I’m talking about doing things that say, “I believe in this that much.”

What’s interesting to me is that most people today are talking and writing about what’s changing, but success in the marketplace is not about what’s changing. It’s about what doesn’t change: That’s how people think and make decisions, how they behave, how they choose.

Mark, how many business people do you know, smart business people who don’t know what the Internet is, what social media is, what mobile technology is? They all know what it is, they’re aware of it and they understand it. So why don’t more of them believe in moving forward with what’s changing?

If we want people to change their behavior, we need to understand why they don’t desire, why they don’t believe. Because they sure as heck are aware of and understand everything that’s changing in the marketplace.

Missed Part 1 of my conversation with Tom? Find it here.

Tom Asacker is an advisor to major brands like Procter & Gamble, UPS, and G.E. and the author of many thoughtful and incisive books on branding and marketing. He is one of the brightest minds in any business, and his latest book is his best yet: The Business of Belief: How the World’s Best Marketers, Designers, Salespeople, Coaches, Fundraisers, Educators, Entrepreneurs and Other Leaders Get Us to Believe.

Watch the complete Q&A or skip to Part 1 of the abbreviated transcript below. Part 2 will post tomorrow.

Prefer audio?  Try this:

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Let’s start with the obvious question: Why belief?

Mark, I make it my business to know why people do the things they do, and I try to help organizations and people improve their impact in the marketplace through those insights. I have noticed over the last two to five years that people aren’t making decisions in the marketplace the way they used to.

Go back 100 years to what I would call “the age of awareness.” At that point we had nothing. So all you had to do was make someone aware of a washing machine, a car, an air conditioner, a telephone – all these modern conveniences, all these things we never had before. Just make us aware of it, and we gobbled it up.

Then came the 1940’s, 1950’s, 1960’s where competition starts heating up and people start differentiating their products based on the features and quality of those products. Actual differentiation. That’s what took Toyota from nothing to being one of the leading car brands, because they actually had a car that didn’t break down. They weren’t driven by style. They were driven by an actual functional difference, and that’s what drove a lot of products back then: Differentiation in functional performance. I call that “the age of understanding.” If you made people aware and made them understand the difference they bought it.

Guess what? Eight or nine years ago JD Powers said there are no bad cars any longer. So making consumers aware and making them understand does nothing to drive their decision-making, because they expect quality in the marketplace. They expect timely delivery. The expectations “bar” has been raised so high that now I believe we’re in a new age: “The age of belief.”

Awareness is not enough. Understanding is not enough. You have to understand how people create beliefs, personally relevant belief in something. That’s how consumers make their decisions today.

So what is “belief”?

Belief is a strange mixture, a personal mental construct of our perceptions of something and our desire for that thing. Once we develop a perception and a desire, then we look for information to validate that perception and desire. That’s how we form our beliefs.

You write in the book that we don’t necessarily believe what is real; we make what we believe real.

Look at all the great debates we have today – from global warming and over-population to political debates – people believe in their point of view, but there’s someone else on the other side of the argument who believes just as strongly – and these are smart people. So we believe what we desire to believe based on our awareness and our perceptions and our understanding of the world and our place in the world, our personal narrative.

Businesses, entrepreneurs, marketers are all looking for “action” from consumers, and the path you outline in this book is: “Desire leads to a belief leads to action.” Can you walk through those steps?

Make no mistake; action – behavior – is the Holy Grail today. Not awareness, not understanding.

Before he passed away my dad smoked for years. I made him very aware of the fact that this habit was going to kill him, and I gave him a lot of information to help him understand that, but he did not change his actions or his behavior because he didn’t desire to. So desire is what drives not only our search for information but also our eventual decisions.

You’re saying the framework begins with what I, the consumer, desire. That leads to me having certain beliefs about the world around me as well as the marketplace, and action – consumption – follows from that desire and those beliefs, right?

Motivation comes from desire. If there’s no desire, there’s no reason to act. So desire is, in fact, the reason to believe in something. Some marketers think the reason people make decisions are the facts that marketers give them, the list of ingredients and all that. That’s not the reason why people make the decisions that they make.

Why would someone run her first 5k race? If you ask her “What’s the reason to believe in running that race?” she’ll be confused. “What do you mean the reason to believe?” she’ll say. “I want to run it.” The desire is the reason to believe. She’ll figure out how to rationalize that desire after the motivation kicks in. And she may use your “facts” for that rationalization.

In marketing, when we have a new thing we want to sell, we ask ourselves what are the “reasons to believe” our item is worth consuming, and these are usually functional, feature-based reasons. But those aren’t the real “reasons to believe.”

Those functional differentiators are permission to believe, not reasons to believe. I have my reason to believe, that’s my desire. Then you give me all that backup information that gives me permission to move forward with my desire, whatever it is. We do look for that before we take a step. So that is the permission. It is not the reason. The reason is your desire.

Given that desire is at the root of all this, why is the book called The Business of Belief rather than The Business of Desire?

Well here’s why. Because I’ve heard people say that they can get people to desire things through advertising, through marketing, through selling, and that’s absolutely false.

You can discover wants and desires and you can bring what you do to life in a way that feeds those hungers, but you cannot create a desire in someone who doesn’t have the desire. It just doesn’t work that way.

After Gandhi liberated India from British rule, somebody from the press asked him: “Now that you have all this influence with the people why don’t you get them to stop smoking?” He said “I can’t do that. They want to smoke.” That’s brilliant!

You can only move people where they want to go, not where you think they should go.

The frustration we’re seeing in the marketplace with entrepreneurs, with organizations, is because marketers think that somehow consumers need more things, more stuff, more apps. We don’t need anything anymore in this modern marketplace. But we do hunger for some things. We have some frustrations. We have desires. And the businesses that best feed those are the ones that are going to get our business, our attention, our interest.

Desire precedes interest. The old marketing construct – attention, interest, desire, action (the AIDA construct) – that’s obsolete. We have everything today! Now you have to get my attention, then comes desire. Once I desire something I dig in to see if it interests me. Desire precedes interest.

Look for Part 2 of my conversation with Tom Asacker tomorrow.

Relevance is a funny thing.

Many of radio’s leaders will argue radio’s relevance is proved by its widespread consumer usage.

Hogwash.

Usage is a temporal thing. It is a byproduct of relevance but it is not relevance. Relevance is relevance.

And long-lived goods and services which are not as relevant to me and my life as newer goods and services will be disrupted and displaced by those newer goods and services over time.

So never take refuge in being popular. Just ask MySpace.

Likewise, relevance is not simply being present in every place and on every device. This is another popular fiction that some broadcast leaders propagate.

The notion that relevance necessarily follows if FM were to magically appear on a widespread selection of mobile devices is false. Showing up is not relevance, relevance is relevance.

And the fretting over the auto dashboard is also misplaced. The dashboard is getting more crowded no matter what broadcasters do, after all.

In general, broadcasters worry too much about the march of technology and not enough about their own march – their value proposition in the menu of options before consumers every day, day in and day out.

If radio becomes irrelevant, it will not be because of technology, it will be because of radio itself. It will be our own fault.

Relevance is not about technology, it’s about what you do.

I can’t imagine a more elegant illustration of this point than the fictional one from an early episode of Mad Men, “The Carousel.” How can you possibly make something exciting that’s “not exciting technology, even though it was the original [technology].”

[click the video to watch, and yes you really should]

Relevance requires using the tools available to us, even the new tools, to make meaning, to satisfy the needs of the consumer, to deepen the experience that radio can be rightly famous for, to be personal even if it doesn’t mean being personalized.

If you’re a News/Talk station, for example, witness the way this feature in the New York Times tells a story using technology. Technology is not a “place to be” here, it’s a means of deepening the richness of the story. Kinda makes your debate about what podcasts to list in your bottomless archive feel a bit thin, huh?

Radio is obsessed with monetizing what it has and being where it isn’t. This is sensible only if you can’t see past the closest financial horizon.

The real win is embracing those tools which help us tell meaningful stories that matter to real people and leveraging those tools with our strengths and the desires of our audience in mind.

I will listen past the garbage for the thing that’s relevant.

I will listen past the garbage for the thing that moves me.

I will ignore the “glittering lures” in favor of what’s meaningful.

The relevant things to do don’t happen by accident, they’re designed by people who care and leaders who show the way.

Show the way.