While still in college, Beau Gunn got an internship at the recently launched WUIN/Wilmington, NC (The Penguin), when the station was in its infancy and still under its original ownership. After the station was sold a , few times, current owner Hometown Media elevated Gunn to GM of a four-station cluster that also includes an online newspaper and a coupon “mall.” In this FMQB interview, Gunn talks about finding his way up the ladder by the seat of his pants, creating local synergy with a variety of products, and the future of small market media.
Beau Gunn
By Jack Barton
While still in college, Beau Gunn got an internship at the recently launchedWUIN/Wilmington, NC (The Penguin), when the station was in its infancy and still under its original ownership. Wanting to work with no programming or full-time on-air slots open, Gunn graduated to the sales department and began his career in broadcasting on the business side. Enter a new owner, Sea-Comm Communications, and after a traditional new ownership “housecleaning,” Gunn found himself in a position of stewardship, being named PD of a station slated to be flipped to a new format as soon as possible.
Gunn defied the odds, as Sea-Comm eventually decided to keep the station Triple A and to keep Gunn in the PD chair. The next adventure came when the station was again sold, this time to Hometown Media, with Gunn being elevated to GM of a four-station cluster that also includes an online newspaper and a coupon “mall.”
In this FMQB interview, Gunn talks about finding his way up the ladder by the seat of his pants, creating local synergy with a variety of products, and the future of small market media.
One of the most interesting things about your career is that you became a PD and had success without really being mentored by anyone. How did you develop those skills on your own?
Well I think if you ask any programmer they may play it close to the vest, but at the end of the day most of us are still guessing if what we’re doing is right. At first, it really started as a little bit of instinct as a listener. What did I feel could improve the radio station? My internship wasn’t necessarily how to program a radio station. But what I did truly learn is how passionate and engaged Triple A radio listeners were. So when (original PD) Mark (Keefe) and (original MD) Jerry (Gerard) exited the building, there was a long pause for about a month-and-a-half where there were no deejays on air, and the music was kind of stale and it was pretty evident that this great thing that was The Penguin was probably going to go away. I made a point to answer every single angry email, and every single angry phone call, to try to defuse the situation. And by doing so I would ask them, “What do you like about the station? What do you dislike about the station?” I would take vigorous notes and I got to meet these passionate P1 listeners who cared enough to write these emails. While I had them I made sure to let them know that I’m really here to help. The alternative would be no radio station, so help me, bear with me, and tell me what you want from us. A lot of my programming instinct came from that feedback in the early days of what this particular audience in Wilmington, North Carolina really liked. I also learned a lot from people like you, the label reps, all of the independent reps and just picking industry professional’s brains.
One of the things we’re going to talk about this year in Boulder at our Triple A Conference is something we’re calling TSR; Time Spent Relating. It sounds like that was part of what went into keeping The Penguin as a Triple A the first time through.
Constant relating has a tremendous amount to do with the survival of The Penguin. Had I just gone in and played what I thought was going to be right, it certainly would have been 100 percent wrong. And to accept that is to know that Triple A, more than any other radio format, is cultivated by a community; to hear the listeners’ voices and to let that just be a democratic process, rather than just following what the charts – which may be dominated by bigger radio stations or different regions – might say. You have to be in touch with your specific region in order to give that particular brand of Triple A station a unique sound.
One of the other areas we really made a conscious effort was to take any type of event that might have been a smaller event or misfit event in the community. We were going to take it and turn it into something great. It didn’t matter if 15 people showed up or 1000; I love nothing more than to hear a grass roots organization say, “We have this thing we’re trying to start, but the other radio stations weren’t interested in being involved with it.” I wanted those events because we could build and grow together.
What made the light bulb go off for ownership to keep the station Triple A when it was slated to end up a Spanish station?
There was a little bit of an uptick in the ratings at that point, just because the format itself became more accepted in the community. But I also think it really was a circumstance. It was really difficult for Sea-Comm to launch something else, so they said just run with it. It was very hands off management and ownership, which was kind of a blessing, and from there it took about a year before they really started seeing some revenue come in from the radio station.
So you had trial by fire where you learned how to be a PD by the seat of your pants on the job. Then you get another new owner, and within six months you’re the GM of four radio stations and an online newspaper. Talk about that.
The one unique part is most GMs of radio stations generally come from the sales side and are very numbers-engaged, and that sometimes creates a philosophy and an environment within the building that there is a separation of “church” and “state.” I come from both backgrounds. I’ve been on the sales side and needed the programming side to really get something done, and I’ve been on the programming side and I’ve really wanted to help the sales people sell us. So the approach I’ve taken since I’ve been GM has been to really make sure we are all working together as a unit and we never lose site of our twofold goals: To grow businesses that decide to sponsor our radio stations, and to put out quality programming. If you approach it from one side or the other, each of the other products will suffer, so I’m constantly reminding the staff that there’s two goals and they must work together in tandem for our success.
Can you talk about the other stations in the cluster?
The Penguin used to be “the little engine that could,” but it’s been forced into a really powerhouse brand here in Wilmington. It’s been voted the Best Radio Station in the local rag magazine for the last ten years. It’s well known in the community, but it is still rather eclectic and not as mainstream as you might suspect. We have a station that is about two-thirds Classic Rock, The Bone, but we’ve started to open the doorway to the ’80s and ’90s, so we’re now branding it as a Rock station. We have a Classical station which is BachFM. That’s fed by the World Classical Network. It’s very eclectic, and certainly complements the Triple A station and it also complements our fourth radio station which is our most ambitious endeavor, and that’s Port City Radio.
Port City Radio is an all News radio station that mirrors some of the great all News stations like WTOP or 1010 WINS. It is a difficult format to pull off in a small market like ours. Fortunately we have a staff of six very qualified and award-winning writers that are constantly populating our daily free digital newspaper, Port City Daily. These reporters are not only writers, but they are actually reporting the news. We have full-time deejays that pull day shifts on Port City Radio. We also have a national News affiliate, so rather than the typical News/Talk that would probably be conservative leaning, we take a very balanced approach to local and national news. It’s a very fast-paced, high cume format that’s somewhat repetitive, but does great here in Wilmington.
The four stations really do complement each other very well. The Penguin and The Bone can be sold together, the Classical and the Triple A can be sold together, the News and the Classical or the News and Triple A can be sold together. They all are always sold with our digital newspaper which is portcitydaily.com. We launched that in September of 2011. It’s a hyper-locally focused digital newspaper, and in a day where all or most all online entities of traditional papers are going behind pay walls, we are always free, and we take our income specifically from ad revenue. We will always be local and we will never write editorial content that alienates one side or the other, and we will always only be online.
Can you tell us about the business model that ties all of this together?
The media model is Local Voice, which is our parent company. If you’re going to be viable with traditional, terrestrial FM or AM radio these days, you have to have a very local element, or else you might as well be SiriusXM or Pandora or any of the other satellite radio stations out there. Our local feel, besides our local deejays, is our great local reporters who go out and get us great local news. They write compelling stories on portcitydaily.com, but instead of just giving them a voice on paper they actually get on the air like deejays and tell a little bit about what they just reported, omitting some of the major details so they can drive traffic by saying, “You can get the full story at portcitydaily.com.” So we get a little bit of news content in there, but also act as an advertisement and driver to our website. Our website has the same exact ads that our radio stations have, so they act as a great re-enforcer for our clients, which at the end of the day, is one of our core values and goals. The radio stations drive traffic to the online newspaper, the online paper drives local content to the radio stations. Our world goes around.
You’ve also found a unique way to drive retail business to the cluster, while driving business back to those retailers.
(Owner) Tom Davis gets 100 percent of the credit on this, as he launched it years ago before Groupon, Living Social or any of these other deal sites existed. The concept is the Save 30 Store. It’s a place where we sell full value gift certificates to local businesses for 30 percent off. The way Save 30 works, for example, is if we solicited a mattress company that tells us they’d like to advertise but don’t have any budget, we’d say “would you be interested in being part of the Save 30 Store?” To keep the math simple, we’d tell them that they agree to give us one gift certificate per month, valued at $1,000, for the term of the deal. We will then sell it at the Save 30 Store to the consumer for $700. When that gift certificate sells for $700, the consumer gets a gift certificate worth $1,000 for the business. The mattress store then receives the full value of $1000 in advertising credit with us. We get to show a business that generally would not have spent any money because they weren’t sure that advertising would work, that it does work. And we get to turn it into revenue direct from the consumer. It’s truly a win-win-win situation; the listener gets to save 30 percent, and the advertiser gets to have a completely risk free opportunity to advertise on our stations, getting us dollars we might not necessarily have attained.
What’s your perspective on the future of smaller, independent media companies in smaller markets?
I can approach it only through the lens I see it through. When I look at the other stations we go up against in the community, they tend to not have the opportunity to be so local and to really connect with business owners and make a difference, therefore growing their business.
One of the tools we continuously use is inviting business owners in on the air, giving them interviews free of charge and maybe running commercials for a few weeks, free of charge, just to get them used to how radio works and used to doing business with us. They will hear one of their friends say they heard them on the radio, so there’s reinforcement that the medium works. The role of local media is not just to put out compelling entertainment, but to continue to give local businesses an opportunity to grow through a cost effective means of advertising.
For us, the future is just bringing the hometown feel back to the community. We are constantly throwing small concerts and bringing people together who might be out of touch through social media. We bring them together, and they can see faces that are local people in the community that share a similar passion for music and similar tastes.
[eQB Content By Jack Barton]
