Elko, NV, boasts the third-largest gold mining community in the world. Ruby Radio Corporation has been serving this isolated corner of the state for 16 years. CEO Ken Sutherland says his six-station cluster, covering 300 miles along Interstate 80, is unique and successful.
Radio Ink: You are about 200 miles from Salt Lake City and about 300 miles from Reno. How does successful radio exist in the middle of nowhere?
Sutherland: It’s an isolated market, and that’s a beautiful thing. My first sales job was in San Jose where you could hear 72 radio stations in your car. When I got here there were two FMs and two AMs, so we grew the radio community. We put on three construction permits, we built them all ourselves and then we learned about HD. In an isolated community full of mountains we actually have three HDs on translators that I refer to as “Super Translators” because at 250 watts, on an 8,000 foot mountain that’s two miles from town, we’ve got the equivalent of a C3 FM; and we have three of them. There are about 33,000 people in Elko and Eastlan Ratings says 86 percent of the people in our survey area are in our cume.
Radio Ink: How was Q4 for you? Were you up or down?
Sutherland: Q4 was a comeback for us. In 2018, Q1 was horrible for us because of what I call “a sales department restructuring.” January just fizzled then the momentum started picking up when I got a couple of guys that were pretty good. Our national sales and regional sales have always been strong because we’ve got these super ratings; but our local sales were soft. The monthly totals through the year went up 16 percent, quarter-to-quarter, year-over-year from 2017 to 2018. It was a function of momentum in November and December. We had a big event in November that really helped. So Q4 was pretty good.
Radio Ink: What are your top categories?
Sutherland: A lot of people will tell you Automotive, but for us our number one category is Non-Automotive Retail. My number two category is Event Marketing. We do three big events a year at the station. We have our 17th Annual Health and Fitness Fair coming up in March. It’s your typical first-quarter promotion designed to pull money out of the corners, to find non-traditional advertisers and get them on the air. We also do what we call an Opportunity Fair, your basic jobs fair in May. Then in August, we do something we call a Women’s Expo. It’s a big shopping event. The Automotive category checks in at number three for us.
Radio Ink: How is Q1 2019 looking so far?
Sutherland: It’s up 39 percent year-over-year, but as I mentioned, we were soft in Q1 a year ago. So being up 39 percent is really more in the okay range than the great range. A lot of the Q4 momentum is spilling over into this year, so I’m not unhappy.
Radio Ink: What is your biggest challenge?
Sutherland: Finding good salespeople, keeping salespeople, training salespeople. Nationally, we have a Nevada Broadcasters Hall of Fame member selling for us. She works all of our agencies regional and national and she is far and away the top biller. I’ve almost given up on 20-somethings. I’ve got a couple of guys with grey in their hair and they are doing far better than most of the kids I’ve had through here.
Radio Ink: What are those Main Street advertisers saying about radio?
Sutherland: We fight the “radio is dead” thing every day. I ran a whole campaign about it. I ran a spot that said radio has been pronounced dead so many times that we’re getting used to it, but we always overcome it. I cited an article that stated that technology is in the process of killing radio, and the author was so convinced that he proclaimed they would stop making radios by 1955. I ran a whole campaign around that and I think it may be time to rewrite it and put it back out there.
Radio Ink: Are you facing much competition from Google, Facebook, and Pandora?
Sutherland: I think that the people who tell me they are advertising on Facebook are not really spending anything, they’re just making posts and not spending any money. These are almost all on the small end. The ones on the larger end, like some car dealers I’ve dealt with, have tried to tell me that SiriusXM has 44 percent penetration in the market. I proved that it was only 11 percent and now they won’t see me. What makes them happy is that they can track customers. I don’t know how we can do that with radio, so we’re losing some to that. My big frustration is that people don’t think radio is sexy enough to fool with.
Radio Ink: Is consolidation good or bad for business?
Sutherland: I want more of it. I’m hoping it creates buyers, buyers who can see an operation like ours and roll it up into their group. I think consolidation is good for the business.
Reach out to Ken Sutherland by phone at 775.777.1196 or e-mail [email protected]
