Jessica Reyna has been called the “Antichrist of traditional media,” but in a visit with the Borrell Associates Local Marketing Trends podcast, the Kill Your Competition CEO had a surprise for the radio industry: she’s not only a fan, but an ardent supporter.
The marketer returned for her third appearance alongside hosts Gordon Borrell and Corey Elliott. Reyna first came to Borrell’s attention in 2019 and has since become a recurring voice at Borrell conferences. A previous Local Marketing Trends episode gave her the “Antichrist” moniker, but her latest visit gave radio broadcasters plenty to smile about while giving everyone else in traditional media a reason to wince.
When Elliott and Borrell put several traditional media channels through a quick-fire rating exercise of “Always, Sometimes, Rarely, or Never,” Reyna did not hesitate. Newspapers: never. TV: never, unless it’s connected TV. Direct mail: never. Cable: never. Outdoor: never, unless it’s digital and dayparted. Radio was the only traditional medium that earned an unqualified endorsement.
“I don’t know why people overlook it,” Reyna said, “And maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m crazy, but for whatever reason, radio is still killing it.”
Reyna argued that radio’s effectiveness depends heavily on three variables: format fit, timing relative to customer behavior, and competitive clutter on the station. She pushed back on the idea of simply buying time and hoping for results, instead framing radio as a precision tool that rewards strategic thinking about when customers actually are.
“What you really need to focus on is ‘what are my customers’ behaviors?'” she said. “Are they going to the car line after school, or are they working until five? When do they call my office, and how many competitors are on this station with me? That is where the magic happens.”
Where Reyna got particularly enthusiastic was on the subject of pairing radio with digital out-of-home. In her view, the combination is radio’s biggest opportunity to extend its effectiveness by running digital outdoor on the same routes at the same time as a radio buy, and reinforcing the audio message with a visual one.
The radio praise stood in sharp contrast to her broader critique of how most local businesses actually spend their advertising dollars. Reyna declared that an over-reliance on Google Ads and bottom-of-funnel thinking has left many local businesses effectively owned by platforms they don’t control. When everyone runs the same search ads with the same messaging, no one stands out, and the platforms keep raising prices because they can.
“They’re not thinking about, am I known?” she said. “They’re actually just basically being owned.”
She pushed back hard on the common framing of brand versus performance, calling the distinction a false one. In her view, strong brand clarity is what makes performance advertising work in the first place. When consumers understand who a business is, what makes it different, and why it matters, the downstream cost of acquiring customers through paid channels goes down. Without that foundation, businesses end up in an expensive race to the bottom on keywords.
Lastly, Reyna argued that agencies and media reps are always biased; not necessarily dishonest, but inevitably shaped by what they know, what’s easy to sell, and what generates the best margins. Her advice to business owners was to establish a single unbiased measurement platform that puts every channel on equal footing, rather than logging into a dozen separate dashboards that each grade their own homework.
