Posted by Bob Smith on September 24, 2008 at 14:44:43:
In Reply to: CBS Radio President Worried About Disappearance of AM Radios posted by Bill Scheffler on September 23, 2008 at 15:03:59:
That's a strange thing for him to say, when the AM stations in his company's portfolio are clearly the strongest properties he has in some of his biggest markets including New York, Boston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Philly and more.
His company's performance proves one thing that we first learned at CapCities/ABC back in 1977 in a major national listener survey, designed to explore the future of AM blowtorches in that company's own portfolio in markets including NYC, Detroit, Chicago, LA, San Francisco and Buffalo. The results that came back surprised TPTB...people told them they don't choose a station based on what band it's on, where it is on the dial or even if it's mono or stereo, they just go looking for the place where they can get the programming they want or need and the personalities they like. They repeated that survey any number of times as long as they owned the company, all the way to the Disney sale...and it came out the same way every time. Content is king, platform is a hell of a lot less of an issue to listeners than we in the business think it is. If we think and plan otherwise, we're just turning our fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy that doesn't have to fulfill itself. Conversely, if we give the people what they want, conventional radio has a lot brighter future than we give it credit for.