Productizing beer and music

While at college, I was the classical music director for the school's non-profit radio station. I became intrigued about the commercial radio realm, and so I hired on as the overnight DJ at an AM Top 40 station.

To hone the staff's skills, management brought down a consultant to speak on motivation and skill-improvement for a week. One of his first announcements was that the word news was pronounced nyews not nooze.

Then he said this:

Music - or news - is not our product; rather, our product is our audience. The spending habits of our listeners is what we are actually selling to our advertisers.

Simple enough, but, at that time in my innocent enthusiasm, revolutionary for me. And to this day, I still look on such things as music and beer - and the list is, of course, much larger - as containing substance in and of themselves.

They are more than mere products. And so, the question,"Well, what is your product?", invariably follows such demeaning imprecision.

At that radio station long ago, my family name - Cizauskas - was deemed too complex for its listeners. So I was given a nom de l'air.

I became Tom Chandler.