WE HAVE TO DO A LOT OF THINGS DIFFERENTLY Radio Ink
Clear Channel CEO Mark Mays said Wednesday that the radio industry must embrace new methods of reaching listeners and populating new forms of media with its content if it hopes to compete in the widening world of consumer media.
"For radio to prosper, we will have to do a lot things differently," he said during the Dickstein Shapiro Broadcast Financing 2006 session at the NAB Radio show. "We need to be taking content, repurposing it, and giving it to people in a format that they want. We have to be constantly evolving and changing what we're doing, and asking ourselves what changes can we continue to make to make radio viable."
Mays continued, "We have two customer bases; our advertising customers and our listening customers. We need to do a better job of looking at how to reach those two customer bases, because there is more competition today for listeners. We're just trying to gain entertainment space in people's minds. We need to create very innovative environments in the future."
Fellow panellist and Greater Media CEO Peter Smyth shared Mays' sentiments. "As evolutionary things happen, people want to get on bandwagon," he said. "People in the industry need to take chances, and not be afraid to fail. We are on the way to great renaissance in American radio."
Aside from embracing technological change, Mays says that radio must also further consolidate over the next ten years if its wants to stand toe-to-toe with other, more consolidated industries that are using their scale to gain stronger footholds.
"Look at radio versus other mediums," Mays said, noting that the cable, newspaper and television industries have all consolidated. "We are going to have to be broader." Mays even joked with Emmis Communications CEO Jeff Smulyan, another panellist, that he would have left Emmis' KZLA Los Angeles as a Country station - Emmis recently flipped the station to Rhythmic AC as "Movin' 93.9 - insisting that the scale Clear Channel has in the market would have allowed it to keep the market's sole Country outlet on the air. Under his breath and with a smile, Smulyan said, 'No you wouldn't have'." |