That’s what iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman and CFO Rich Bressler want employees of radio’s biggest company to know. In recent weeks, there have been reports that both Apple and Liberty Media are kicking the iHeart tires. In a memo to iHeart employees, Pittman and Bressler want their team to take that as a compliment as the company looks ahead to 2019 and emerging from bankruptcy with 50% less debt.
Here’s the entire memo from Pittman and Bressler:
As you may have seen, there continues to be a lot of press around our restructuring so we wanted to send you an update to give you some perspective on it. As we finish up our process, which greatly reduces the company’s debt, we expect there will be a lot of people who are looking at our equity since we are such a unique company. Just look at the facts:
As the number one audio company in America, we have a greater reach than any media property in the U.S., including Facebook and Google;
– We reach 91% of Americans every month;
– Our broadcast audience is twice the size of the next radio competitor and seven times their size in digital audience;
– Our social footprint eclipses everyone in audio and is twice as big as Netflix;
– We are the number one commercial podcasting company by a wide margin;
– We have a full complement of high-profile national events that are ranked by consumers ahead of even Coachella and other festivals. Our iHeartRadio Music Awards show has set records for social engagement, and our upcoming iHeartRadio Podcast Awards will be the standard for the entire industry;
– We have a consumer master brand that stands alone in the audio space;
– We are uniquely embedded on smart speakers like Alexa, giving us a prime position there;
– We are the only audio company that has a significant presence on YouTube and Snapchat — we have over 50 million monthly views on YouTube and over 20 million monthly unique users on Snapchat; and
– We have unique and powerful research and programming tools that allow our creative people to continually create, improve, and refresh our products at a speed others can only dream of.
To back all this up, we have data analytics, a programmatic platform and attribution tools and capabilities that make us the only traditional media company that can interface with advertisers as the major digital players can. We control our own data and programmatic platform. And most important, we have all of this in the hands of the best sales organization — smart, creative, responsive, and aggressive.
The good news is that this is just the beginning. So when you hear that people are interested in iHeartMedia in any form, take it as a compliment; it’s validation of our strong operating business and the unique position we have in the media business, and how our value increases once we have fixed our debt issues. We are truly a one-of-a-kind company, and let’s never forget that we’ve gotten here through hard work and great thinking from you and everyone else on our team.
Thanks.
Bob and Rich
