Of course there is. Advertising sales only makes sense when you can deliver large numbers. Consolidation helped provide those numbers 25 years ago.
Radio has, historically, always struggled with this. In the days of 7, 7 and 7, radio stations tended to be part of other companies. Those companies felt radio drove business to their other operations, and those other operations helped sustain the radio stations. I know half (or slightly more than half) of commercial radio stations were losing money in 1990, and I seem to remember David saying that was the case as far back as 1960.
In fact this is starting to become a problem for TV companies as well. That's why we're seeing radio companies selling to non-commercial religious operators, who don't have to deal with demanding advertisers.
TV is struggling badly from an advertising standpoint. Something I've noticed in the small market where I live is that some of the advertisers we used to get when I worked in radio, at least partially because TV was too expensive, are now advertising on TV. I don't know if that's a trend everywhere, and I haven't talked to anyone who is in charge of making those decisions here. I would, however, expect one of the reason they're advertising on TV today is because it's more affordable than it used to be. A friend of mine in an adjacent market switched from advertising on the radio to TV around 2006-07 because he found a cheap deal advertising on the NBC affiliate's Weather Plus digital subchannel that included a handful of spots on the main TV channel as a bonus. He was able to get that deal for the same price he was getting for being the last spot every day on the Sean Hannity show on the talk station in town. He also said he quickly saw results from being on TV, including an occasional caller asking, "Is this the guy on the roof in the commercials?".
There is no way to 'increase local sales' if you can't deliver a bigger number to advertisers. The only way to do that is create more inventory. That means either add more minutes of advertising per hour, or create more content outside of the air signal that you can sell. Which would you prefer? Cumulus is choosing to create more non-broadcast content.
At the risk of sounding like John Madden or Len Dawson, there is also no way to increase local sales when you don't have available clients. I'm aware of a major market radio cluster that had roughly 60 salespeople twenty years ago and only has about a dozen today. If it staffed the sales team back up to 60, everybody'd starve. As we've discussed multiple times before, you can't get back customers who went out of business during the Great Recession.
Digital seems to get customers who either don't buy radio or buy radio sparingly. I hear a lot more ads for my local Kroger when streaming than I do on the radio, same for McDonald's. Even Walmart occasionally buys digital when it never buys radio. I don't know if it'll ever be enough to regain profitability, but radio gets far too little credit for finding ways to get those clients, even though it's not with the transmitter. Those of us from the programming side don't like to think about it and hate to hear it, but radio is a sales and marketing operation.
