Steve Masters
Editor in Chief and Radio Host, Steve Masters
As one of the forerunners of the Modern Rock format, Live 105/San Francisco trailblazer Steve Masters approached music and radio as an out-of-the-box thinker. Fast forward to today and that same passion that propelled him through the format’s earliest years is hurling him through a newer, massively consumed medium – video gaming.
Utilizing his razor sharp radio and production chops and his drive to spread the good word, Masters has created a very unique and effective business model. His marketing and promotion company,CCCP, executes national radio promotions for video game companies, most recently for Rockstar’s half-a-billion (worldwide) selling Grand Theft Auto 4.
GottGame hones his broadcast skills and remains the only radio feature focusing solely on video games. The two-minute segment is syndicated nationally to over 100 stations across a multitude of formats.
We caught up with Steve recently and asked about his hottest new venture.
So what got you started in the video gaming arena?
I always thought that the video games would be a great prize because, at the time, radio was giving away CD six packs and movie premiere passes, DVDs for Name That Tune type contests, or doing morning show contesting. They always had lame prizes. I thought video games would be a better prize, so I started contacting a lot of the publishers, and a lot of them knew who I was because the game industry is here in the Bay Area, so a lot of the big managers, the product managers, the decision makers, grew up listening to me. Now they’re 30-something managers. So I started doing national video game promotions through on-air giveaways. My company is called CCCP — Consolidated Conceptual Communications and Promotions. And we’ve very successful. We handle all the stuff for EA. We just recently did Grand Theft Auto 4 for Rockstar and promotedMajor League Baseball 2K8. We handle the Madden Challenge every year and hundreds of other video game promotion projects. They’re all different and they’re all fun.
While I was growing that business, and while I was doing the midday show at Live 105 in 2002, I had the idea to put together a video game update show on what’s hot in video gaming. I know production; I know how radio works; and I get all these games all the time. So I just started. The very next day I went to Guitar Center and I bought about $300 worth of gear. I would just hook up all the video games systems through the board in stereo and play the video games and record the audio while I was playing them. Then I would pick the three top games that I thought Men 18-34 would want to hear about: Racing games, Shooter games, Action Adventures, sports titles. Primarily the selection process is based on the audience of Alternative Rock, Active Rock, Sports Talk radio, and Top 40. Men 18-34 is what I’m going after when I select the games for each week’s show.
The first supporters right out-of-the-box: Dave Wellington at Extreme (KXTE) in Vegas, when he was there, Mark Hamilton at KNRK/Portland and Sean Demery at Live 105. That first week I started doing it, everybody took a chance. From there we’ve grown it. It’s been really successful. We offer it market exclusive, and we have my version, which is available for one FM station and one AM station, and we also offer GottGame Urban, which is hosted by KMEL’s Big Von. We are also looking to expand to other formats.
How do stations get involved?
Here’s how it works for affiliates. We give the thing away for free. There’s no barter; we don’t ask for any time back. Occasionally, when we get a sponsor, we’ll have a ten-second mention inside the feature. We send it out digitally every Tuesday at 12:00 P.M. Pacific to all of the affiliates. Lots of stations have also sponsored it locally.
How often do they run it?
Each station is different. Indie 103.1 runs it seven times a week in all different dayparts. We have a lot of stations that run it numerous times. Chris Williams, down at Project 961 in Atlanta has it scattered all over his station as well. And Chris Ripley at KXTE runs it six times over the weekend, so he’ll start it on Friday, run it a couple times there in different dayparts, and a couple of times on Saturday and a couple times Sunday.
I would imagine that something like this on a male-targeted 18-34 year old station would be just as good as a hit song; very little tune out.
Especially now, with the statistics being what they are: almost 80% of Men 18 – 34 have at least one video game console; a lot of them have two. Video gaming has become the home entertainment medium of choice for Men 18 – 34. Also, GottGame.com is about 30,000 uniques a month now. It’s promoted at the end of the radio feature. We do our giveaways there and we started to expand the entertainment content on it where we have weekly TV shows.
What really makes the radio show unique amongst all the podcasting competition out there?
We’re the only one that produce a major market sounding show formatted for radio. I want everybody who tunes in to be able to sit through it even if you’re not a gamer. So, when I sit down to write the show, obviously it’s all mainstream console games, primarily it’s all games that people know about or want to know about. I try to word it in such a way that even if your wife is in the car with you, she listens to it and gets something out of it. It would be great someday to do a national call-in show, that features the producers of the games, musicians, and questions about the latest games and consoles. We shall see…
For more info about GottGame, contact Steve Masters at steve@gottgame.com or 415-282-4466. To inquire about becoming an affiliate, contact Director of Affiliate Relations, Kate Wolfson atkatew@gottgame.com or (415) 282-4466.
To hear GottGame Radio, go to www.gottgame.com. Make sure you have your speakers turned on. The latest feature will start to play automatically.
** QB Content by Mike Bacon **
