After sharing details from Nielsen’s three-minute shift and the industry’s ongoing digital revenue renaissance, the RAB united some of radio’s most respected leaders to deliver a clear message: radio stations, across owners and markets, are still strongest together.
In a webinar convened on his birthday, RAB President and CEO Mike Hulvey was joined by RAB Board Chair and Townsquare Media COO Erik Hellum, Cox Media Group EVP of Radio Rob Babin, Bonneville International EVP Regional Media Operations Scott Sutherland, and Lenawee Broadcasting Company President Julie Koehn for the state of the organization’s One Voice for Radio campaign after one year.
The initiative stands on three pillars: unified advocacy, digital revenue growth, and the enduring trust audiences place in local radio.
Hellum framed the stakes plainly. “If we don’t tell our story, nobody else is going to tell that story,” he said. “I’ve been on the board since 2017, and I’ve been in the industry since the late 80s, and I’ve never seen the leadership of this industry working more closely together to advance the story of our medium than they are right now.”
The panel pointed to Nielsen’s 3MQ shift in PPM markets as the first major One Voice for Radio win. Sutherland noted the progress while keeping perspective. “We look better, but we still live in a quarter-hour world,” he said. “At the end of the day…we have 180 seconds to get an impression, and Spotify has 30 seconds to get an impression. And then you get to the Big Tech companies, two seconds to get an impression.”
On the digital front, the RAB and Borrell Associates published the 14th edition of the Digital Benchmark Report in February, projecting $2.5 billion in digital revenue for the radio industry in 2026. Hellum, with plenty of “digital-first” experience at Townsquare, put the local urgency into numbers: “Over 70% of ad revenue is now digital.”
“Of that 71% that’s digital, 85 cents on the dollar leaves the market. So that money used to be spent locally, and now it’s being spent with big tech, with digital ad agencies.” So how does radio best state its case and fight back? Sutherland described Bonneville’s approach to digital as deliberately focused. “The tendency in that space is to have the Cheesecake Factory menu, if you will, because everyone wants to serve 47 products,” he said. “We’re trying to make sure that we’re more like Chipotle, that we’re really focusing on the products that align better with our overall sales narrative.”
As was mentioned in the RAB/Borrell report, Babin pushed the industry to treat digital as a primary growth engine, saying, “2026 will be defined by the ability to deliver integrated radio and digital campaigns that offer measurable results. Our role is to help bring that clarity and to offer marketing solutions that are fully integrated that drive the end solution.”
Koehn, operating in a market of 20,000 people with 56 competing signals, described how Lenawee Broadcasting extended its flagship station WLEN across platforms. “We need to reach people everywhere they want to consume us,” she said. “As radio stations, we were the original content creators. Back 100 years ago, we started creating content. We have all this content we’ve created and we have to be able to share it in multiple platforms.”
She offered a concrete demonstration of how traditional radio bolsters modern commerce, adding, “We had a client who had a display ad on our website and they were getting maybe five to seven click-throughs a day.” Koehn commented, “We, on a Saturday morning, did two live commercials on the air about the study, and their clicks went to over 117 that day. Two spots are all it took to drive that click-through rate.”
Trust surfaced repeatedly as radio’s core competitive advantage.
Hulvey recounted a presentation made to a major holding company in New York where sportscaster Noah Eagle addressed several hundred advertising professionals. Eagle, son of broadcaster Ian Eagle, drew a distinction between his television and radio work that Hulvey said stopped the room. “When I do a television broadcast, I may have a much bigger audience at that moment in time,” Hulvey recounted, “But when I’m doing a radio broadcast, I’m actually drawing the picture, and then I’m coloring it in. And I am having an intimate relationship with the audience. And I can feel it as a radio broadcaster.”
Panelists backed that trust argument with servers.
Sutherland reported that Bonneville’s two Phoenix stations have raised over $30 million for Phoenix Children’s Hospital across 16 years, including nearly $2.5 million in a single recent campaign. Babin described how WSB Radio in Atlanta raised $2.2 million in 36 hours during its 25th annual care-a-thon benefiting the Cancer and Blood Disorder Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Koehn said Lenawee Broadcasting contributes over $1 million in cash and in-kind support to nonprofits annually in a community of 20,000, including more than $1 million raised over time for local veterans through its Think About project.
Hellum tied service directly back to business: “Big Tech can’t do that,” he said, describing how Townsquare’s New Jersey 101.5 team slept overnight at the station during a historic blizzard to broadcast through the storm. “They don’t care to do that. We’ve done that for a long time, and we still do it as best as anybody.”
Koehn returned to the fundamental strategic point of One Voice for Radio, adding, “Our competition is not each other,” she said. “Our competition is Big Tech and things that really are a little bit out of our control. But we have to remember that we’re a trusted member of the community. Radio is a trusted member of the community.”
