Suffice to say that today’s radio programmers are leading a vastly different professional life than they were 10-15 years ago. There’s much on the programmer plate and the wide canvas of digital issues and responsibility overload has led to a new breed of programmer. With wily veterans like Jeff Kapugi it’s all a matter of taking it in stride, evolving with the changes and adaptation. Kapugi was recently named VP, Country Programming for CBS Radio adding further dimension to a diversified and colorful career. This week, it’s all things Kapugi!
Jeff Kapugi
Jeff Kapugi started his radio career in Tampa back in the heyday of the legendary Power Pig days of the late eighties/early nineties under the tutelage of Randy Michaels, Marc Chase and BJ Harris. What a way to launch a career! Power players, power attitudes, power strategies and most of all, the Power Pig. He was the station’s first overnight jock in the new format and eventually graduated to PD. Kapugi also launched CHR KSLZ/St. Louis and had a very productive run as PD of WIHT in our nation’s Capitol.
In 2009, Kapugi embarked on his “radio amnesia days” when the medium took a backseat to his next career turn as he joined the Tribune Company, where he would be reunited with Power Pig alumni Randy Michaels and Marc Chase, among others. Kapugi entered Tribune as VP of Digital Content, quite a bold move for a radio programmer at that stage of his career, and eventually ascended to Chief Operating Officer of Interactive. Subsequent to a bout with bankruptcy at Tribune, Kapugi re-enlisted in radio with CBS about a year ago landing him back in the programming saddle in
St. Louis overseeing Hot AC KYKY and Mainstream AC KZEK.
Now it’s on to a new chapter of Kapugi’s multi-faceted career as he readies himself for his new position with CBS Radio as VP of Country Programming & PD WUSN-FM Chicago.
How did this recent opportunity within CBS Radio come about for you?
I’ve been staying in touch with the market Manager in Chicago, Rod Zimmerman, ever since I was let go at the Tribune Company and I knew that at some point near the end of this year that I’d be coming to crossroads of having to re-commit to another year of commuting to St. Louis or to stick my neck up and seeing what might be available in Chicago. When Buddy Scott decided to retire, the moons just kind of all aligned and it worked out for me.
It’s an obvious geographical fit for you, but with most of your day to day programming history in the CHR world, what makes this a formatic fit?
I know I’ve been framed a Top 40 guy for a long time, but in addition to CHR I’ve programmed Rhythmic CHR, Mainstream AC, Hot AC, Urban, Beautiful Music…I’ve been across the spectrum of formats. Country’s the one format I haven’t done on a day to day basis, but I think a good music PD can do any format they put their mind to. I did help launch a couple of Country stations in KSD/St. Louis and WFUS/Tampa that were pretty successful. I also got to oversee WPOC in Baltimore and WMZQ in DC. Country’s in my background, just not on a day to day basis. While I might not have the day to day format experience and success behind every format, I’ve touched every format and now I’m very excited to be getting deeply involved in the Country format.
How do you envision the transition challenges going into the Country area?
Formatically speaking when it comes to programming, I think there’s such a fine line between formats. I had no issues assimilating to the Mainstream AC and Hot AC worlds in St. Louis on a daily basis, and I don’t anticipate many issues going into Country day to day. When you size it up, the formats have all evolved with the times and conformed accordingly. Hot AC has become Pop/CHR, CHR has become Rhythmic/CHR, Rhythmic/CHR has become more Urban, and Country has become more CHR oriented conceptually speaking.
What among your managerial skills-set makes you uniquely qualified to fulfill this executive position in CBS’ Country division?
CBS wants me to take a different perspective on our Country stations. I’ll be working with Jeff Garrison, who assumes his new role as VP of Country Artist Relations. I will emphasize the day to day programming of the stations, while Jeff focuses on artist relations in Nashville. I believe it makes for a good team and great balance between the two of us.
A lot of the successes we’ve seen at our CBS Country properties have been those that have been taking a Pop approach to the formatics of the radio station, and I have a lot to offer in this area.
What excites you most about getting involved with Country radio, Country music and Country artists?
It’s the hottest format out there right now. I recently attended the Keith Urban show in Chicago. The crowd was in their seats for the opening act, Jake Owens, and the entire show was an amazing experience. The loyalty of the audience is incredible. The loyalty of the artists to the radio stations and the stations to the artists is remarkable. For years I’ve always been jealous of watching the music awards shows on TV and all the Pop artists that go up on stage and thank God, and the Country artists would thank Country radio. I always wondered why Pop artists don’t thank Pop radio or Hot AC radio. So I’m excited to be involved in a format where the artists realize the strength of radio.
I start in Chicago on December 5 and I’ll be using the next six weeks to button things up in St. Louis and make for a good transition, while I help spearhead the search for my replacement.
Tracing your career back to its beginning, you started at WFLZ/Tampa and spent 16 years there much of the time in the celebrated upstart Power Pig years of the nineties. What were the most indelible impressions made on you during that time?
During that time I was pretty green in the business. I just graduated from college and decided to move to Tampa. I was working at a Taco Bell as well as WFLZ when it was Oldies. When they decided to make the switch to Top 40 in 1989, I was actually supposed to be fired when they dismissed a bunch of the Oldies staff. The OM at the time was getting ready to go on vacation during the transition and no one could find me to fire me. I wound up meeting with the new PD, Marc Chase, who said “Yea, you were supposed to be fired last week but it seems like you’ve been doing a lot of stuff around here and we need a guy like you, so we’ll figure out a place to put you at some point.”
The lasting impressions made on me were more after it was all said and done and I had moved on to St. Louis and then back to Tampa and then to DC. I thought that’s how every radio station was run until I went to Jacor in St. Louis where it was like a library. My reaction was, “Hello, we need to liven this place up a little bit!”
The personality of the Power Pig from back in the day still lives in that building. 4002 Gandy Blvd. is a very special place. It always has been and always will be. It had that same vibe went I went back to Tampa for my second stint at FLZ and the other stations I oversaw. It’s a very special building and I’m sure even though there are less people working there today than there were when I was there, it still has that special vibe.
Was your goal to take that vibe and try to instill a similar spirit wherever you would move on to?
Yes, I tried to put a little bit of that fun factor into St. Louis when we launched KSLZ back in the late nineties. I tried to instill that mentality that we were living it and what happened on the air was what we were living in the hallways and how we were living our lives…everyone hung out together. It’s hard to reach the stature of what the Power Pig was, but we had a lot of fun with it.
In DC it was pretty much the same deal although I was able to recruit some former FLZers in Toby Knapp and Kane and bring them into the fold to help inject some of that fun factor into WIHT in 2005.
Who influenced you the most during those early Tampa years?
Among Randy, Marc and BJ Harris, I couldn’t pay enough for the radio education I got from them in a very short period of time. With them it was always a three ring circus. It was all about out of the box thinking and focusing on the entertainment value of the radio station while not letting it be a just a jukebox. Those were very important concepts I took away from my time spent with the three of them. Randy was the ring leader and had a major influence on everything about the Power Pig and Marc Chase is one of the best at that kind of radio. It was just a very exciting time and a great learning experience for me.
I was probably the most normal one of the bunch so I’m sure they took away a few things from me like balance, rationality and things of that nature. It was kind of like putting a morning show together. We had these four heads and we all brought something unique and special to the table and learned a lot from each other.
Subsequent to you leaving WIHT in DC, you had an interim period of decision making to contemplate, where were you at professionally at that time?
I kind of knew I needed a change and I decided to pull my own parachute and became a free agent. The timing with the Tribune Company worked really well. Marc Chase was reorganizing some of the things he was doing at Tribune Interactive and we touched based. I told him Chicago is home for me and I can help you on the ground floor a little bit more than some of the other people may be able to in just knowing the market and growing up reading the Tribune and The Sun Times. I also felt at the time I was one of the driving forces in the success of Clear Channel’s interactive initiatives on the radio side. My cluster in DC was one of the leading clusters in all the digital metrics that were used for measurement. I thought I could add some value to what Marc was doing at Tribune interactive and we worked out a deal for me to be VP of Content over the Chicago digital properties.
It was a great opportunity for me and similar to my new position with CBS Radio where I can offer a fresh outside-in perspective, I was able to approach the Tribune job from a different perspective. I looked at it from the consumer side as opposed to a lot of the people who worked at Tribune as primarily journalists. I’m the complete opposite of a journalist. That perspective, along with my experience, was valuable to the company and it laid the groundwork for all of the rest to come into play for me there.
Did you have any trepidation about entering a new field of endeavor at that stage of your career?
I did have a little trepidation about entering a new field but I knew I was doing it with people that knew what I was about. They knew where I would fit into the puzzle. I really thought that if I could have done what I was doing at Tribune for 4-5 years, I could have blazed a different trail for myself for the next 15 or 20. So that part was real exciting. I wasn’t writing off radio by any means. I felt I had achieved a certain level, not that I had “done everything” but I had done some things and had been successful doing them and thought this would be a great opportunity for me to excel in a new medium that really hasn’t been defined yet. That part was exciting.
Tribune also recruited several ex-Jacor/Clear Channel players into the company. How would you best describe the culture at Tribune at the time given this dynamic?
It wasn’t a recreation of the Jacor days at a newspaper/media company. Although it was an effort to loosen up the ties that everyone wore, figuratively and literally. We had people walking around in khaki shorts and flip-flops with tattoos up and down their arms. That would have never been seen in the Tribune tower five years ago. It was really about loosening up a very tight operation that was really a bunch of journalists, and I don’t say that in a bad way, but Randy and Marc were trying to change a culture that had been the same for decades. It wasn’t going to happen overnight and it wasn’t going to happen easily. A lot of the extreme things (and innuendos) that were thrown out there were blown out of proportion. They were done for reasons to just try and loosen up the mentality.
As VP of Content overseeing the digital Tribune properties, what were the biggest challenges you encountered in adapting to this new world?
Initially it was acceptance. I didn’t have a digital background outside of what I did in radio and if you look at the web traffic, the newspaper usually rules the market followed by TV and then radio. So as much success as I thought I had in DC and Tampa with Clear Channel it pales in comparison to the type of traffic the digital brands at Tribune and some of the TV properties do.
So the question became, “Why is this guy overseeing the content on all these brands when he doesn’t know anything about what we do and how we do it.” It goes back to changing the culture and looking at it from a consumer’s standpoint. It was trying to create a two-way communication point with the audience. As opposed to reporting the news, it was having a conversation with the audience whether it was in print, online, on TV, or on the radio. There were some great things we were able to accomplish in Chicago. The ChicagoBreakingNews.com site was something new that was really starting to get off the ground as I arrived, and a hyper local blog called ChicagoNow.com, which is hundreds of local blogs all in one place, covering any topic you could think of relative to Chicago.
There were some really cool things we were able to launch that I had a role in. But I must say there are some extremely bright digital minds at Tribune Company especially in the Chicago properties. It just blew me away. It was neat to be part of what was going on there at the time.
What was your most prominent achievement at Tribune?
Escalating to Chief Operating Officer of Interactive was a great accomplishment for me making me Marc’s direct right hand man. It’s not what I went in there for. There were people between Marc and I on the tree when I first arrived, and then over the time I was there, the last 6-7 months, I was basically the Operations Manager of Tribune Interactive. We had a lot of fun and were able to get many great things accomplished. We were able to redesign all of our newspaper.com websites among other things.
You’ve been programming radio for two decades, what are the biggest changes in the medium today versus your early days as a PD?
There’s the obvious which is less of us doing more. There’s essentially one PD over multiple stations. Back in the Power Pig days we had an OM, PD, APD, MD and AMD. Now you have a PD and MD for two stations and that’s it. The number of bodies has clearly been cut down. It’s just the way we do business in general. Our days are clearly busier than they were 15-20 years ago.
When I first arrived at the Power Pig I always thought I was living a lifestyle, not working at a job. I still like to believe that’s true, but it’s a little less of a lifestyle and a little more of a job these days. I still enjoy what I do. I still enjoy the creative process. There’s less of the fluff off factor that you had 15 years ago where we could decide to bring in the part-timer and have him do the mid-day show and we’d go play softball for three hours with the staff in the middle of day, which is virtually unheard of these days.
The responsibility that programmers have these days is much greater. We’re being challenged to be fiscally responsible. We have to look for more ways for the station to make money, where back in the day it was more like, “Look, I just got you and an 11 share, you figure out how to sell it.” It’s not that way anymore. I feel like I have skin in the game in creating wins on the ratings andrevenue sides, as well as the digital side.
You did all the due diligence for PPM set up in DC prior to the arrival of the methodology, but didn’t have the chance to actually operate in the PPM environment until your arrival in St. Louis. If you were preparing a market today for incoming PPM, would it differ from your days in DC?
I don’t think so. In DC, we had the benefit of stations in Philadelphia and Houston doing PPM prior to our market launch and they helped blaze a great trail for us with a lot of guidelines. That was when the Clear Channel “Less Is More” initiative was launched, another blown out of proportion situation where everyone took in literally. You heard the stories like “You can’t talk for more than seven seconds and things of that nature. We kind of blazed our own trail in DC. We had a lot of meetings with the talent and talked about how we wanted to attack our new world in PPM and how we needed to be brief, but focused, and have a plan, purpose and payoff for everything we did whether it was a break on the air, an on-air promotion or an appearance. It’s one of the things I used to preach to my staff and still do today. If you ask my staffers about the three P’s, they’ll recite: plan, purpose, payoff.
A lot of the philosophies I had as DC was rolling into PPM are still true today, although I think I’ve gotten smarter having worked in a PPM environment. I do think I had DC set up nicely but they were very fortunate to get an amazing replacement for me in Thea Mitchem, who is a DC homegrown and already had a couple of years of PPM under her belt in Philadelphia. So for as well as I set DC up, Thea was able to take everything we had set up and execute the plan, a plan she was part of given her prior market experience.
How much has PPM altered your thinking and strategy about programming content?
It goes back to being concise and having a focus. I remind my staff in St. Louis constantly, especially the Y98 morning show (Phillips & Company), if you’re not there in two minutes then you’ve already lost your audience. They’re just not going to be there for you after that. We can’t be doing those 7, 8, 9 minute breaks. Although I do feel I’m cheating at times with everything we have to look at in PPM. It’s a little bit of analysis paralysis between looking at meter counts and media monitors and gauging audience reaction. You see when people tune in and tune out and what they tune into. Among PD Advantage, the weeklies, the monthlies, etc. there’s a lot of data out there you can review and really pinpoint what you need to work on.
Given all of these instant metrics, is radio at times overreacting in the decision making process with knee-jerk decisions and becoming a little more clinical and less of an art form?
I think to a degree. The analysis paralysis is clearly there. You can overanalyze yourself into a really bad radio station. I believe there’s a difference between being driven by research and being research driven. You have to use all of the available tools to help give you the best idea as to where to go, but you can’t overreact to an Mscore that goes from an extreme positive like a plus 6 to a minus 1. You have to give it another week and see if there’s a trend taking you in that direction.
Arbitron doesn’t have it down pat yet either with PPM. There’s a lot of indexing that’s way off in a lot of key demos and a lot of radio stations. In St. Louis, females 25-34, which should be the heart and soul of our Hot AC (Y98) is indexing in the low seventies, which means whoever has meters in that pool is getting weighted up to 100 and Y98 doesn’t have a ton of P1 meters inthere. We cume them all but we don’t necessarily have a lot of hot P1 meters in that demo right now and that should really be the sweet spot of the radio station. We need to understand who’s in there before you overreact.
You can’t overreact to any of the data that’s out there on a day to day, week to week, month to month basis. You have to know what’s in the core. It’s just like looking at music research. You can’t react to the numbers until you look at the qualifier information and understand who’s in the test that week. You really have to dig down to the core of the data that’s being provided to you. It all starts at the root.
You were always one step ahead as a programmer in applying digital concepts to radio, what do you feel are the most effective digital platforms today for radio?
It has to be on-demand. It has to be what they want, where they want it and when they want it. You need to be in that game. Getting an iphone app, an Android app or whatever other app is out there is imperative so that when they want you, you’re there. It’s really key. CBS has just pushed out a bunch of apps for our CBS local.com sites. We just pushed out an Andriod app for KMOX in St. Louis which is a great app. Our radio.com app is also great so that when people want us on the go they can have us on their smart phone. Again, it’s all about being there when they want you.
What do you feel are the most productive digital revenue stream options for radio?
Once we figure that out we will know the future of radio and the most important digital areas of radio to pursue. That’s what we talked about a lot at Tribune. How can we monetize this digital revolution? The newspaper out-billed the website tenfold and we see where radio stations out-bill their digital counterparts fifteen-fold. How can we change that balance so that more money’s going into digital, not necessarily less on air, but how can we increase the digital side because that’s where everyone says it’s going. We haven’t figured it out yet and I don’t have the answers, but until we figure it out radio will keep losing revenue over time. We need to figure ways to get it into digital.
What did you take away from your Tribune experience that allowed you to expand the depth of knowledge and opportunities in the digital fields for radio?
I understood more how an interactive operation works, with product development and quality assurance and working with digital developers. It’s a pretty intensive operation on the interactive side. As a whole, I worked with some great people in Chicago. Tony Hunter, the publisher of Tribune, was a great mentor for me in many respects. He taught me a lot about strategy, goals and tactics and how to filter those down. I owe him a lot for what he was able to teach me in the short time he and I worked together. There’s a lot of very intelligent people at Tribune Company and I hope once they get out of bankruptcy they’ll be able to spread their wings and fly a little bit more.
You’ve worked at three radio companies during your career. Can you contrast the cultures of the companies and what impressed you most about each of them?
At Jacor it was that out-of-the-box thinking, that bigger than life three ring circus entertain the audience mentality. Again I couldn’t have bought the education I got during my Jacor days. Clear Channel was really about buttoned up management, systems and the pure depth they have everywhere, and the always forward thinking mentality. The culture at CBS is very people oriented and somewhat autonomous. We make our decisions for St. Louis in St. Louis. We keep corporate involved. (SVP) Greg Strassell, (CEO) Dan Mason and (EVP) Scott Herman are involved with the decisions we make, but they really do give us the autonomy. It’s kind of like, your bat, your ball, your butt, which is refreshing.
Are you paying attention to some of your competitors’ initiatives that may be good for the overall medium of radio?
After the big iHeartradio.com concert recently I think everyone kind of has their eye on that app and what’s next for it and how CC’s going to monetize it. That’s certainly on my radar. What they’ve done so far impresses me, but what’s next, that’s what I’m looking for.
Is it more advantageous today to operate from a position of being a larger radio group in aggregating all a company’s resources and leveraging that with advertisers and consumers?
With CBS we have radio, outdoor, television; it’s very similar to the Clear Channel structure. Cumulus is now obviously a much larger radio group. I do believe you want to have that diverse portfolio so that if one of your divisions is down another one can help prop the company up. I tend to think we’ll see that type of structure going forward.
How much programmer interaction is encouraged at CBS and how do you feel you benefit from the intense programming environment?
The format captain team is a great resource for any of our PD’s along with Greg Strassell and Dan Mason too. Even Scott Herman is a former programmer. We have a ton of programming resources at CBS and the lines are always open for communication.
[eQB Content by Fred Deane]
