• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 14, 2006

"It's hard to take a successful business and change it. It's much easier to take a failing business and change it, and that's why there's hope for radio," according to media consultant Erwin Ephron, who delivered this gloomy--but also hopeful--prediction after his speech on Thursday to an audience of radio execs at "Listen Up!," a seminar series arranged by radio ratings measurement firm Arbitron.

Ephron didn't need to convince his audience that radio is in the doldrums, or that it needs to change--but he did seem to feel he had to persuade them that change was possible. So his speech ended up sounding a bit more like a coach's fourth-quarter pep talk than a seminar. At one point Ephron chided the audience: "Come on, you know this stuff... If the cable networks can guarantee audience delivery, why can't radio? And if the Weather Channel, with fewer commercials, can guarantee higher than average recall scores, so can radio, with [Clear Channel's] 'Less Is More' program."

Among Ephron's suggestions was a strategic pairing of TV and radio, reviving the practice of "duplication": "[Arbitron's PPM results] show radio is a 'reach' medium as well as frequency, so why isn't it being sold that way? And why not use radio to reinforce and guarantee TV communication?" According to Ephron: "They're both broadcast, and television could use some help from radio. That's a 'new-old' idea called 'duplication.'"

Privately, Ephron admitted he was "impatient" with the radio industry. For one thing, the industry needs to take note of figures like those recently released by the Radio Advertising Bureau showing a decline in local ad revenue but an uptick in national sales: "If you take the dollar numbers, national numbers are up while local numbers are weak, and getting weaker... why aren't they pushing national sales? They're all in a good position to do it--Clear Channel, Infiniti, all those guys."

In February the Radio Ad Bureau reported that national sales climbed 4 percent that month over the same month last year, but at the same time, local ad dollars dropped 3 percent, leading to a 2 percent overall decline from February 2005. Meanwhile, according to a survey from Radio and Television News Directors' Association (RTNDA) and Ball State University cited in "State of the News," the number of programming directors reporting a profit for radio news programs dropped from 22.4 percent in 2004 to 20 percent in 2005.

The latter finding brought up another of Ephron's targets: local station managers. "The obstacle [to national sales] is the local station managers, who are really sort of hung up on the local ad sales model, for obvious reasons," Ephron said. "And I think the radio execs know that. But this is institutional inertia, and things are probably just going to have to get harder before they start to improve."