TORONTO – Money worries and digital strategies seem to be the key business issues keeping radio industry honchos awake at night, judging by their comments during a special radio exec panel session at the annual Canadian Music Week convention held in Toronto last week.
“Our company is in a tremendous growth pattern right now, but I worry about 2008 happening again,” said Christopher Grossman, owner and president of Haliburton Broadcasting Group. Haliburton owns radio stations in 18 small markets in central and northern Ontario, with expansion into two more communities expected soon. “I worry about what would happen if the economy went sideways again, or if there’s a disaster in East Asia and how that would affect our business.”
Money was also on the mind of Denise Donlon, general manager of CBC Radio/Radio-Canada. Despite being publicly funded, (and there are no ads on CBC Radio), the CBC as a corporation relies on advertising for one-third of its budget.
“So we are still subject to the vagaries of the market,” Donlon said. “Because there is government appropriation, I would say we’re inoculated but we’re not immune.”
Veteran broadcaster Bill Evanov, founder and president of Evanov Communications Inc., said that although his debt-free company has never had to worry about money, as an independent broadcaster operating in major Canadian markets, its biggest challenge is competing with corporate entities that have deeper pockets and more resources.
Donlon noted that one of CBC Radio’s challenges is figuring out how to embrace the new digital technologies and platforms that are transforming the media industry, while maintaining the integrity and brand loyalty of its broadcast service.
“People are demanding to be served in all these new ways,” she said. “Luckily, the technology is giving us better options. But we’re expected to serve everyone, and we know that’s just not always possible.”
CHUM Radio president Chris Gordon said the digital end of CHUM’s business is the biggest concern that keeps him up at night.
“Other than copyright and CRTC issues and all the admin things that go along with what we do all day, truly the digital element and where we’re going to be three years from now are driving what I see as our biggest challenges,” he said. “Basically, now that we’re owned by a phone company (Bell Canada), that solves one of my big problems. But we need to be able to utilize all of those resources that are going to take us to the place that we truly need to be.”
Paul Ski, CEO of the radio division of Rogers Broadcasting Ltd., said that industry fragmentation and competition created by new digital platforms mean radio folks are having less fun than they used to have.
“The way we’re going to survive in the next three to five to 10 years is if we can attack the competition by beating them on a per-person creativity standpoint,” he said. “If I’m competing with other radio stations or all these things that are coming in the digital world, I can win if each person I’ve got is more creative than the others.”
With the advent of social media and new user-engagement tools, Donlon added, CBC Radio is now able to move from a traditional one-to-many broadcast format to more of an interactive one-to-one conversation with its listeners via its Radio 3 on-line service.
“The competitive environment gets more and more fierce all the time,” Donlon said. “We are competing for the attention of our listeners with everything – with games and smartphones and widgets and subcutaneous (RFID, geo-locating) chip implants. So it’s all about how you get listeners and how you engage them.”
Richard Costley-White, CEO of London, Ont.-based Blackburn Radio Inc., was bullish about the future of radio. Blackburn owns 13 radio stations in southwestern Ontario and is about to launch a 14th in London.
“Radio has a long future ahead of it, as long as we stick to our knitting, instead of being mesmerized by the technology,” he said. “It’s about building and sustaining communities. It’s not about the gadgetry.”
However, Costley-White did stress what he sees as “a huge affinity between radio as we understand it and the proliferation of platforms and technologies that are out there. We have been jumping on them willy-nilly for the last couple of years, and we’ve seen our audience just keep growing.”
According to Evanov, “radio will be around forever” as long as the industry changes with the times.
“Down the road, you will still have a radio licence and a radio station, but people will be listening on this device,” Evanov said, holding up his smart phone. “There’s no threat to radio from satellite radio. Radio will always have the mass audience…as long as it grows where the technology is growing, whether it’s the phone or whether it’s Internet radio in the car.”
When asked about efforts to monetize Internet radio services, most of the radio executives on the panel said that wasn’t much of a priority.
“I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on it,” said Rob Steele, president and CEO of Dartmouth, N.S.-based Newcap Broadcasting Ltd., which operates radio stations in small and medium-sized markets across Canada. “(Internet radio) is a very small part of our business. We do maybe two per cent of revenue on the Internet. So you don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time on it.”
Blackburn Radio’s Costley-White said Internet business represents about three per cent or four per cent of his company’s revenue. “But it’s growing,” he said. “This past budget season was the first time I actually put a hard target on it.”
In an interview conducted after the panel discussion, Donlon told Cartt.ca that CBC Radio’s on-line digital business is about equal in size to the radio station that it operates in Moncton, N.B.
“That’s important, though,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is build out as best we can, and try to figure out how to give people what they want. But for us, it’s all about return on investment. What do you stop doing, so that you can do more of that, right? The money is finite.”
As a public broadcaster, CBC Radio has to be careful about how it spends public funds, Donlon added.
“We have to make sure that we’re using taxpayers’ money as best as we possibly can. So if we thought there was a lot more money out there to be made, in terms of on-line delivery, we’d be growing that.”
