Radio Ink obtained a copy of a happy anniversay memo from David Field to Entercom employees that was circulated last week. In it, Field gives his employees an update on how the company is doing with one year of the merger with CBS radio in the rearview mirror. Field says enormous progress has been made and there is no intention of slowing down. He lists 10 accomplishments and also discusses challenges the company is facing. Here’s the entire Field memo…
To: Entercom Team
From: David Field
From the beginning, we have been all about playing offense, committed to excellence and focused on the ample growth opportunities we have with America’s most outstanding group of leading, iconic local radio stations and personalities, uniquely delivering local connection at national scale. We are the #1 creator of live, original local audio content, the unrivaled leader in news and sports radio, #1 or #2 in virtually every music format, the #3 podcaster, a major player in events, and the home of RADIO.COM, the fastest growing digital audio app in the United States.
We also have the advantage of being in the most undervalued and least disrupted medium in the U.S., reaching more Americans and generating a superior return on investment for advertisers at a time when so many of our primary media competitors are so disrupted and vulnerable.
We have made enormous progress in our first year, and we have no intention of slowing down. As we continue to build upon our positive momentum, I wanted to give you an update on how far we have come. Over the last year, we have:
1. Built an outstanding leadership team across the organization.
2. Completed most of our integration work and are aggressively reinvesting savings in important growth areas including data and analytics, RADIO.COM, ad sales marketing, national client development, local radio programming and research, sports, and more.
3. Driven significantly higher ratings every single month.
4. Successfully extricated ourselves from the USTN mess and re-launched TWIN as a premium, fast-growing business.
5. Launched the Entercom Audio Network with a blue-chip client roster including P&G, Home Depot, Walgreens, Staples, Hyundai, Indeed.com and more.
6. Successfully relaunched RADIO.COM and transitioned our stations off of the CBS and TuneIn platforms. RADIO.COM is thriving – it is the fastest-growing digital audio app in the U.S. (up 179% in total users in 2018) and recently surpassed both Sirius XM and TuneIn in monthly digital users.
7. Completed all of our required divestitures.
8. Built a strong national client partnership team that is elevating our senior relationships with major national brands.
9. Achieved solid growth in digital, events, government, national, and bubble-up sales.
10. Worked to build a best-in-class local sales organization, focusing on larger customers, enhancing account strategies and improving how we compensate our sales executives to be consistent with leading media and sales organization from Google to Facebook. Our new plan will benefit AEs by adding stable salaries and more financial upside, transparency and simplicity, and expanded opportunities to sell additional products locally and nationally.
Like any organization undergoing transformational change, there have been some early challenges and growing pains and work remains to be done. I appreciate all of the efforts to drive integration and important systemic enhancements and particularly want to thank the financial, traffic, HR, digital, and legal teams for all of their hard work behind the scenes to drive organizational improvements.
I am pleased to report that just as we have guided from the start, we are showing powerful signs of improvement and revenue acceleration in the second half of the year and are well positioned for a strong 2019 and beyond. As I mentioned on our most recent earnings call, fourth quarter revenues were pacing up 4% as our organizational improvements have begun to kick in and many of our markets are now delivering excellent results. We are becoming increasingly successful at playing offense and taking share from other media, using our share shift presentations, Entercom Analytics and other tools to go after our fair share of ad spending.
As I announced in September, we are expanding our commitment to community service with the launch of Entercom Cares. Our stations have always worked to make the world a better place, but with our scale and lineup of many of the country’s most important and influential stations and personalities, we will be able to increase our impact by focusing on a few core causes: the environment; the military community; suicide prevention; pediatric cancer care and other childhood medical needs; and civics education and objective, nonpartisan news. I look forward to building on our important work in the months and years ahead.
I also want to salute our news stations across the country for the incredibly important work they do, particularly at a time of community crisis. In just the past few weeks, we have watched with great pride as KDKA-Pittsburgh, KNX-Los Angeles, and KCBS-San Francisco have provided essential information and helped their communities cope with tragic massacres and catastrophic fires. We are proud of their great work.
As we look ahead, we see terrific growth opportunities in 2019. Radio appears to be in the early stages of a renaissance. More and more advertisers are frustrated and concerned by the high level of disruption impacting other media and are taking a fresh look at increasing their radio spend. Consumer product companies led by the country’s largest advertiser, P&G, almost tripled their radio advertising in the third quarter. We also saw a handful of other categories growing by as much as 50%. Additionally, we are seeing a number of other highly influential brands like Amazon, Uber, Google, Facebook, Peloton and others increasing their spending with Entercom and in radio.
We are also making a number of big investments to position the company for strong growth for years to come through our various growth initiatives mentioned above and we are making additional investments to ensure that we have top-notch tools, practices, and systems to compete effectively in today’s hyper-dynamic world. But in order to ensure that we reach our full potential and drive strong, consistent growth, we will all need to continue to embrace change and new improved practices to enhance how we operate and compete effectively against strong media competitors.
It has been an extraordinary, exciting, and energizing year. I want to thank each of you for all you are doing to help us achieve our goals and build something truly special and transformative. I could not be more excited about the future and the journey ahead.
Let’s make sure we finish 2018 strong and double down on our work to ensure a wonderful 2019.
I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday with your families and friends.
With great appreciation and all best wishes,
David
nice really