Rick Cummings has spent his entire career with Emmis Radio and he’s damn glad he has. From his early days of launching WENS/Indianapolis to his current term as President of Programming, Cummings has been a first rate radio executive at a top notch organization. Cummings and CEO Jeff Smulyan have been together for 28 years and are still matching wits and finding solutions for Emmis in the most challenging of times.
Rick Cummings
Starting out in 1981 as Emmis’ first programmer for its inaugural station in Indianapolis, WENS, Rick Cummings has seen his career take a meteoric rise as he channeled himself up through the Emmis ranks. From that initial gig in Indy, it was onto Emmis National PD in 1984, then a promotion to EVP in 1987 and finally up to President of Programming in 2002. Emmis currently owns and operates twenty-three radio stations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and St. Louis, among other markets, along with its publishing and international operations. Cummings is at the very core of the radio programming division working in tandem with local programmers and managers as they confront the continuous challenges of competing in a multifaceted media landscape under a new set of electronic measurement rules.
eQB presents excerpts from the September FMQB magazine
Cover Story: Rick Cummings, President of Programming, Emmis Radio!
“Although I’m involved in a number of areas with our properties, I keep most of my discussions these days to programming, the product and the marketing of the products. I work closely with the PD’s and managers. Because I’ve been with the company so long and served as the president of the division for several years, I have some advantages that perhaps other programming executives might not enjoy.”
“As of today we have four markets that are PPM, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and St. Louis which recently went on line with pre-currency. This area has become an important focus for us. I believe that’s how the business is substantially changing. There are times when I’ll make a visit to a market and literally spend all of my time talking about what the data’s telling us.”
“Emmis had a lot of stations that were built over time as products that worked really well in the diary world and many of those stations, specifically in New York and Los Angeles, had large ethnically concentrated audiences. Those stations have suffered disproportionately in PPM. We’ve spent a lot of time this year trying to address that and we believe we’re making progress.”
“At the beginning of this decade I would have told you that knowledge is power. Nine years later I would say sharing is power. There is more sharing of information among our programmers and markets when it comes to PPM and we’ve tried to take lessons we’ve learned in one market and spread those to as many places as we can.”
“One of the most important things we’ve learned about PPM is that for every question we believe we’ve answered there are two more that arise. We’ve been very systematic in our approach to PPM and work diligently in how we continue to study and learn the intricacies of the PPM process.”
“The LA CHR battle between AMP and KIIS has been really interesting to watch. With Power 106, we were particularly pleased about being first in our target demo when the recent monthly came out, because you have KIIS and AMP that are battling each other who are both parts of big clusters and right now, much of their battle plans have to do with who can play the least commercials. For a company like ours with one station in LA, that’s a strategy that doesn’t work.”
“Ebro at Hot 97 in New York and Jimmy Steal at Power 106 in LA have thoroughly examined everything they’re doing with their products. They’ve questioned things that at one time were never questioned. But when the other guy (NOW in NY and AMP in LA) is lean, mean and brand new, and enjoys all those halo images that accompany being a new, low spotload radio station, you really have to be on your game.”
“Traditional business, even as it has eroded dramatically, still far outstrips alternate revenue streams. A new advertising model will emerge some day and it will be some kind of 360 degree multiple platform selling touch point model, because that’s how people consume audio and video. I’d like to think we are going to successfully take our brands to multiple platforms and monetize them but I don’t know how soon or to what degree it will happen.”
“Performance Tax Bill is an unjust tax to our industry. This is the RIAA and the record labels looking for their own big new revenue stream under the ploy that it will help poor starving artists when in fact most of the money is going right in their pockets. This is being driven by the top leadership at the big four music groups, three of whom are foreign owned. I don’t believe you are going to change their minds.”
“Jeff Smulyan has run the company for twenty-eight years and if you know him at all he’ll tell you he’d hope to run it another twenty-eight years. It’s what he’s always wanted to do. It’s part of the reason you find so many people wearing the Emmis ten and twenty year watches. I decided a long time ago that I didn’t want to be anywhere else. For as long as I was going to work in the business I was going to work for Jeff.”
** QB Content by Fred Deane **
