To say that Jon Zellner has seen it all may be an understatement, but there really is something to be said for the depth and versatility that traces throughout his career. As a senior programming executive for CCM&E he continues to attack big challenges and increase his work capacity at an admirable pace. Programming has become such an integral part of the fabric of his professional life and the opportunity he has to share his wisdom and exercise his guidance on countless fellow managers is a huge asset to his company.
Jon Zellner
If the name of the game these days in programming is diversity, innovation and foresight, then place Jon Zellner, given his background and current job description, in the upper echelon of the class. Jon’s a well seasoned programmer who is constantly thinking ahead and keeping in step with his company’s vision path of continued forward progress.
Zellner’s experience runs the senior programming gamut in both the terrestrial and satellite realms. After OM, PD and on-air stops at WNCI and WXGT Columbus, KZZP and KOY-FM Phoenix, WKZL Greensboro, KTHT Fresno, and KYIS Oklahoma City, he hopped over to CBS Radio for a flourishing nine year run. During his CBS tenure he served as VP of Top 40 & Hot AC Programming and OM/PD for WBMX and WODS Boston, while getting his CBS start in Kansas City as VP of Programming for KMXV, KSRC, KFKF and KBEQ.
Prior to Clear Channel, Zellner spent four and a half years as SVP and EVP of Programming for XM, then Sirius XM, overseeing music, entertainment and broadcast operations. He joined CCM&E in June of 2009, and in his current position as SVP of Programming oversees 200+ radio stations across 45 markets in the Northeast, Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions.
In your dealings with several markets and clusters, what is your systematic approach to assessing the markets you’re involved with?
Assessing the results certainly is simpler than assessing how we got there and where we should go. Revenue and ratings speak for themselves. In situations where a cluster leads the market, it’s almost always because of strong people and iconic brands. So, the short answer is that each market is unique, but the basic principles of success apply to everyone and that means having the right structure, the right people, utilizing all of Clear Channel Media and Entertainment’s assets and insuring that everyone understands the goals of the cluster and the company.
What are the most enjoyable aspects of your job when getting involved with the various market clusters?
Working with the people in our company is the best part of this job. That’s what makes CCM+E so special. We simply have the most knowledgeable, creative and innovative people in media and (SVP of Operations) Kevin LeGrett and I love hosting “all-hands meetings” when we visit markets to insure that everyone, from local management to part-time board ops, understand what’s happening in the company and has the chance to feel like we’re all part of something bigger than just radio.
How much interaction do you have with all the principals in each market, and what have you learned most from some of the areas that you weren’t that involved with in the past?
With the number of clusters, stations and people, it’s not easy to get face time with everyone when I visit a market, although I do respond to every e-mail. That’s why the all-hands meetings are important. I always try to make time to meet individually with all the PDs, key talent, sales managers and the digital and promotions teams. While I never worked in radio sales, I have always recognized the importance of the programming and sales teams working together, and that’s something I stress consistently to all departments in our clusters. Every programming decision we make ultimately should be designed to generate revenue. The challenge is for programming to work with sales on protecting the integrity of our brands while maximizing any and all revenue opportunities. I also believe that many of us who have been in the industry for a long time are just starting to learn about digital and the growth opportunities there. It’s exciting to hire people with little to no “radio experience” with the understanding that they recognize how our business is changing and that our brands are being used differently every day. CCM+E is a “content” company and how our listeners access our content trumps the importance of the device it’s accessed on.
How to you prioritize the needs of each of the markets and clusters?
The 80/20 rule tends to work best. On average, 80% of revenue comes from the top 20% of our brands, so while every brand is important to me, I try to insure that our regional programmers focus their energy where the ROI is greatest. That said, it gives me great satisfaction to jump on iHeartRadio and listen to one of our smaller market stations that sounds larger than life while also sounding local and custom-designed for their community.
CC has prided itself in its mentorship program over the past year or so and we’ve seen many CC programmers get opportunities to move to larger markets with more responsibilities. How much of a role have you played in this process?
It’s exciting to watch talented people move up in our company and the mentorship program we launched a year ago has proven that we not only have strong people, but we have a system in place where good people have the opportunity to achieve their goals while learning from seasoned and talented managers. It’s crucial for our industry to continue to develop talent and find the next superstars. (SVP of Programming) John Ivey has done great work with some of our younger CHR PDs and all of our SVPs and brand managers recognize the importance of building a farm team. In one of my market visits last year, I heard an aircheck of a woman working as a part-time Business Manager who just wanted to be on the air. I thought she sounded fabulous and now she’s doing afternoon drive for us in a larger market and voice tracking a few shifts for several other clusters. There are many examples of people with raw talent from both small and large markets, who began as interns or part-timers, worked hard and are now high level executives in our company.
Promoting from within also enhances company morale; do you see the residual effect these promotions have on younger programmers?
Definitely. I would always rather promote someone who is passionate about what they do, wants to continue to learn, who’s humble and gets excited about coming to work every day, rather than someone who lives in the past and constantly talks about the way things used to be. I believe that when your memories outnumber your goals, it’s time to move on. Positive attitudes are infectious and though our business has changed dramatically and will continue to change, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing. That said, the more seasoned programmers in our industry have a responsibility to coach, educate and inspire good people who are just starting out in our business. And, because many of us program brands targeted at younger listeners, it’s imperative that we have a sense of what those young people want and understand the lifestyle even though we may not be living it ourselves.
Jon and Rihanna go
cheek-to-cheek.
Given the array of formats you deal with it appears the lines of division among contemporary music formats are closer than ever, how much of a challenge does this present to the clusters you are dealing with these days?
Every competitive situation is different, but I have always believed that matching and exceeding listener expectations is the most common trait amongst successful radio brands. It’s absolutely important that our brands stay in their lanes, but I would always discourage a station from playing a non-hit just because their sister station plays it. When many Hot ACs were classified as Modern ACs and afraid to play any song without a guitar, they created a wall and limited their potential because they relied on a certain sound to justify airplay. Ultimately, what ended up happening was that music cycles changed and they ended up playing nameless, faceless artists who happened to make music that had the right sound, but didn’t sell or test. When Hot ACs, Rhythmic CHRs, mainstream ACs and even Alternative stations play hits, they may sound closer to CHRs in the ears of programmers, but usually their ratings increase. Programmers tend to over-think certain things a lot! Bottom line is that successful brands are built around simply playing songs the target listener wants to hear most – hits. The way to build loyalty though goes way past the music. Turning listeners into “fans” and building a true coalition is a combination of a whole bunch of little things done right, including entertaining talent, memorable branding, interesting promotions, exciting contests and a dynamic digital strategy.
As guitar and Alternative centric as Pop and Hot AC have become over the past year, how essential is it to properly separate the music and flow in efforts to avoid being too one dimensional?
Many years ago, Guy Zapoleon taught me everything I know about music cycles, rotations, analyzing research and scheduling. I couldn’t be more excited that he’s part of CCM+E and I get the opportunity to work with him today. CHR has always won when it recognizes music cycles and compensates accordingly. There absolutely is a science to creating the perfect balance and flow of any radio brand. Guy’s basic principles of the “three lane highway” ring true in any format where the music always comes back to the center lane after every other song. Creating the proper sound codes in whatever music scheduling software system you use are crucial to create a consistent listening experience for the target listener. I always stress ”around the world in 20 minutes” meaning that anyone should be able to listen to any radio brand for 20 minutes and get a complete sense of who they are, what they do and how they fit in with the competitive landscape of the market.
How do you envision trends in music evolving this year?
It’s exciting to see Dance music take off again and watch CCM+E embrace the trend with the launch of Evolution 101.7 in Boston. I’m so happy to see Dylan Sprague thriving in our company after working with him for so many years in Kansas City. iHeartRadio is such an incredible platform and gives us the opportunity to test music and formats to reduce risk and insure that we’re always ahead of where music is going. We’re doing the same thing with Comedy. After seeing the success of comedy on iHeart Radio, we launched it as a format on a couple dozen terrestrial stations last year.
Jon and Taylor Swift.
It’s been admirable what Clear Channel has done over the past few years regarding new initiatives and decisive moves in the digital fields. What excites you the most about your company’s forward thinking approach to these areas?
What excites me is the fact that we recognize that our content and our brands define us as a company. Our mission statement is for us to be wherever our listeners are with the products and services they expect and want. The iHeartRadio digital platform brings incremental listening to Clear Channel’s 239 million monthly listeners, the largest audience of any media outlet in the U.S. iHeartRadio provides yet another platform for Clear Channel listeners to access their favorite radio stations, custom stations and non-audio content in an all-in-one digital product. Last year alone, over 660 million custom stations were created by listeners of iHeart Radio. We absolutely believe in the future growth of digital.
Radio is still an effective and cost efficient buy for advertisers. Is the medium competing enough with cross media rivals in maximizing its share of the overall revenue pie?
Radio still reaches 93% of America every week. That number hasn’t budged for decades, regardless of every gadget that has come along and caused “experts” to predict our imminent demise. The frustrating statistic is that we only generate 7% of the dollars spent on media. That means it’s on US to tell our story. Television advertising costs have tripled in the last twenty years, yet the #1 most watched network today is the DVR, which has caused 81% of America to fast-forward through the commercials. Newspapers used to reach 81% of America every day. That number has dropped to under 40%, but there is still an inordinate number of dollars spent on newspaper ads, [AA1] not to mention the yellow pages. We need to do a better job of showing companies who use media that radio advertising really generates results. Rather than focusing on taking a larger share of the radio pie, we should focus on getting a larger share of the media buy and using success stories to prove the power of our personalities and the strength of our brands.
Jon and Tom Poleman
with Jennifer Lopez.
You’ve had a long, productive relationship with the music industry. CC has done a lot in this area of cultivating premium opportunities to showcase today’s recording artists. What have you experienced to be the more successful artist programs CC has embarked on?
(President, National Programming Platforms) Tom Poleman, (President, Entertainment Partnerships) John Sykes and the National Programming team have done an incredible job of re-writing the playbook between CCM+E and the music industry. Our Artist Integration Program (AIP) has proven to be extremely successful in helping launch successful projects and careers for Fun, Gotye, The Wanted and many others. We have opportunities for the AIP on the terrestrial and the digital platforms as well as many other possibilities and platforms for artists and labels to break new music, whether it’s on our FM stations, our HD2 channels or one of our unique iHeartRadio channels. Between the 38 AIPs and 276 DAIPs we did last year, Clear Channel invested over $53M worth of inventory. Also, instead of burying new music, we make it an event where superstar artists with new releases are showcased hourly in all formats on the day of release. We did 37 world premieres last year, 34 artist-focused ultimate contests which run on all of our stations and 40 iHeart Radio Theatre live performances. These performances are truly one of a kind and we’re excited about opening up our second iHeart Radio Theatre in Los Angeles later this year. We’re just as committed to working with artists, labels and managers in Country and Rock. (EVP of Programming) Clay Hunnicutt works very closely with the Nashville-based Country labels and (SVP of Programming) Brad Hardin does great work in the Rock and Alternative world.
How critical is it for the music industry to remain vibrant and profitable as a partner industry to radio?
An overwhelming majority of new music is still discovered by the public on radio, even by young people. Music is still the #1 reason why people listen to radio and CCM+E has been instrumental in re-building and re-defining the relationship between radio and the music industry. We recognize that the two industries need each other and can operate more effectively as partners. We’re excited to host the record labels twice a year in New York and Nashville and encourage them to bring us their priorities so we can help develop plans that are beneficial to both. Aligning our brands with artists that define each format and helping labels expose new music to our listeners is important to us and we have developed many win/wins recently that seem to be spreading to other media companies.
Who have been some of your mentors throughout your career and what concepts did they impart to you still have staying power?
I mentioned Guy Zapoleon earlier. I also learned a great deal about marketing and making your brand stand out from Dave Robbinswhen I worked for Nationwide Communications in the early 90s. Eric Logan at XM taught everyone on his team about the importance of managing with “love and trust” versus “fear and doubt.” I learned the most about motivating and inspiring teams fromHerndon Hasty, my longtime Market Manager in Kansas City, who truly made me happy to come to work every day. But, having the chance to work with (Chairman) Bob Pittman, (CEO) John Hogan and (President) Matt Martin at CCM+E has been nothing short of invigorating. Not a day goes by when I don’t feel energized by our leadership team and fortunate to be working amongst such a talented group of executives.
[eQB Content By Fred Deane]
