Good Karma Brands dabbles in other formats, but sports radio is its bread and butter. In Cleveland, it is Amy Crossman that is charged with making sure the staples are always in stock and of the highest quality.

This is her first foray into the world of radio, and man, what a time for it! Frankly, what a group for it.

ESPN Cleveland can be heard on 850 AM. That is the way listeners consume the station as a terrestrial broadcast product, but in 2023, no one is consuming any station in only one way. ESPN Cleveland takes the idea of going where the listeners are to an extreme and Crossman says that is why she feels confident for the station’s future regardless of what car companies decide to do about the AM band.

That is one of many subjects she covers in our conversation as part of the Meet the Market Managers series presented by Point to Point Marketing. Amy Crossman also shares her thoughts on live events after Covid, how the premium content model works in radio and what she learned at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Demetri Ravanos: Rather than start with the broadcast product, I actually want to start with The Land On Demand. I am surprised in 2023 that the premium content model for a radio station is still a relatively uncrowded space. Not a lot of groups have followed your lead on the local level. 

Amy Crossman: So true. It is really unique and it just goes back to our hosts and our talent creating content that people want to get on demand. Maybe they’re at work or doing something else when The Really Big Show is on, and they want to hear what happened with Rizz and Aaron. They’ll listen at the gym or on their way home.             

We found the on demand desire was really high and immediately our fans took to that model. So for us, it’s it’s been this really fun, interesting thing to see. It doesn’t hurt that it’s six figures to our bottom line, right? And it gives us an environment to test things out, podcasts and other kinds of audio and video products, with a group of really diehard loyal fans.

DR: What has been the enthusiasm for that very product from advertising partners? These shows run ad-free but you guys do have a landing page for The Land On Demand. That’s plenty of space to be sold.            

I do wonder though, when they look at, say, the Audacy stations, for instance, that’s not behind a paywall. So what sort of conversations do you have with advertisers about that? 

AC: Yeah, it’s a great question. It is a commercial free environment. That’s part of the play certainly for the subscriber. Our live reads still happen during programing content. We really just strip the commercials out.                   

We hadn’t explored sponsorship as a whole until last year and then had one of our partners as a title sponsor of The Land On Demand. We were really thoughtful about how to make that a great experience for the partner but not really intrusive for the fan. We kind of rearranged the title so that the logo was locked up with the title. We had a bug on the video screen and some other kind of careful placements for that partner. It was really about reaching the most loyal fans that we have.                       

They also did, as part of their partnership, an open house. Leading into training camp, wih the Browns really being our biggest season all year round, we opened up The Land On Demand and lifted the paywall brought to you by this partner so that there was a lot more fan sampling. 

DR: That sort of leads into my next question as we talk about fan sampling and these conversations with advertising partners. On average in the industry, we talk a lot about the common man sort of being a little bit more media savvy than ever. I wonder if that if you see that showing up in real life conversations, whether it’s with listeners or advertising partners. Do they have a better grasp or at least do they think they have a better grasp of our industry a little bit? 

AC: From a partner standpoint, I would say yes. I think our partners are more media savvy. Their kids are more media savvy. They really see kind of where media is evolving to and we certainly do and have invested in that here in Cleveland.                  

We added a digital content team at the beginning of this year who are really focused on the content that we create and taking it to every platform for every fan to consume in the way that they want to. It’s a little bit of a catalyst from The Land On Demand, more focused on social video YouTube, but this content team really has created this very different energy, not only in the studio but with our partners. We are allowed to have different types of conversations with the success that we’re seeing with digital content. It’s literally like a TV studio around here because digital content team is running around with cameras, capturing behind the scenes in the studio, capturing what’s going on quickly, editing and posting. So it creates a very different pace around the studio. 

DR: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I just had this conversation with a doctor earlier today. I don’t know how old you are. I’m 41 and she is a little bit older than me.                 

We were talking about popular podcasts and how some of them have blown up into TV series and movies and stuff like that. I said, “You know, as much as we talk about this being true with our kids, I genuinely start to wonder if my generation is the last one that traditional, terrestrial media really means something to.” Has that idea of “I go where the great content is, regardless of platform” trickled all the way up to the oldest ends of millennials and the bottom end of Gen-X? 

AC: It’s a really interesting question because to your point, whether it’s children or whatever the generation is, even some of the teammates that we have working here, how they consume media we talk about things like the magazine I used to work for, and it doesn’t mean anything to them.            

We don’t even consider ourselves to be an AM radio station. We are content creators, and we serve it up on many platforms. I think that really resonates with that generation instead of kind of building all this great content on this station and asking people to come to us, we’re now going to where they are. It’s just a different model, but it makes it a lot more fun because we’re able to approach them in different ways. We launched a YouTube show three weeks ago and we’re launching a second one before Browns season. All of that is behind-the-scenes content, right?                 

We know how much our fans love our on-air teammates. And they’re always curious about what happens when they go to break right or the end of the show or what happens at the beginning of the show. So we’ve seen a lot of success, really fantastic success, on YouTube with showing the fans a different side of our on-air teammates. 

DR: Given the success of The Land On Demand, the investment in the digital side that you’re talking about, also the station streams through the ESPN app, which has very reliable proliferation every single year. I wonder if you feel pretty prepared if we are indeed headed for the day that access to the AM band in new cars just isn’t there anymore. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is or isn’t any more important to you. It’s just there is a different level of preparedness, it sounds like, in Cleveland. 

AC: We’re trying different things and we’re not going to get them all right, but that’s okay. I think the fact that we are eager to test things out and most importantly, our on-air teammates are just as eager matters. If we didn’t have the entire team behind the idea of “let’s get our content to where our fans want it,” it would be a little bit more of a struggle.                     

We just have an amazing group of people that come from varied backgrounds on our team. And so everybody is involved in the idea is like, “How about if we try this” or “What if we travel this way”. That has certainly been a different level of energy and pace on the team, which just kind of trickles through all of the teammates, sales, marketing, production, and otherwise. I like to think we’re kind of prepared. 

DR: I want to talk about the part of your job that is recruiting talent, particularly on the sales side. If you had experience with radio sales at this point in 2022, you expect you’re going to be selling, a portfolio of stations, right? That can be good. That can be more opportunity, but it could also mean you’re stretched thin. How do they react to the idea of coming over to a place where, sure, there are many different products within ESPN 850, but it is a single umbrella that you are selling under? 

AC: To be totally honest, I’m looking out at the team right now, I don’t think we’ve hired anybody in radio sales in the past three years yet. We really have kind of a great intersection. We have some tenured salespeople here, marketing consultants who are amazing and know our assets inside and out. The newer teammates we’ve hired over the last three years don’t come from other stations. In fact, we just hired someone who’s starting at the end of May, and he’s coming from Rocket Mortgage, the top seller at Rocket Mortgage. So, there is a there’s a learning curve to teach and coach them in media.                 

I think that recruits are energized by the fact that it’s not just AM radio, which is a critical part of our business in Cleveland, but there’s the opportunity to test and sell and have different conversations about different products. I think it’s probably an advantage for us from a selling perspective because we really are kind of trying so many new things. 

DR: So you guys have a sales opportunity that is not unique to you guys. It is unique to ESPN Radio stations though – ESPN play-by-play. It’s not like you don’t have the Guardians. It’s not like you don’t have the Cavaliers. I mean, hell, they just went to the playoffs for the first time in forever and it was on your airwaves. It’s just not there all the time. It’s not the hometown broadcasts.          

Tell me about the conversations locally you have with whether it is advertising partners or listeners when you’re out at events about the fact that your teams are here, it’s just we’re doing it a different way and there is opportunity there for you still. 

AC: Yeah, I’m glad you brought it up because, you know, we are obviously the official home of the Browns. We talk about the Browns 13 months out of the year, of course, as important in Cleveland. 

DR: Can I tell you that I use your market as an example all the time. I live in Raleigh. I tell people this is a great place to live. It is a terrible sports radio market. And I always follow that up by saying, “We’re not Cleveland. We don’t have a team that unites us in misery like the Browns. That’s what you need to be a great sports radio market.” 

AC: It’s so true. Our content mission is Browns, drama, fun. If the content that the teammates are creating does not fall in one of those buckets, we’re probably not going to be talking about it.           

Matt Fishman, the director of content, has done an amazing job with adding teammates that are insiders in those other teams. Right? So Brian Windhorst is a teammate and he is our NBA insider for all things Cavs Andre Knott is a teammate, and he obviously travels with the Guardians and is an insider there. So that really is our approach.                    

Again, we like that it’s less traditional. We don’t obviously have the rights to the Guardians and the Cavs, but having an insider. Our fans really like that, right? They’re getting information from the source and maybe a little bit different than it would be served up in in a traditional environment where we had play-by-play. So we feel like we’ve covered the bases.                  

Cleveland’s a unique town. The Cavs went to the playoffs and people were okay with it, but they were really still talking about, “is Stefanski going to get fired in the bye week in week five?”. That’s really where all of the buzz is.                       

We liken the approach that we have to dating. We have great relationships with the Cavs’ and the Guardians’ front offices. They’re great partners with us to try new things and different approaches and unique ways to partner together. 

DR: Tell me a little bit about live events post-COVID. Do you see any lingering effects that have changed? 

AC: I think Ohio just kind of forgot about the pandemic and really moved on. I’ll tell you, to be honest, we really saw it in 2021 when the NFL Draft was here. It was touch and go on were they going to come or were they not going to come. They were kind of just plowing through.          

Pre-pandemic, we would do up to 250 events a year and that may be anything from a small street team at a bar for Corona up to our big thousand-person draft party. So we were certainly itching to get out and create live events. Our fans were itching for it and our advertising partners were as well. So we hosted a VIP event, pre-NFL Draft, which was we we kind of laugh that maybe it was the super spreader event. I think we had 250 guests and everybody was hugging and kissing babies and just being so excited to be back together again. So that was probably the only one where we were incredibly cautious about how we were rolling that event out. 

By football season, we were doing our Browns tailgate that we do every week and everything just seemed to kind of come back in Ohio. This year we’re doing as many events as ever. 

DR: I don’t doubt the appetite is there for advertisers, but we have entered a whole new economy since the pandemic and I wonder what that does to the to the live event business or those advertisers’ dedication to live events. 

AC: Yeah, it really depends on the advertising partner. For so many of the businesses that partner with us on our live events, their objectives are really to have the face-to-face interaction with fans and we can provide that for them. There really aren’t many that have strayed away from that because it affects their business in such a positive way. So we may have streamlined our events a little bit more just so that we could develop a best-in-class event versus just cranking out 250 events a year, but for the most part, the fans still come out.                       

We have a big event on June 25th, our block party. It started last year. There’s just so much excitement around it in Cleveland. All of the teams are participating. It’s really just a great celebration of football and of sports in Cleveland. 

DR: You came to this job from a very untraditional place. You came from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. What lessons can you bring from there into running a media operation? 

AC: Prior to that, I was in New York for 20-plus years in the media business. So for me, the great opportunity to work at the Hall of Fame and get into the sports marketing world was really a highlight for me, but what I really missed the most was the media component to it. Media is my currency and it’s how I know to create solutions for advertising partners and great content for fans. So that was really my foray from kind of big corporate media to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton and then landing here at ESPN Cleveland.

It isn’t easy to be in the sports radio game in Houston. Todd Farquharson and his team at ESPN Houston know that. Three locally staffed stations and two stations that run national programming give fans in the area a lot of options.

Farquharson talks about how Houston became home to so many sports stations in the latest column in our Meet the Market Managers series presented by Point-to-Point Marketing. He also talks about the things our industry thinks too inwardly on, like dial position and the value of ESPN Radio.

ESPN 97.5 and 92.5 in Houston is built largely on the strength of local sales. For Todd, his sales staff, and his programming staff, that means everyone is important to the clients.

Demetri Ravanos: Let’s talk about the Houston market. There are a lot of sports stations there, and it’s a lot of sports stations fighting for what usually are not big numbers. So what makes it worth it to be in a crowded, small space? 

Todd Farquharson: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve been in the sports radio business, I started in ’94 with a local, independent group that would be bought by Clear Channel. It was before there was an all-sports station in town, which became Sports Radio 610.               

Then I guess in 2003, SportsTalk 790 popped up. That’s iHeart’s sports radio station. Our group now was born out of some guys that were at 610. It’s a weird circumstance where you got two competitors were probably enough for this market, but then a third was born out of, “Hey, we want to leave and do our own thing.”            

You’re right. I mean, the Houston sports radio share is probably six or seven when we’re doing well and we’re all fighting for that. What makes it worthwhile is it’s what we know best and it’s where our talent is, and I feel really good about our talent.                      

Ultimately, I’d love to see us grow the market, not just ourselves but the other stations too. Now, I don’t see us working together side-by-side, but what can we do as a sports platform to grow the share? I go to an Astros game and it’s packed with 43,000 people during the playoffs and there’s a lot of fervor and excitement. There’s so many of those people, I guarantee you, that just don’t listen to sports radio. Maybe if they’re exposed to it or give it a shot, they might go, “Wow, I had no idea!” So I hope to not just fight for the sixth share forever. 

DR: Let’s sort of keep it in the realm of what’s going on now. Again, there’s a lot of stations fighting for not a lot of share, but you guys are the only ones on FM. How are you talking about that — whether it is with clients, maybe even prospective hires for you guys? How much are you putting that front and center? 

TF: We certainly make that a big part of our pitch when we’re talking to advertisers. It depends though. The advertisers who know the sports radio space recognize that. Other times, you have to be Captain Obvious and tell the buyer that “this matters because the sound is better.”        

One interesting thing that they wouldn’t know is that we don’t duplicate with the stations very much. There’s very little audience duplication, actually. So you’re reaching totally different people. We crossover mostly with the rock station, with the AC stations, with the urban stations. So we’re going to help you reach a whole different audience.                 

I don’t sell against my competition because if a strategy is working for you on those radio stations, it should work for you on our station. We share the same qualitative demographics in terms of who the listeners are, but ours are totally different set within the demo that happen to be on the FM dial. 

DR: You don’t want to sell against your competition. You want to sell what it is you guys do, but within the industry, we’ve been having a lot of conversations about what exactly the future is for AM radio. So I wonder, does the fact that there are eight car manufacturers that aren’t even putting access to the AM band on the dashboard anymore come up at all in conversations with clients? 

TF: I don’t think it has a lot unless they’re really dialed into the business. It’s not something I want to bring out because, usually, we’re selling schedules for the next three, six, or twelve months. For a lot of people, it’s not a reality yet. So, I think it may come across as negative selling when it’s just not even a factor right now. 

DR: I do want to talk about the way we look at audience now, because I can sit here and say exactly what I said, right? “It’s a small share that everybody’s fighting for.” But that’s not the only way to measure an audience. That might not even be the accurate way to measure it all. So what is it you guys are looking at to understand not just how big the audience is, but what kind of impact you’re content is having on your listeners? 

TF: We certainly want to give the advertisers an ROI. They need the return. So that’s measured often by their experience.             

“Oh man, you know, we are getting some people to walk into the store” or “We’re getting some phone calls” or “The website traffic has gone up 3%.” That’s when we can feel that our ads are working.

But beyond the radio audience itself, we do try to give them exposure to bigger audiences. For example, we have a companion website, SportsMap.com. It’s focused on Astros, Rockets, and Texans. So it’s very much the same content, but a lot of people that land on the website have never listened to the radio station.

As an advertiser, you may reach, let’s say, 100,000 on our radio stations, but there’s another 200,000 a month that will hit this website that you may not be exposed to. We videotape all our live programing. We’ll chop up that video into 30, 60 seconds snippets, put it on Tik Tok, put it on YouTube, put it on Facebook. So we’re exposing other audiences to what we do that, again, probably never listen to sports radio. We get that. We met a few listeners who said, “Man, I discovered you guys on YouTube. I didn’t realize y’all had a radio show.” That happens every day.

DR: That kind of goes exactly to something else I was thinking about as I was putting doing my research and putting this together to chat today. There was a time in this industry when if you said ESPN Houston is on 97.5 and 92.5, that might be deemed by some in the industry as too confusing. But you just hit it on the head, man. People are coming to your content in so many different ways. I would guess that not only is it not even a huge problem anymore, may not even be a consideration for a lot of listeners. 

TF: I think we are so fractured. I mean this morning, I get up early and go walking and I listen to a podcast until our local morning show came on. So I flipped from podcast to stream and I hopped into my car and I’m listening to radio. You know, we all have figured out how to consume multiple mediums, so I would hope somebody can flip a dial from 97.5 to 92.5 easily. 

DR: You guys have been recruiting for a PD in recent months, and I wonder what some of the challenges that came with doing that in 2023 were. What are candidate’s questions and concerns about, not just your business, but the future of radio in general and are they the kinds of questions you had to answer five or ten years ago when you’re doing this? 

TF: Yeah, it’s interesting. Most of the people that were interested in talking to about the job, I don’t think there were a lot of questions to be pointed about where are we going to be in ten years with the industry or where is the media going to be. Maybe I had a few of those, but I guess they were more interested in, “Hey, I’d like to come work there and be a part of the sports radio station.” So we didn’t honestly have that many conversations about the future of it, specifically to our company.

We’re trying to be broader than just radio, as I mentioned. Beyond our digital platform SportsMap.com, we have CultureMap.com. That’s in five cities, the five major cities in Texas. We have an InnovationMap.com. So we have nice digital platforms that expand into different categories and we’re trying to grow that way as well so that we are not siloed into the singularity of sports radio. 

DR: So are you looking for candidates then that can contribute to building the business, in all of those different ways? 

TF: We’re looking for somebody who acknowledges that we are a bigger platform than just sports radio. Maybe sometimes you might be running promos for InnovationMap or CultureMap sponsors an event and we take our sports radio show live from there. Why not be exposed to all these people? So it’s just a matter of working together and realizing that we’re greater together.

DR: In my position, I’ve been studying the changes to ESPN’s business over the last three years. In the industry, we all have opinions about what is the quality of ESPN Radio programming. We all wonder what is the stability of ESPN’s audio product. 

But I want to talk about it with you from the standpoint of people outside of our industry. When you go out on the street, whether it is meeting listeners, meeting potential clients, whatever, do those four letters still carry the weight that they did, say five, ten years ago?

TF: Absolutely. It’s still the biggest brand of sports. You kind of touched on it. We can be hypercritical within the industry, but let’s say I’m talking to a female business owner and she is not really into sports, but she’s open to listening and she wants to reach the right audience. ESPN means something. She’s she knows it. It’s better than, “Hey, it’s Todd’s sports radio,” right? 

DR: I make this joke all the time that in this format, we have a wheel of five words that you’re allowed to name your station – Fan, Ticket, Score. You know the ones. In Hosuton, none of that exists and the branding is clearly laid out with “Sports Radio 610” and “SportsTalk 790”. You guys have gone with a very specific, well-known brand. I mean, that does say something different than “97.5 The Ticket” would. 

TF: Right. We enjoy our partnership with ESPN in terms of even the backstop programing we get. You can never have to apologize because your weekend or evening programing wasn’t great. ESPN does a nice job. So we love that.            

I love when we can carry the Astros. You know, we’re not the flagship, but when ESPN says, “Hey, we’ve got an Astros game and you’re allowed to run it” I just say alright. When the Astros are in the playoffs or in the World Series, we carry all those games, which is fantastic. And we’re able to monetize that in a way in a really nice way. 

DR: The bulk of your business being almost entirely local, tell me a bit about the role that your talent plays in starting and maintaining those client relationships. 

TF: Yeah, you’re right. The national business kind of withers away. As ratings fluctuate, so does national business. But fortunately, we rely on our direct business, the local business.            

I can walk into a meeting and say, “Well, we’re just like you. We’re a local business born and raised right here in Houston, Texas. So we’re very similar to you.” I think owners of businesses appreciate that.                

When it comes to the hosts, they’re very interactive. They’re anxious to create relationships and maintain relationships. A few of our hosts, frankly, are some of our best salespeople, because they meet people out and because they’re on the air. They have engaging personalities and people want to be around them and they get to know them. When those people are like, “Hey, I have a business. How do I start advertising with you guys?” that is who they usually ask. I love and depend on our hosts. They do a terrific job for us. 

DR: So are those hosts that are also going out and doing their own selling? Is it the folks that have been there for a while or when you launched that new afternoon show or bring in Jeremy to be a part of the midday show are you welcoming them to come in and try their hand at selling their own show as well. 

TF: Absolutely, and to be fair, I shouldn’t say that they’re necessarily selling. What they’re doing is setting up a relationship. “Hey, I met this guy.”

If you are instrumental in bringing some business to you, to us, and we get the deal, we’ll give you a little something to incentivize you to do that again. Sometimes a personality can open a door much quicker than a salesperson can. 

Las Vegas is a beast unto itself. No one knows that better than Natalie Marsh. She has been with Lotus Communications in Sin City for 24 years, and has seen the market completely transform in that time.

In a city where there is always something new to do, how innovative do your sellers need to be? How much do the old ways of doing business still work with clients?

Forget the sales side for a second. How do Marsh and her programmers keep up with the ever expanding roster of sports offerings in town to make sure both the teams and local listeners are getting what they expect from the company’s five sports stations?

Natalie answers all of these questions and more in the latest Meet the Market Managers column presented by Point-to-Point Marketing. Enjoy!

Demetri Ravanos: Since we’re focused on sports radio, I think the best place to start is the way Las Vegas has exploded as a home for major league professional sports. How have the expectations of your staff, both programing and sales, changed as those teams have come to town? 

Natalie Marsh: I would say it has changed pretty dramatically and it’s been a real learning experience. Fortunately, we had two support stations prior to even the Golden Knights being here. So, we had a team of sellers that were invested in selling the passion and the loyalty of the sports fan.              

That’s just grown and expanded, and now we’re teaching them how to take that to the next level. Now, we have five sports radio stations.

From a programming standpoint, it’s really been about finding the right people. They have to be engaged. It’s different when you have the teams here. The expectations change.              

There is nothing more amazing and maybe a little bit frightening than the owners and executives of the teams listening to your stations. It’s super flattering, but take Raider Nation Radio for an example. Mark Davis listens to that station every day. There’s a different level of expectation or engagement or knowledge that has to come into play.                 

Are our guys going to the practices? Are they seen at the games?               

It’s more than just watching it on TV, which is really what it was prior to us having any professional teams. The game changes when you have to go from having minor league baseball and university sports to having an NHL team, a WNBA team who just won the championship, and an NFL team.             

We pride ourselves on who we are as a group and why the sports teams want to be affiliated with us. There’s a lot of pressure internally to make sure that we’re keeping up to that standard. 

DR: I do want to talk about Raider Nation Radio. Is that something other stations and ownership groups have come to you with questions about the way the relationship works with the Raiders? Because certainly there are teams in other markets across the country with fan bases that would respond to a station like that. How much of a resource have you been for other stations around the country? 

NM: I would have to ask my PD. I’ve never personally had another group reach out to me on, how this came to be.             

For me, it’s about what can we do, and analyzing what we can make from a sales perspective. Also, what can we do that is a different way to monetize the affiliation with the team but also makes the team realize how much of a partner you really are. That’s really where Raider Nation Radio came from.            

Mark Davis or even his dad prior to him had always been second best in the Bay area. That’s the way they’ve always been treated. It was always the 49ers first and Raiders second. So we made a promise as we were presenting as to why we would be the right choice as the flagship radio partner. We were going to have a station that was dedicated to the Raiders. That’s really where Raider Nation Radio was born. 

DR: So I want to ask you about that and the Golden Knights as well because you guys have put a priority on being the flagship stations of the teams in town. I wonder what sort of conversations you are having in the lead-up to those pitches, both with your bosses and also with your staff, about the importance of getting those play-by-play rights. 

NM: So we’ll go back to the Knights, because I’m going to tell you that prior to the Knights, we had rights for our minor league baseball team and UNLV.          

There were certainly times during my 24 years at Lotus Broadcasting that UNLV helped us make some money, people wanted to be on the games. But they’ve had their struggles. And so we were pretty naive about what this was going to look like.                 

I was a sales manager when we went to pitch for the Vegas Golden Knights, and I went to my GM right away and said, “Do we want to pitch for these rights? What do we want to do? What what does it look like?” We made some calls, we did some digging, and I met with my sales team, and said, “Here’s what I’m going to need from you guys. Do you think you can deliver it?” I’m lucky because I had a couple of salespeople that really embraced it.      

Everybody thought “Hockey in the desert? This is going to be terrible. Nobody is going to want to do it.” But I had a couple salespeople that would talk to advertisers and say, “Look, you’ve got to get in this the first year or you’re not going to be able to get in next year. We’re going to sell it out. It’s going to be first come, first serve, and if you don’t get in now the prices will be higher and you won’t be able to get in.”                

These are all things that we talked and strategized about, but I had a couple that actually did it right. We sold it out. The team obviously did its part and made it to the Stanley Cup Finals that first year. So the premise that we sold became a reality.                 

We expanded our coverage because part of our presentation to the Golden Knights was that we would do a game a week in Spanish. I had done some research and realized a couple of markets had sort of played around with Spanish broadcasting in the NHL. Nobody had really given it their all. Our station became the first Spanish broadcast of a Stanley Cup Finals game, which exploded and became viral.

So from that, we thought, “Hey, we’re going to do every home game.” And that’s how we moved forward. And I was able to expand what we had available on the Hispanic side and what we had available on the general market side, amending that contract to include these extra Spanish home games that we were carrying. It’s really been fantastic!                             

When you teach a sales staff how to sell probably the hardest of the four, sports it becomes very easy to sell the Raiders right after that because the NFL is the easiest.            

We’re a little crazy. I heard the WNBA was coming in and said, “We owe it to female athletes and fans to become a partner for them. I don’t know if we’ll ever make money on it.” I said to my boss at the time “I’m going to do my best. I’ll at least make sure it’s a wash for you, but I think we need to do it. It’s the right thing to do.”                 

We started carrying all of their home games because a lot of these facilities aren’t set up to have the away team there with a radio broadcast. The Aces won the championship last year, which we were able to sell strongly. Now that demand is even higher.                 

It’s been fun to watch not only the sales team grow in how they understand it, and how they sell the passion of it. We don’t sit in a market where those sports stations get a lot of ratings. The market size just isn’t there. We only have 800 to 900 meters in the market. So unless they get lucky and one just happened to fall on a sports fan, you just don’t see the movement that you might elsewhere. So we don’t sell on ratings. The sales team has really embraced it. 

DR: So am I right to assume that businesses in a market like Las Vegas, which is built on experience and entertainment, understand the value in sports radio? Because you hit on it, right? It is not a ratings play. There have to be businesses that understand the value of a dedicated audience, even if it is smaller, they are more apt to hear the message than just a straight numbers buy. 

NM: Absolutely. We have been very fortunate in being able to prove that to them. You’ve got to get that trust first. You tell them the story and then you show them.                

We have car dealerships and hotel/casinos on there, We have every kind of business, but those are big businesses with ad agencies that we’ve still been able to convince this isn’t about the numbers. That’s quite a feat in 2023.           

That’s why I’m really proud of my sales team because it’s hard sometimes to convince people this isn’t about the numbers. A lot of clients want to talk about numbers because the other groups want to talk about the numbers. It’s a competitive marketplace for those ad dollars, especially in the last three years.            

You had COVID, then things started coming back, and everybody was so nervous about that. Then last year was a political year, and now this year everybody’s worried about the economy. There’s just a lot of competition in the space. Even as the teams come to town they sort of take money out of the market because of their sponsorship dollars. So then that space becomes even more competitive.

Our programming team is fantastic. They go out on calls with the salespeople and they’re super engaged with our clients and our partners. The whole building getting behind a sales effort makes all the difference in the world. 

DR: So given that connection that the audience has with these stations, with the local personalities, what is the process like on pitching a new client on the benefits of paying that premium for things like endorsements and live events, to really take advantage of an audience that wants to do what these people are telling them to do?

NM: I think there’s a couple of ways that you can make an impact. If you’ve done your CNA properly and you understand which on-air talent is going to mesh best with the client, you bring the talent to them and let that personality express their passion. Then the client can see it and know that same passion exists with our listeners.                 

The other thing that is really successful is taking the client to an event. We do a lot of viewing parties. Not only do we have five sports stations, but I have two rock stations, and rock sets us up really well to do the viewing parties because it’s another male-based audience. So, it’s easy to get a prospective client to a sports viewing party. Last year was the first time we did away game viewing parties for the Aces. This is before they were winning the championship, but we had started taking clients to the games.                  

That’s the other thing — take them to a game and let them see the excitement of the fans. The WNBA, that’s not an easy sell, but if you go to a game, you are sold that it is a really, really good game of basketball. Take a female manager or owner and show them, “Look at these women! You’ve got to support the sport.” And they see the excitement and the passion of the fans.                

Utilizing those three things: Meet our personality and see their passion, come see the passion of the fans at away game parties, or come and see the passion of the fans at the game. They kind of get it and then they’re willing to take a chance. Then when they start getting results, they’re in. 

DR: When you are looking for sellers, whether you’re actively recruiting or somebody’s resume just comes across your desk, how specialized is your search? Is it easy to get someone up to speed on doing business with things like casinos and clubs or are those the kind of accounts that you really need market knowledge and institutional knowledge of those businesses in order to be successful? 

NM: I think it would depend. There’s sports betting everywhere now so that changes things a little bit and makes it a little easier if I’m going out of the market.              

I’m a little spoiled because we have huge longevity here in my group. I’ve been here 24 years and I have sellers that have been here longer than me. That comes with pros and cons, but for the most part, they are pros. We tend to be the group in town that people want to work for, so it makes it easy to recruit in the market.               

I think if I was looking at somebody that wanted to come here from out of town, there would be a conversation of “Tell me what it’s like in your market when you have to sell events because Vegas is different.” I know everybody thinks that their town is different. But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it’s actually true here.

We get inundated with messages and so you have to be ready to explain to a new business that opens. People have a lot of options here. More than they have anywhere else. Every day there’s something else coming and it just it doesn’t seem to slow down.               

I’ve never worried about if somebody knows how to sell to a casino or not, because if you know how to sell any kind of on-site activation, then it’s probably pretty easy to turn that into what it could look like if done at a casino. 

DR: So I want to flip to the other big side of radio, which is programming. Q Myers is an interesting guy. I personally like him a lot. You have him leading multiple brands. At the same time, his own profile is rising as a host. Tell me a bit about the conversations you guys have about balancing those two sides of this job and how they each serve Lotus in Las Vegas. 

NM: So our sports product is the only product that has a PD and an assistant PD for exactly that reason. So we knew that. We had that in place prior to Q coming here.                

We knew that we wanted a personality as a PD — someone that was going to do both. Once I met Q, it was just a given. There was no way that I wasn’t going to have him be on the air. He’s really just too good at it. It really helped that we already had an assistant PD in place.                 

Now, what I did not know about Q is, he doesn’t stop! I will be driving home at 7:00 at night and I’ll have ESPN on and I’m like, “Oh. Q is filling in for Freddie Coleman again.” And then I’ll be listening on the weekends and he’s got his weekend show. I often joke with his wife like, “You know, this isn’t me, right?”. She’s like, “I know. I was married to him prior to you.” I’ve given her bottles of wine before to be like, “I’m so sorry that your husband works all the time.”

But his passion and energy are contagious. That’s what’s so special about Q because it’s really hard not to want to laugh and smile and have fun at your job, but also work really hard when your boss is laughing and smiling and working his butt off. Even though I tell him to slow down and he doesn’t listen to me, it’s okay. It’s the pot calling the kettle black a little bit because he would probably tell me the same thing. 

DR: So I want to end by asking sort of a bigger question. You’ve noticed that our discussion has been about sales and programming. When people think about the radio business, it’s easy to divide it into those two categories. But I wonder if we look at the other aspects of the business, how healthy is the pool of capable, experienced candidates in your experience when you are looking to fill a role like, say, promotions or engineering or production? Any of those behind-the-scenes roles that do not fall into the sales or programming categories? 

NM: I’ve been really lucky. I sit with a lot of different business leaders on a regular basis, and their biggest complaint is not being able to find talent. I’ve had multiple times that I’ve had to find talent since COVID or even during COVID and have always been able to find the right person. Whether it was an engineer, a board op or a remote tech.    

Again, that longevity does come into play to protect me a little bit, just because I haven’t had maybe the volume that other people have had. So maybe, just by pure numbers, I would start to have more of an issue if I was having to hire more people but when I look at who we have had to hire in those areas, we just have been really fortunate.

I try to have a really good relationship with UNLV and their broadcast school and school of journalism. I’ve had some candidates come from there in those positions. We also do a work-study program with a job and college preparatory school that we have here in town. We’ve actually hired one person from that school, and have been involved from the beginning. They have their first graduating class this year.

So we have another kid in mind. He is interested in coming on board to learn how to run play-by-play while he goes to college, so we’ll likely have a second person that we hire from that school.

I think it just depends on how innovative you get when you’re looking for talent. The last person that I hired, I looked at my engineering department a little bit differently. I realized we needed help in the department but I didn’t think we needed an RF engineer anymore because so much of what radio does is digital and IT. We were redoing all of the studios, and some of that is about computer stuff, not RF.

You can get an RF contractor if you need one out here, but I need somebody in the building that understands all of the aspects of this new digital world that I just hopped into because we were a little bit behind. I think it’s kind of opening up and expanding your thoughts on what does that new person’s skillset need to look like? You have to think a little bit outside of the box in my experience.

Look at our sellers. Every single person that worked in some sort of traditional advertising lost a chunk of our business to digital advertising. That’s just the thing, and so you have to have that component that you can offer so that you can get back some of that budget that you’ve lost going back to like 2008 or 2009.

You just have to be open-minded. And if somebody comes to you and they have a passion for your business and they have a passion to learn, even if they maybe don’t have the experience, then that’s almost worth it to take that chance on that person versus trying to find somebody that has the experience.