Dave Benson has a career that spans over 30 years, including some of AOR’s most prestigious call letters, but made his reputation in Triple A at the helm KBCO/Denver-Boulder as it became a market dominator in the late ’90s, before heading west to KFOG/San Francisco where he led the heritage station back to a position of prominence in the Bay Area. After KFOG didn’t renew is contract in Q2 of ’09 he landed in another significant Triple A PD position at KMTT/Seattle. In this exclusive e-QB interview, Benson talks about the trepidation of facing unemployment in the current economy, the current broadcast landscape, and keeping a station relevant in a world of ever-expanding entertainment outlets.
Dave Benson
By Jack Barton
In a career that spans over 30 years, Dave Benson spent time at some of AOR’s most prestigious call letters, including WYSP/Philadelphia and Chicago’s WLUP, before landing at SBR Media Strategies as it was emerging as the key consultancy in Triple A during the format’s infancy. It was from that position that Benson grew into one of the key programmers in the format, going on to helm KBCO/Denver-Boulder as it became a market dominator in the late ’90s, before heading west to KFOG/San Francisco where he led the heritage station back to a position of prominence in the Bay Area. With Benson’s reputation as an intelligent PD with a strong understanding of Triple A who consistently delivers results, it was a shock to most of the industry when KFOG parent company Cumulus Media didn’t renew his contract during the first half 2009. But as quickly as Benson could make plans to spend his summer traveling, Entercom called about filling the recently vacated PD chair at KMTT/Seattle. Benson joined The Mountain in August and hit the ground running, making a change in the morning show and working with the staff to re-energize one of Triple A’s premiere stations. In this exclusive e-QB interview, Benson talks about the trepidation of facing unemployment in the current economy, the current broadcast landscape, and keeping a station relevant in a world of ever-expanding entertainment outlets.
You had the experience of facing what all radio professionals fear most in the current economy when Cumulus didn’t renew your contract at KFOG earlier this year. What was your initial reaction on learning the news?
It wasn’t a big surprise. In the three years of working with Cumulus, there were years of reduced staffs, reduced budgets and reduced autonomy. Much of it was the economy forcing all radio companies to look at budgets and possible savings and to make some painful reductions. But by the time of the final year of my contract there were other mindsets and practices from the company that led me to believe that my chances of continuing with Cumulus were pretty slim. John Dickey told me in April that I’d done a great job, but they weren’t going to renew my contract which expired in late May. And that’s that.
So what thoughts go through your head facing unemployment in this economy?
I guess I had the same trepidation as anyone who’s been working in a single industry for a long period of time during an economic depression and a changing media climate. I thought about what I was going to do for a living. I was in a situation where I knew I could take some time away and recalibrate a bit. So my immediate goal was to hang out a bit, exhale, play with my dog and plan a bit of travel. I didn’t know for how long, but I knew I wanted to take a break.
Did this experience and the time away alter the way you look at the industry or the process of creating great radio?
Halloween night marked 37-years of me being in radio, and during that time I’ve taken three fairly substantial breaks. The first one was when I took a year-and-a-half, almost two years off to be Pat Metheny’s tour manager in the early ’80s. The next one I took almost two years off between The Loop and joining SBR, and I managed to get four or five months off this time. It’s a really, really healthy process and I highly recommend it. I’ve come back each time with a better, more realistic perspective.
I came back still wondering how radio is going to adapt to the changing media world and to the changing economy. How broadcasters are going to adapt to ownership with sometimes conflicting priorities. I’ve said this before; the radio business is separated right now into groups of people who are broadcasters and people who are broadcast property consolidators. I feel really lucky to have landed at a company that’s still a broadcasting company. I’m thrilled to be working for Entercom.
Can you define what that means?
There are several of the larger groups whose ultimate business plan is the buying and selling of broadcast properties with big increased valuations and the broadcasting itself is an expensive, necessary but pesky byproduct of that process. Then there are still companies run with that core value of broadcasting; the thrill and pride that goes along with being a broadcast entity that provides entertainment, information and – if you’ll pardon the expression – the magic of radio.
How does that impact what you do every day?
I’m a broadcaster. I’m not a consolidator. As much as I absolutely believe in pitching in to help modern broadcast companies survive severe economic times, and to be realistic about the structure of modern broadcasting, and to be challenged to bring new platforms in, and to give a good hard look at the way we’ve “always” done things and to see if we can do them more efficiently, there’s something pretty deflating about knowing that what your company really wants to do is sell your station. Gosh it takes the fun out of it and seriously, it’s not good for the culture.
As radio competes with so many different media and entertainment platforms, is there a way to use them to enhance the value of radio to its audience?
Yes. The second half of the question is, “Tell us how,” and I don’t have the answer. I wish I did, but finding the answer sure is fascinating. But when I began to talk to the people at Entercom, what they talked about was how to improve the process. How do we energize the communication? How do we make The Mountain a better and more interesting radio station? Those are the conversations that excite me and those are the conversations that excite any broadcaster.
So how do you make The Mountain a better and more interesting radio station?
We want The Mountain to be an interesting, successful, contemporary Seattle radio station. There were some structural changes that were discussed before my arrival and I’m still working on those. We brought in Sean Demery and we’re looking for a couple of other people to help us make The Mountain the most interesting and successful Adult Rock radio station we can, and we think Seattle’s a fascinating place to do it. Obviously (former KMTT PDs) Chris Mays, Shawn Stewart and Kevin Welch – and all the PDs through the years here – have proven there is an audience for it here, and we’re just going to continue that process.
Talk about the challenges of doing that with a station that has been successful for almost two decades.
Well, the good news is you have a heritage property; the bad news is you have a heritage property. It’s all about the tone of that sentence. I always told the good folks at KFOG that everything you say and everything you play will piss somebody off. That’s a dynamic that will happen in any radio station with a large, diverse cume. Triple A, more than any other format, is designed to sort of head off in a different musical direction fairly often. I used to call it the Science Of The Unfamiliar Position. We’re going to play a song you might not know or you might not like, but if we’ve done a good enough job through the years of really bonding with you as a listener you’ll sit with us with the expectation that the next thing we play is really going to be great for you. We are trying to figure out where the best place is for The Mountain to be musically. We’re trying to figure out where the best place is for The Mountain to be socially and culturally. We’re trying to figure out who the best people are to represent the radio station.
We made a change in the morning show recently, and that disappointed people. And in the era when everybody’s walking around with a cell phone and an e-mail apparatus in their hand, and everybody has 600 Facebook friends, you hear about it quickly when people are disappointed. But you can’t make change without changing something, and changes were called for here. I know that’s an easy thing to say and a harder thing to do. Overcoming inertia is a struggle on all levels, whether it’s personal or adapting a format for its own survival or to the industry that we’re working within. I sure know how hard it is for me.
The morning show change was a fairly big one, with a heritage talent leaving and Sean Demery, who has no Triple A background but a strong history in Alternative and CHR, taking the reins. What values and skills do you look for when making that kind of change?
When Sean was the Program Director at Live105 (KITS/San Francisco) it was one of the most creative radio stations I had ever heard. When I got to know Sean I found him to be one of the most intelligent, witty, eclectic people I’ve ever met, who is truly energized by the ideas and the execution of radio. So at that point, what more do you need? I was just looking for the best person to bring into this station to help me and teach me.
I feel very fortunate he was available. He knows the concepts of radio and he’s also been in the trenches. He’s programmed, he’s been an announcer. I’m not just bringing him in to do the morning show and leave at ten o’clock. I’m bringing him in to be one of the pillars, along with John Fisher and Shawn Stewart, of the station. He will also be part of the process of what we do on-air, on our website, in the street, and where we have dinner.
What changes have you seen in the way the audience relates to its radio stations?
You spend your whole life as a programmer trying to reduce all negatives, but then when you make a change you believe in that you know will disappoint some listeners, you take a step back and say, “Look how connected they are to what we do!” That gives me optimism. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the city of Seattle who use radio, like radio, are connected to radio, are passionate about radio, and those are the people we work for.
Has it changed? Of course. Radio is no longer the Big Kahuna. We now share the media landscape with a dizzying number of options. There are a lot of bright and shiny objects that come and go, and no one can really predict what’s going to stick and what’s going to dominate. But radio’s in play and that’s exciting!
The last decade has seen technology blur lines between local and global perspectives, which seemed to create a quandary for some radio stations. Is local perspective as important as it once was for radio?
Being “local” has always been important for radio. But today, when we program local radio stations, we have to know that the audience has instant access to a world’s worth of information and entertainment. It’s harder to bluff your way through now. If you say this is “new music” and folks have been listening to it online for a year, you lose credibility. I hope we can be a credible local source for a world view of music and information that radiates out in big circles that begin at the tower.
So it’s not that you either ignore world events or ignore anything that happens in your zip codes. It’s that you make decisions, you hope the right decisions, based on what your local community will find important and valuable.
There are stations out there that are just jukeboxes. They’re going to be part of the picture too, and PPM seems to work for some of them. My own extremely unscientific theory is that the best thing you can do to survive in the PPM world is to have the best radio station you can by playing the game as well as you can – including using “local” to your advantage, and trust that in the long run the meters will reflect the effort.
***eQB Content by Jack Barton***
