• by Jonathan Blum , January 2, 2009

Maybe the marketing oxymoron “innovative radio” is losing its joke power.

After more than a decade of declining market share and incursions from both the Web and satellite providers, traditional over-the-air broadcast radio may finally have a recession strategy: working with the future instead of trying to ignore it.

Major station groups have quietly begun to offer new (for them) integrated marketing products that combine traditional broadcast radio, Web sites, live events and database marketing. And the results are bearing fruit. In sports radio, for example, WEEI.com and WFAN.com (the Web homes for sports talk stations in Boston and New York, respectively) have grown to become dominant Web destinations in their markets.

WEEI.com captures roughly double the reach and total page views as NESN.com, the Web site tied to the Boston Red Sox regional sports TV network, according to Alexa. And WFAN.com not only dwarfs SNY.com, the Web site tied to the New York Mets regional TV network, it regularly out-performs yesnetworks.com, Web home of YES, run by the Yankees.

None of these radio Web sites will win design awards. ESPN360 they are not. But still, radio has the potential could offer an affordable cross-platform marketing option that could produce results even for the smallest businesses.

“The biggest issue we have is getting over the perception hump that radio can’t be this sophisticated,” says Weezie Kramer, regional president at Entercom, which owns WEEI in Boston. Kramer says markets can vary, but the base level, where her clients can see results, is with a $50,000 annual buy.

“That lets us take someone through a multiplatform program buy,” Kramer says. “Once there, my results are as good as anybody’s out there.”