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| Investor Relations |
Q&A with Cox Radio, Inc. |
Local is good, and Cox Radio is all about building local brands – radio stations
that embrace a community and are embraced back by the community's
advertisers and listeners.
2 questions with:
Caroline Devine
Regional Vice President
Jay O'Connor
Regional Vice President
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Kim Guthrie
Regional Vice President
Ben Reed
Regional Vice President
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Just what is a local brand?
REED: You've established a local brand when your
radio station is the top-of-mind station in a certain genre.
Or on the sales side, you're the local brand when your
radio station is the one advertisers rely on to get their
message out. And you're the radio cluster local brand
when you're the cluster that gets the job done.
O'CONNOR: You build a local brand by finding out what
local listeners want. You do music research and perception
research – ask people what they want to hear...
what they expect from the station. Do they want traffic
reports or 5-day weather forecasts? And then you build
the brand around the consumer's mindset. Local brands
serve local communities. You want to endear your station
to the community. You have a great local brand when
more and more listeners refer to your station as "my
radio station."
DEVINE: You're a local brand when the audience of
your radio station can remember your "name" without
being prompted. It's when the radio station becomes
famous for its music, its air personalities, lifestyle fea-tures
or contests, and how it reflects the vital issues
in the community.
GUTHRIE: The corporate office doesn't create our local
brands. Our local station teams do. The team decides
what's most appropriate for its community and what bene-fits
the station should provide to the community. This
means finding out how that station can be meaningful to
the community and how it can participate as a good and
contributing corporate citizen for local causes, issues
and events. When I started working for Cox Radio, I kept
calling our corporate office and asking for the corporate
policy on various subjects. The answer nearly 100% of
the time was, "That's a local station-level decision."
How do you create a local brand?
GUTHRIE: You invest in local research. And you
research constantly to make sure you're on target. You
give back to the community. And you show listeners that
your station is more than just a music box.
REED: You maintain an intense focus on your strategic
plan. That's something I think Cox Radio really excels
at because we don't have other distractions. We are
100% radio with the highest trained people producing
the best radio product.
DEVINE: We identify the best format opportunity based
on a target audience's interests, then create a station
product that best fits that marketplace need. We
access all our resources to accomplish this, including
research, creative local teams and focused application
of the information.
O'CONNOR: You research. You focus. And you execute.
You find the local bull's eye and keep hitting it with local
personalities, local news, local promotions, local advertising,
local traffic reports. You tell the community over
and over again that this is their station. And while we
will continue to experiment with things like syndicated
personalities, we keep finding that well-executed local
programming and promotions are just as, if not more,
effective in raising our Arbitron cumulative listening scores.
GUTHRIE: There's no book on how to build a local brand –
no 12-step program. Each local brand in our company
is significantly different but the common denominator
is that our local station people are dialed in to our local
communities...and we bring that all to life on each
radio station that Cox radio owns.
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