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Radio Stations Boost Revenue, Ratings With Online Sales, Attractions

BY JESSICA LONG

When it comes to attracting advertisers, San Diego’s biggest radio operator, Clear Channel Communications Inc., now sells space on its various Web sites as much as it does airtime on its stations.

It’s a conscious move on the part of the San Antonio-based company to appeal to a younger, more “connected” generation that grew up with the Internet and cell phones that have more functions than a Swiss Army knife.

“The old days of just cost-per-point (proving a set number of listeners at a set hour in a given program) are gone,” said Brad Samuel, vice president of sales in San Diego. “People still buy cost-per-point, but now they’re asking for it along with asking, ‘What else do you have for us, what’s new?’ ”

Samuel credits interactive Web sites that promote social networking, cell phone text messaging and other new media with helping the company grow its total San Diego County revenue 27 percent the past two years. In addition to allowing stations to reach people on a more personal basis, the technologies have fueled a trend that encourages people to tell friends about things they found online, Samuel said.

“The constant challenge is, how do you continually grow ratings and revenue?” Samuel said. “That’s the task we face every day.”

Clear Channel, a publicly traded company with more than 1,000 radio stations nationwide, operates seven stations in San Diego County: classic rock station, KGB-FM 101.5; pop station, KHTS-FM 93.3; active rock station, KIOZ-FM 105.3; adult contemporary station, KMYI-FM 94.1; country station, KUSS-FM 95.7; and talk stations, KLSD-AM 1360 and KOGO-AM 600.

Shauna Moran, program director of KIOZ-FM 105.3, is used to leading a station that relies heavily on selling itself as a package deal between radio and Web time. A morning show, called the “Mikey Show,” airs daily during the morning drive time, but it’s the funny bits and streaming video of what goes on in the studio shown on the station’s Web site that has really built a loyal following, she said.


Audience Participation

“It’s all about MySpace, YouTube , it’s about the listener now,” Moran said, noting that it’s just as Time Magazine dictated when it announced its 2006 Person of the Year was “You.”

The Mikey Show, like many of its counterparts, has built a fan club of sorts. The P-1 Army is a club that listeners can join to get special perks. Listeners share their e-mail addresses and other contact information and become part of a special community within the station’s Web site.

Among the perks of the P-1 Army is access to a dating service just for fellow listeners of the Mikey Show and a text service that allows listeners to sign up for whatever “cool stuff” the show may want to share with them “personally.”

“It’s easy to get on top, it’s not (easy) to stay there,” Moran said.

According to Samuel, using that interactive connection between a station and a particular listener to attract more advertising dollars could be as simple as selling sponsorship on a mass text message sent out to everyone on the list.

Another way to use the interactive capabilities of the Web sites is to stream video commercials, the same as would be shown on TV. Samuels said advertisers pay to include their 15-second commercial before a video of a live performance some musician did in a studio or a funny bit done by a radio personality.

Although some trend reports have suggested that things such as iPods and satellite radio distract listeners , especially younger ones who are most often the biggest target of deep-pocketed advertisers , Doug Hyde, director of research for Clear Channel in San Diego, said that top national page view data shows that eight out of the top 10 stations in the country with the most active interactive Web sites belong to stations with a younger listening audience. Stations such as Clear Channel’s KIOZ-FM 105.3 in San Diego, he said.


Jessica Long is a freelance writer based in Escondido.

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