RAB President and CEO Mike Hulvey pointed to John Morgan’s testimonial on the power of radio with the Florida Association of Broadcasters as proof of concept for an industry pushing back against a wave of negative coverage that made headlines last month.
Hulevey made that case on the National Alliance of State Broadcasters Associations’ Broadcast Advocate podcast, hosted by Texas Association of Broadcasters President and CEO Oscar Rodriguez.
Hulvey highlighted Morgan, the founder of Morgan & Morgan, whose comments to the FAB about radio’s role in building his firm were amplified by Radio Ink.
He described the remarks as the clearest available case study for what radio can deliver for a local advertiser. “Here is a prominent radio advertiser saying it as loud as he can,” he said. “If we want to take a case study and talk to a local advertiser about what they should aspire to be and what their business can become as a result of their marketing and advertising partnerships with their local broadcaster, boom, there’s a perfect example of that.”
Morgan’s endorsement came at a very welcome time, as the industry was steering around negative national coverage after one particular take on Jacobs Media’s Techsurvey 2026 data caught the attention of the Drudge Report. Hulvey said the headline missed the point.
“It wasn’t that people aren’t listening and aren’t engaging with our content. It was how they are engaging with their content,” he said. The story framed declining over-the-air listening as a consumption drop when Hulvey says it was a distribution shift. “Instead, the headline was something like listening to AM and FM listening drops, which was not true at all. That was only referring to the over-the-air consumption, but it was a distribution comment.”
The bulk of the conversation centered on the RAB’s Audio Leader advocacy deck, available to any broadcaster through the organization’s website and presented to NASBA leadership in Washington earlier this year. The deck frames broadcast radio as the leader in the broader audio space and makes a data-backed argument that adding a broadcast component to digital-only ad campaigns improves results across the board, in what Hulvey calls a force multiplier.
“When you look to see when you add a broadcast component, if you were a digital-only marketer and you say, I’m not going to the traditional media, we don’t need that. The answer is you do need it,” he said. “By even keeping your budget the same and reallocating what may have been a 100% digital budget, pulling some back into a traditional broadcast, adding that to what you’re doing, what we’re seeing is better results when you add broadcast.”
The Audio Leader framing is designed to meet advertisers who have drifted toward digital and streaming on their own terms. “In the ad community that sometimes leans into the term audio more than radio, again, broadcast radio is the leader in that space,” Hulvey said.
He grounded the sales effectiveness argument in a story from his time as a station operator, recounting a McDonald’s franchise owner named Rick Richards who interrupted a presentation with a single question. “He stopped me, and he said, ‘Mike, that’s really a good idea. But I have one question for you. Will that idea sell a hamburger?'” Hulvey said. “That response struck me like a lightning bolt.” The question reoriented how he approached every advertiser conversation that followed.
“Part of our vernacular at RAB is we’re in the business of selling hamburgers,” Hulvey said. “At the end of the day, our clients want one thing to happen. They want that product or service to move. And we want to be a part of that solution for them.”
