Radio+Television Business Report

The latest Media Monitors Spot Ten Radio report has one big takeaway with respect to the most active ad category at broadcast media: auto insurance brands.

At radio, there is a leader that is not present at Spot Cable. It shows that broadcast media is the preferred way to go for achieving stronger ROI.

That’s because Progressive is the category leader at Spot Radio once again, with GEICO at No. 9.

Some 46,194 spot plays are attributed to Progressive, as DuckDuckGo is the No. 1 paid advertiser by play count for the week.

Meanwhile, it is another big week for Babbel, and it and McDonald’s are back in the Spot Ten.

Cumulus Media has selected two individuals who will serve in newly created positions across its Music & Entertainment and Sports divisions.

Their role: to lead new content development across the audio content creation and distribution company’s platforms.

Reporting to EVP/Content and Audience are Doug Cohn, who’ll take the role of SVP/Music & Entertainment, Content and Audience; and Bruce Gilbert, filling the role of SVP/Sports, Content and Audience.

Cohn was formerly SVP/Music & Talent for Nickelodeon, where he played a key role in the career success of JoJo Siwa. He previously spent more than a decade at such entities as Atlantic Records and VH1.

For Gilbert, the role is a promotion for the 7 1/2-year company veteran, who will continue to direct all sports programming for Cumulus’ stations and for its Westwood One Sports arm.

For two generations of rock and roll fans, it was a South Bay monster, gaining steam against a direct format rival in the early 1980s with such industry veterans as Ken Anthony in afternoon drive. By 1998, powered by the Lamont and Tonelli morning show, signals were added around the San Francisco Bay area to expand the station — perhaps the first opportunity to “microcast” and target specific communities.

Now, thanks to GeoBroadcast Solutions technology being tested, the ability to narrowcast for this station, now targeting Bollywood music fans, by using one FM signal appears to be a success.

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SiriusXM has selected three new senior marketing executives as SiriusXM continues its current growth initiatives by launching a new national brand advertising effort designed to reach larger audiences.

Now reporting to Chief Marketing Officer Denise Karkos and supporting the company’s SiriusXM and Pandora brands are:

• Jasmin Chanana, Senior Vice President, Digital and Customer Experience
• Anne Milan Alo, Executive Creative Director
• Kimberly Wilson, Senior Vice President, Brand and Advertising

Karkos comments, “Their collective experience across major consumer and business-to-business brands will help accelerate our brand and business growth. The diversity of this set of leaders at my table is imperative in our pursuit to build SiriusXM to new heights.”

Chanana joins SiriusXM from EY, where he was a Managing Director in their Digital Practice, leading the New York office. Milan Alo joins SiriusXM from Netflix, where she was the streaming services Head of Creative Studio, Title Promotions, leading a multi-disciplinary creative team responsible for fully executing the creative campaign for The Queen’s Gambit.

Wilson joins SiriusXM after a 16-year tenure at The Walt Disney Company where she served as VP/Multiplatform Marketing and held several distribution marketing leadership positions. Wilson previously worked for iHeartMedia and BET Networks. Wilson will lead SiriusXM’s brand marketing and advertising, digital content and audience engagement teams.

NEW YORK — There’s a new over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV offering that’s now available for viewers across the U.S., accessible via such platforms as Roku and Amazon Fire TV. It allows viewers “to connect with local news and information relevant to their lives.”

Yes, there are plenty of apps that do this already. But, this is the first to involve Hearst Television stations.

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As Zacks Equity Research sees it, “One company to watch right now is Entravision Communications.”

The company’s shares have been on the rise across 2021. Still, Zacks wonders if EVC is undervalued.

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As the first half of 2021 ended, Cumulus Media could count itself among a select group of publicly traded broadcasters that were enjoying strong interest in investors on Wall Street. Shares reached $14.75 after bottoming out at $9 on May 4.

With hours remaining in trading on September 17, Cumulus shares are moving closer to that six-month low point, punctuating a 90-day decline for the company’s stock.

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It has been tied to the company’s Flint, Mich., radio stations yet has a signal that’s based in Lapeer and covers such Michigan towns as Sandusky and Almont, to the east of Port Huron and Midwestern Ontario.

Now, Townsquare Media has decided to part ways with this outlier. The buyer? A religious noncommercial broadcast operation.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The recently launched nonprofit industry organization representing Low Power, Translator and Class A TV Stations is giving its seal of approval to the “Local Journalist Sustainability Act.”

Says association executive director Michael Lee, “This legislation is surely a sensible investment in the all-important issue of local media trust and transparency.”

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Riverfront Broadcasting, led by Carolyn Becker, has attracted national attention for its operations in the Heartland of America.

With operations in such markets as Yankton, S.D., Riverfront is now scaling back in a small way. It is saying goodbye to an AM, FM and FM translator serving a small city in Iowa.

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Kagan, the media research group within the TMT offering of S&P Global Market Intelligence, has just released its review of all of the broadcast media transactions seen between January 1 and June 30, 2021.

For RBR+TVBR readers, the results aren’t much of a surprise. Yet, Kagan’s Volker Moerbitz’s assessment is still a striking one: the first half of 2021 registered a total deal volume that was less than the average monthly deal volume in any of the years between 2011 and 2019.

Thank the Lord for the brokers involved.

COMING OCTOBER 4: HAS COVID-19 FOREVER IMPACTED MEDIA DEAL VALUES?

 

The Fall 2021 RBR+TVBR Special Report, available to all subscribers of the RBR+TVBR Afternoon Headlines E-mail, features an in-depth report on the state of the transactions marketplace. Adam R Jacobson chats exclusively with some of the nation’s leading brokers, and gets their assessment of the deal-making landscape as 2022 nears. IT’S ONLY IN THE DIGITAL AND PRINT EDITIONS OF THE FALL 2021 RBR+TVBR!

Subscribe now to ensure you get your copy on October 4.

 

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Less than 48 hours after a New York Federal District Court Judge declined to honor its request for summary judgment in a case focused on copyright infringement brought against the operation by the nation’s “Big Four” broadcast TV networks, Locast on September 2 suspended its operations.

Now, that suspension has become a permanent cessation of business activities, thanks to a ruling Wednesday from the 93-year-old judge overseeing the case.

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Nearly one year ago, the radio industry, along with the NAB, started their salute to Radio’s 100 years of service in the United States. While radio stations exited in the 1910s, it was the might of Westinghouse and its KDKA in Pittsburgh that brought Radio into the 1920s as a force to be reckoned with.

One of those early radio stations that predates KDKA didn’t get its commercial license until its relocation to Boston in 1931. Before then, it was located in Springfield, Mass.

That could explain why the current owner of that Bay State giant, WBZ-AM 1030, is sparking a 100-day centennial celebration for the station on Sunday.

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A provider of AI-driven audience engagement and sales intelligence solutions for media has unveiled a selection of principal conclusions from a just-released study conducted in partnership with SmithGeiger.

The biggest finding? There are “tectonic shifts” in how Americans perceive, consume and pay for media content. There are also big changes in how media executives see the sector progressing into the 2020s, putting clouds over their confidence in their ability to address emerging challenges.

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By Rob Dumke

A new television viewership report from the spot cable arm of the company that owns Peacock, NBCUniversal and Universal Studios, as well as Comcast, finds that streaming “consistently” serves as a strong complement to traditional TV ad campaigns.

This was based on research conducted during the first half of 2021 from Effectv, the ad sales division of Comcast Cable.

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The two individuals at the helm of the nation’s largest audio content production and distribution company are preparing for a presentation on Wednesday at the Goldman Sachs 30th Annual Communacopia Conference.

Bob Pittman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Rich Bressler, President, Chief Operating Officer & Chief Financial Officer, of iHeartMedia will participate in a question and answer session at the highly regarded investor event.

They’ll be chatting it up starting at precisely 2:05pm Eastern on Sept. 22.

A live webcast of the session will be available to the general public at the start of the session through a link on the Investors homepage of iHeartMedia’s website (https://investors.iheartmedia.com/).

A replay of the video webcast will be available in the Events & Presentation section of iHeartMedia’s Investors homepage.

 

What did iHeartMedia stock close at on September 16? Visit the Wall Street Report now at RBR.com’s homepage for a quick glance at all of broadcast media’s publicly traded stocks.

According to Nielsen, the return to the classroom had an effect on monthly TV and streaming viewing.

The Gauge, Nielsen’s snapshot of viewing trends, showed a leveling of viewership after three months of steady growth.

The August data reveals that streaming maintained a 28% share of total TV viewing, compared with broadcast TV (24%) and cable (38%).

Children 6-17 years old viewed about 7.5% less than the previous month.

Nielsen said that drop was offset a bit by a 0.5% increase in overall TV viewing. The slight uptick was attributed to adults tuning in to broadcast programming such as the Olympics.

By Rob Dumke and Adam R Jacobson

“Broadcasting locally but driving national results,” Davis Broadcasting Inc. has stood out in the markets in which it operates radio stations in for its commitment to localism.

Now, its President and CEO has personally written to those in favor of a resolution that would prevent the levying of any new performance royalty payments on Radio.

While the biggest piece of legislation on Capitol Hill designed to do this is largely dead, recording industry advocacy group musicFIRST on Monday will seek to resuscitate it.

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ATLANTA — Gray Television’s dedicated investigative team is readying the launch of a new weekly program featuring “watchdog reports” about government corruption, consumer alerts and health care issues.

The show takes the name of the investigate team and will premiere during this week across all of the broadcast media company’s stations.

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By Rob Dumke

The importance of fact-based broadcast radio and television journalism at a time when misinformation is running rampant on social media is a key mission for local news organizations across the U.S.

It’s also integral to the NAB, which has unveiled a new ad campaign giving a boost to local  stations in particular.

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