BY KURT HANSON

Best-selling author Seth Godin -- famous for his books "Permission Marketing," "Unleashing the Ideavirus," and "Purple Cow" -- delivered the keynote speech this morning at the NAB Radio Show in Philadelphia, telling broadcasters that they are at a critical fork in the road and urging them to change their direction.

"With the web and satellite radio and WiMax, radio's not going to be one-way communication any more -- it's going to be two- or three-way," Godin told the several hundred attendees in the audience. "You're either going to embrace it or not."

Quoting from his various books, he described the "TV (and Radio)-industrial Complex" of the late 20th Century, in which there were a limited number of channels, advertisers used those channels for mass marketing, consumers purchased those products, and advertisers used the resulting profits to buy more ads.

"The FCC is the reason you exist," Godin said. "It's about limited spectrum. If there were a million FM stations, you couldn't sell any advertisements." But with the advent of TiVo, Xbox, DVDs, Yahoo!, Escient, home theaters, 400 TV channels, 10,000 magazines, and more, "the TV-industrial complex is going away. What are you going to do about it?"

In this new environment, "You're spamming your listeners," Godin said.

Godin used the photo-sharing service Ofoto.com as an analogy, in that they've turned the job of ordering photo prints from something one does alone to something expansive --
something one offers to one's family and friends. "What the Internet is going to do is change the radio experience from this," he said, motioning inwards, "to this," he concluded, motioning outwards.

He challenged his audience,"How many podcast subscribers do you have?", notingthat one New York City station has 50,000 subscribers now and will someday have 500,000 subscribers -- "and each one of them is someone who's not listening to you."

He also asked, "How many anticipated, personal, relevant ads do you deliver?" Responding to the speakers before him -- the NAB's Eddie Fritts and Jefferson-Pilot's Don Benson, both of whom extolled the value of radio's localism -- Godin noted, "Local doesn't necessarily mean local on a map; it can mean local based on interests."

He concluded, "I can't think of a group that cares more or is more likely to run with this than you are." On the surface, that sounds like a compliment -- but a careful reading of the words suggests that Godin may be equally cynical or pessimistic about every group he speaks to.