If quality experience is the litmus test for a successful career, Bill Figenshu is at the top of his class. For three and a half decades Fig has held corporate positions of responsibility while simultaneously distinguishing himself with his entrepreneurial spirit. It’s no wonder he was destined to open his own company and ply his trade the best way he knows how, hands-on and aggressive thinking.
By Fred Deane
Bill Figenshu
Bill Figenshu has been navigating the radio industry for quite some time now and is having a fantastic voyage. He’s held top exec posts for broadcast outfits like CBS/Infinity, Chancellor Media, Citadel Broadcasting and Viacom Radio. As the latter’s President, “Fig” developed the company from scratch creating stations like KYSR/LA, KBSG/Seattle, KNDD/Seattle, WMZQ/Washington DC, KIKK/Houston, WLIT/Chicago, and WLTW/New York. From a $150 million investment, Viacom sold the company in 1997 for $1.1 billion, the highest amount of money ever paid for seven FM radio stations at the time.
In July of 2005, Fig successfully formed FigMedia1, offering a vast array of broadcast clients guidance and strategic planning in cluster and station operations, as well as talent development, branding and positioning, and the creation of new products. He also serves as the President of Station Development & Operations for Peak Broadcasting which serves Fresno, California and Boise, Idaho. Peak is a “new generation” radio broadcaster formed in 2006 to super-serve local, growing communities throughout the western U.S.
As Fig surveys the lay of the land of today’s radio industry, there are a few things he likes and a few things he’s not terribly fond of. He may not have seen it all, but he’s certainly seen enough!
Let’s visit a topic dear to your heart; live and local radio. Is radio discouraging young talent from pursuing long-term careers in radio by diminishing local job ops in favor of national talent and programming importation?
We certainly are, but more importantly we’re discouraging young people from even coming into our industry. If we don’t stop cutting people and we don’t make it attractive for college grads and other young people to even consider radio, we’ll have big problems. If you’re a very bright and creative 23-24 year-old and you have a career choice of radio or an Internet start-up, which is the more attractive option? The answer’s pretty obvious.
Next, we have to stop cutting local staff and eliminating jobs. A radio station has to be a fun factory. We know that local listeners and advertisers love to be connected to the community. So, on one hand we know great local talent is worth more money to us and pays off in revenue much more than “songs in a row,” that’s no great revelation. Yet we continue to block the path of entry into this business as a creative and dynamic medium. As a result it’s not an attractive career option for young people.
How do we reverse the trend?
If radio’s advantage is local, and 90% of its revenues are local, it should be staffed and managed locally. Top down management from thousands of miles away can’t compete with locally talented management and staff. I’m not suggesting 1980’s staffing, but having full power radio stations that operate as 50,000 watt MP3 players with no community presence or creative focus rarely wins. There has to be a gateway into the business, and it’s not just all about jocks sending out recordings of shows they did in college or the small markets they worked in. There are many places today to find talent. It’s on YouTube, blogs, and a myriad of other online sites. There are a lot of creative people out there, but when you talk to them about radio; it has to be an attractive proposition. People have to think of our industry as a dynamic place to work, otherwise they won’t want to choose us as a career path. Finally, creative company leadership must extend beyond accounting. We are not playing to win; we are playing to “not lose.”
How much of a role does public relations play in this mix?
PR and branding have a role. I would love to see company leaders speak publicly about the benefits of their respective companies beyond pacing, sales figures and debt structure. When was the last time you saw anyone at the top levels reach out to make the business attractive, whether it’s the leaders of companies, the NAB or the RAB? Recently I spoke to a group of people in the medical profession in NYC. I told them that radio has over 250 million listeners in a typical week. They were shocked! The first question I get from a well-known surgeon was, ‘Didn’t satellite radio kill local radio years ago?’ There’s a public perception that satellite radio, and now Pandora, have many more listeners than terrestrial radio, which of course isn’t true.
How are we marketing ourselves to say we’re still a very dynamic business with 250 million listeners a week, that we pass 100% of the homes, cars, and computers in this country? Pandora, satellite, iTunes, AOL Radio, Slacker, Jango, and others would kill for our metrics. They talk about their product. We talk about pacing vs. last year. We do so many great things every day in radio, but the burden of positive perception and leadership must extend beyond Jerry Lee (WBEB/Philadelphia). It’s time to start bragging about our stations, the content we create, and the people who work in our business. Where is the passion?
What solution do you propose?
It has to start at local levels and be talked about at the national level. There has to be examples (and there are) where new shows and new content are being developed. It’s a very small number, but you can find one or two places where stations are reaching out and doing dynamic things for advertisers, and the community at large. At one of our Peak Broadcasting clusters in Fresno we hired five local on-air full time personalities last year. These are new jobs, not replacements. But you can’t just hire average talent. They have to be good. Being local alone is not enough, being good and local is. It really is about investing in local outlets. Every local cluster should have a separate online/digital platform that is separately staffed and managed. Your gateway to entrance in radio for young people should be through the local cluster web portal.
Why aren’t radio groups getting more proactive in recruiting young people into the business?
Someone has to present an incubator opportunity for creative young people to come into our business. It’s not going to start on a group wide basis and it’s not going to start in hundreds of markets. Simply take one market and build the model. But if we don’t start attracting young people we’re in trouble. We’re already two generations behind. We’re already seeing a 4 to 5% decline of AQH, but it’s mostly in the younger demographics. Radio was managed, programmed, and even sold by young people. No more. Quick, name 10 national or local rising radio stars under the age of 35? (Out of 14,000 local stations.)
Given the magnitude of the recession, can you rationalize why product and personnel decisions were made in the spirit of efficiency, if not necessity?
I realize there’s an issue with financing, declining revenues and huge debt loads. But the problem is we’re going to see even more erosion in AQH unless we stop cutting local people and start looking for and developing local air talent. The shortage is getting critical.
As an industry, there’s no doubt a decade ago we overpaid for stations, and this pesky recession has caused everyone to cut. I get it. But now that we’re starting to see a gradual recovery, we have to behave differently. The good old days are certainly not coming back and we’re not going to see the revenue growth we saw in ‘97-98. There’s simply not an economy that will support it, and now we have social media and other digital assets that are serious competitors. Now that the industry has made all the cuts, we have to begin operating at a level where we have to start applying creative energies. It doesn’t mean we have to add a lot of people. We just have to start one at a time and at the entry levels, and provide an opportunity for new talent, on-air and off.
How damaging is it to radio’s unique qualities when you reduce the art, spontaneity and human resource factors of radio programming and presentation?
It eats away at the very core of radio’s foundation. It’s not about being in the radio business anymore. We’re in the audio content business. Either way, these principles apply. We need creative resources to foster a dynamic locally appealing product and a dynamic environment for people to want to join.
We really have to get beyond the radio business thing. It’s all about audio content delivery. Radio is a tower and transmitters. Audio content is something very, very different. It’s obvious now that people don’t care how they consume their entertainment as long as it fits the demands of their lifestyle. Radio needs to realize we don’t need to care how they are consuming our product either. If I can listen to your show on my car iPod because I downloaded it, does that really matter? Or do I have to hear it in real time on your AM or FM signal? In less than nine months, my client Norm Goldman, a national talk host, is getting over 60,000 monthly downloads to his show. Consumers are not waiting for a local radio affiliate to broadcast the show. They’re in charge of their listening. Anyone with a TiVo understands that. Does the morning show start at 6am, or when the consumer’s podcast starts playing on their MP3 player?
Don’t you feel the industry has been conforming to the on-demand model where technology has placed the consumer in the driver’s seat?
The consumer is the programmer. Radio is making strides on the tech platform front but who knows it? I recently finished a research project and was very surprised to find that 30-40% of the women I interviewed wake up to the alarm clock on their cell phones. They’re waking up to cell phones because that’s the source of most of their audio content, communication, and information. We know that consumers live on their cell phones. We must be where the people are.
How can radio optimize today’s new tech and social networking platforms?
Social networks are huge for radio. We must thoroughly understand them and apply their uses. We still have an unfair advantage with 250 million people listening weekly to terrestrial radio stations yet the power of the social networks is extraordinary. Sometimes I see these radio Facebook pages and wonder if we really understand this stuff. It’s a big opportunity for radio to harness its power in areas that are far-reaching with consumers today.
The industry has to change this notion of protectionism. We’ve seen it fail in the movie industry where they don’t want movies distributed online. We’ve certainly seen it in the music business. We have to get out of this notion of protectionism and get our content in as many platforms as possible. It’s not just about AM and FM. We are in the local audio/video content creation business.
Why didn’t radio gravitate (if not create) digital social networks sooner since its history dictates that the medium traditionally was one of the first local social networks? Isn’t the concept in radio’s DNA?
I continue to ask myself that very same question. Why wasn’t that us? There’s MySapce and Facebook, why didn’t radio develop these social platforms first? We were the ones who already had the built in listeners. Why did the CEO of Pandora recognize what we didn’t? We just didn’t want to address it until it was too late to innovate. We knew it. We were the first to develop it. We were the ultimate social network. The next opportunity is to develop social networks that are local. It’ll be another challenge because it’s going to require talented people who know how to create, write code and understand algorithms, and that’s just not a place radio is comfortable with. But it’s going to have to be or else.
Are we far off from developing local social networks with an emphasis on local communities?
I’m actually surprised no one’s come out with a local version of Pandora yet. Think about this…You’re driving to work listening to a New York version of Pandora programmed by local consumers. Or you see a billboard that says ‘Pandora Country Radio, Commercial Free All Day at Work.’ Do you heave in the car or do you wait to be sick in the office?! Those kinds of things would scare the heck out of me. And to think we have the ability to do those things. It’s not terribly difficult. We allowed Pandora to come in on our turf, and there really has been no response at all (that I’m aware of) from the radio industry. P.S., Pandora local sales are next.
Couldn’t have (or can) HD Radio conceptually be terrestrial’s response to a localized Pandora approach?
I have an HD radio in my car, but if you talk to many people in the industry unless they have the free tuner you get, most don’t even own an HD radio tuner in their cars. So, if we’re not buying and listening to them, how can we expect consumers to? Also, because of the severe reductions in personnel, we don’t even know what to put on our main channels yet alone develop prospective ideas for HD channels. Could HD be a youth gateway to radio? Indeed!
How do you assess the overall HD Radio initiative today? Is there still value for radio?
There’s only value in something if you believe you should be there and invest creative resources. It’s good that the FCC has allowed operators to double and triple HD power. The challenge over the next five years is to put in place content that is meaningful so people will buy HD radios. Just going HD is not enough. No one is going to complain about a well-received, well processed analog signal. They complain about crappy songs, bad DJ’s, and too many commercials. HD cannot be about traditional radio.
There are tons of opportunities but it’s not for the traditional broadcasting model. For the HD2 channels we know micro formats could be attractive channels. We’re thinking broadcasting with HD, when the opportunity is for narrowcasting, which would give people a reason to go out and by the HD tuners. It’s getting late as consumers are trending to all things cellular. We’ve sold 3 million HD radios in the last ten years, which equals the number of iPhones purchased just last month!
Given iBiquity’s availability over a decade ago and the strong position of radio margins at the time, why wasn’t HD Radio perceived as an investment in the medium’s future with more pronounced development and marketing efforts?
The bottom line is money. At about $75,000 per station, if you have 100 radio stations, the math’s not very favorable. Plus, there really weren’t any formats that anybody felt strongly about putting on. We have to put something interesting and different on HD to make it worth finding. We need some non-traditional, out-of-the-box type content that will motivate people to buy HD tuners. But radio is a very provincial business and hates change. I can give you a profitable HD opportunity now, but I’m saving it for my clients. Write me at fig@figmedia1.com and I’ll give you a hint.
What do you perceive to be the most critical areas of radio group infrastructure that will allow the medium to grow and improve going forward?
On the technology side most major companies are well equipped to understand and develop web sites, streaming initiatives, and podcasts, which all benefit radio’s brand and product. The biggest concern is the creative side. At the end of the day, this is a creative business and we shouldn’t be selling ourselves short.
If I were to put the number one issue on the table today it is that we’re not developing the next generation of content creators which means we’re not going to develop the next generation of content listeners. Look at the biggest personalities in Talk, Rock, Urban, CHR, and Country. In many of these formats there are no leading personalities under the age of 35. We are hard pressed to find people under the age of 50 who have big morning shows. I’m not suggesting that the people on the air should be gone. It circles back to there is no pathway to develop youth and we’re not making the business attractive enough for the best and brightest.
What is radio’s strongest asset?
The biggest weapon we have is our relationship with local advertisers. 90% of the advertising in the country is local and we have a connection with them. Wouldn’t Google, Yahoo or Pandora love to have a relationship with local advertisers? They want what we have, but we have to put things on the air that a local advertiser will get excited about. Local creative promotions, community events, and half price deals that generate new revenue are being developed by companies like Premity (www.premity.com). They will fund the return of youth into this business. But we’re not going to do it by just switching on the voice-track and expecting people to show up and be responsive. We can’t sell rankers, and try to steal money from other stations. The future is being a part of the social network revolution that exists on every platform. The transformation of radio from AM and FM analog broadcasting to a creative local content developer with diverse distribution, youthful participation, and a contemporary perception over every platform must begin at the top, middle and bottom.
[eQB Content by Fred Deane]
