What I Did This Past Summer

With Labor Day heralding the end of summer, I’d like to observe one of my favorite annual traditions that you may also remember from your elementary school days: the teacher’s request for students to write an essay recapping the most recent summer. 

For radio, and in fact for media overall, it was an eventful season as consolidation continues in the face of economic headwinds.

Bankruptcy, staff reductions, rule changes, the integration of artificial intelligence, and retirements; those things made headlines over the last few months, in a continuation of what’s been going on in recent years. There’s now a greater focus on podcasting and digital. Sellers are adding more arrows to their quiver of what they can sell.

We saw Audacy enter a streaming deal with iHeart. Connoisseur acquired Alpha. Saga replaced its imaging voices with AI. Beasley Media redefined itself as a digital-first company. Satellite format offerings were reduced while more stations shared content across multiple stations in many markets. Delivering audio on more platforms is becoming a standard to compete. Nielsen lauded the success of the recalibration to a 3-minute AQH requirement in PPM markets.

The audience is there. The way they use radio is what’s changed.

The challenges we face have certainly caused sleepless nights for many of us, but it’s not all bad news. There are opportunities that surfaced this summer that should be cause for a business reset. Whether you call it a “Correction” or a “Reboot,” this business is setting itself up to rebound, rebuild, or remodel. The question is, will radio do what it needs to do?

What we cannot do is stay the course and hope that the advertising recession we’re experiencing will end on its own. We have to be in control and focus on advertisers and the audience. If you can take care of those two things, maximizing your assets in those areas, you can be successful. 

Someone is getting the advertising dollars available in your market. There’s at least one radio station or cluster in almost every market that dominates in building and maintaining an audience, and in generating real revenue. What’s their approach versus yours? What are the most successful stations doing? What can be learned from those stations? What’s their advantage, and is it tangible or is it more about legacy and history?

I have to wonder when the last time a management group analyzed what’s working versus what’s not? What’s working for them and working for their competitors? That would have been a good way to spend one’s summer. That’s exactly what I did. I focused on my clients as well as their competitors. I also looked at those stations that fall into the category of being successful and admired that were neither a client nor a competitor.

It should be obvious that seldom does the “one-size-fits-all” approach work when it’s not customized for local markets, adjusted to compete against your rating challengers, or a “plug-and-play.” There are those things that work well, though, and uniformity allows for scale. The question becomes one of audience attraction and revenue growth. The general thinking for decades has been that great content attracts an audience and that leads to big ratings. Big ratings help to generate revenue. They don’t do the selling for you, but they help to get you into the “discussion phase” for potential advertisers, and audience size helps with increasing rates. 

The commonalities of the most successful radio stations are that they have great talent, (which may be a mix of Local and National personalities), a direct high profile connection to the community, are marketed in a way that enables them to be everywhere and be seen everywhere, have active local sellers, and are focused on moving their advertisers products, services, and goods. They invest wisely in growing their audience, with the intention of recouping the expense as they grow revenue. 

They’re marketing machines for their advertisers. Over the air, digital, podcasting, on-demand, social media, appearances, newsletters & websites, and selling promotions, experiences, deals of the day, along with packages that benefit retailers. One example is a Grand Opening Package that entices an advertiser to turn over the event to the station to plan and execute for them. There are those who fall back on the tried and true practice of including sponsors and advertisers on promotion packages. It works.

A recent visit to a major market emphasized to me that doing radio the way it should be done works. That “way” includes all of the aforementioned practices that build an audience, which leads to taking more of the available ad dollars off the table. The anonymous client had 8 cubicles occupied by sales reps.

The promotion department has a veteran leader with team members who execute weekly onsite events. There’s a digital director. Programming and Operations leadership. The production and copy writers, administration, and traffic that one would expect to see inside a station. I think that I mentioned that this station is profitable. 

So that’s how I spent my summer. I searched out radio stations that are doing well. Successful stations. In a multiple-station cluster, some stations generate a greater return on investment, and they deserve attention and resources. The formula for success in radio, and frankly, all media, isn’t as complicated as it sometimes appears to be.

The challenge is apparently the funneling of resources. That and the belief that radio done right still works.