Where is the radio industry headed? What are some of the top leaders overseeing AM and FM radio stations doing to manage the rapid changes being seen for their business?
Those were just some of the questions presented to panelists in a 2018 NAB Show panel late Wednesday featuring Beasley Media Group CEO Caroline Beasley, Entercom SVP/Corporate Business Development Tim Murphy, Cox Media Group EVP Bill Heinrich and NAB EVP/Strategic Planning Steve Newberry.
Moderated by Jacobs Media President Fred Jacobs, the executives were asked what radio can do to maintain a competitive advantage over digital media, and other media that may compete for radio’s attention.
Murphy’s answer? “It comes down to great local programming, and scaling local programming is very hard.” Murphy suggested broadcast radio companies fight back against other media by promoting this unspoken-of advantage to marketers and clients. “We’ve got to make sure our great local programming continues to be great and brings a sense of belonging,” he said. “We’ve got to control the distribution of that. We can’t hand that over to those super-stack digital platforms. If we built around a moat to show that it’s very expensive and very hard to develop that, then we can own that.”
Murphy’s point was illustrated by the fact that a Google or Facebook would need to spend millions of dollars on content that was as local as that of radio. Doing so wouldn’t likely happen or simply be successful.
It is up to Radio to run with that fact and promote it heavily.
For Caroline Beasley, there’s another vital ingredient that makes radio stand out from other media. “It is also a part of being a part of the community, which is what we do,” she said.
NAB’s Newberry concurred. “It is how we can connect to our local community, in the best of times and the worst of times – said NAB EVP/Strategic Planning Steve Newberry. “It is something we all have and we cannot run away from that. If we keep that content connected to the local community, that gives us an opportunity to increase our market share.
As Murphy has experience at both the Boston Globe and The New York Times, a question asked by Jacobs about what radio broadcasting companies can learn from newspaper companies, so Radio doesn’t “make the same mistakes” as their print brethren, was a personal one for him. “I learned through mistakes, like most people,” he said.
What, then, should a broadcaster do? “You have to look at the world through your competitor’s glasses,” Murphy notes. That’s something newspaper companies failed to do in an era when Monster.com and similar companies were building databases and killing newspaper companies. Yet, newspapers had a weapon it never knew it had.
“The unfair advantage, which they were unaware of, was the circulation database of the newspaper – they only looked at it as a tool for collecting bills and reaching out to subscribers,” Murphy said. “They were just so rigid that they never saw this as part of the business they were in.”
For Beasley, the message was to rely on a well-executed plan to move forward into the future, and not prayers. “Hope is not a strategy,” Beasley says. “That’s what we discuss in our company. Look at the platforms and focus forward.”
Let’s hear it for Community, Connection & Class!