Interviews

As Gordon Smith heads into his eighth year as president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, many in our industry are glad that position carries no term limits for the former Senator. Smith is very popular among the NAB radio membership and his calmness, stability, and professionalism serve the radio industry very well (in addition to the great team he has working for him). Smith is among Radio's 40 Most Powerful People and has been ever since he took the NAB leadership job eight years ago. His official ranking on the list will be revealed next week when our Top 40 issue mails.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that's been in radio for longer than a month that Mary Quass was voted one of radio's 20 best leaders. She's respected by every executive in the industry and loved by her employees, as we found out during the voting. Our Top 20 Leaders list is out this week and the NRG CEO did pretty well this year. Here are just some of the comments we received from the people Quass leads...

Does the radio industry take creative seriously enough to help clients succeed? Why do many advertising agencies lack the desire to spend time on radio creative, caring mostly about a television commercial that takes so much more time to produce and costs so much more than radio? Why do radio stations allow awful-sounding advertisers to record their own commercials? We turned to a very successful creative services company to try to find the answers.

That's just one of the questions we asked Nielsen Audio Managing Director Brad Kelly in his May 22 Radio Ink cover story interview. A lot of industry revenue, and a lot of industry jobs, ride on the ratings. In the top 50 markets those ratings are determined by the Portable People Meter. What is Brad Kelly doing at Nielsen to make your radio life better?

If you answered yes, you may want to listen to some of the advice we pulled from Rex Hansen, who's retiring after a long and successful career in radio management. Hansen's final stop was a 19 year run as VP/GM for SummitMedia's cluster in Springfield, MO.

Something we love to do here at Radio Ink is to find and highlight stations that produce great content. 1010 WINS in New York City is a station that makes our job easy. A year ago the station produced a series addressing the growing heroin epidemic that's gripping the nation. Here's what Director of News and Programming Ben Mevorach and his team are up to now...

This is not a negative story about Nielsen. Nielsen is the ratings system, the currency radio uses and advertising agencies and local businesses rely on to make purchases and funnel millions and millions of dollars into the radio industry. Many would argue that since Nielsen purchased Arbitron, the bigger company is making more of an effort to improve its product for the industry. But those discussions are for another day.

Leslie Whittles' job for Cumulus in Houston is to grow the KRBE product and brand with a focus on how the station can best serve the community. That, of course, includes all facets of what comes out of the speakers as well as the overall image of the station. The most important part of her responsibility is to make sure her entire team understands and is focused on the goals.

Last week, Alpha Media named Ernie Martinez National Director of Digital Content. Martinez has come a long way from his first gig in radio when he was 19 and a producer for Radio Disney. As the head of Alpha's Digital Division, Martinez is now responsible for the digital strategy for hundreds of Alpha's radio stations, and that includes finding ways to bring in digital revenue.

Kim Komando was 9 when she first sat at a computer, helping her mother locate software “bugs” while she coded software. She graduated high school at age 16 and went to Arizona State University where she started helping people using computers. Kim graduated top of her class from ASU’s School of Business at 19 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Information Systems.