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Buffalo Cumulus sells AM to Buddy Shula
- Thread starter exdjted
- Start date
Except Buddy will make money from it. Acquisition cost was less than a "fixer-upper" house in a bad neighborhood. His cost to operate it is basically the tower rent and the electric bill. Everything else can be combined with WECK's back office infrastructure/staff. The demographics of both stations complement each other, so anybody buying spots on WECK will probably also buy WUSW. When you think about it, it's about as close to a "no-brainer" in radio as you can get today.
can't forget streaming and music licensing. repairs/replacement of gear that breaks, etc
Additional insurance costs, probably need an additional traffic and continuity person, additional retainer for FCC counsel and a number of others. But still, consolidation can result in great cost savings.
No need for another traffic & continuity person these days. With automation, one traffic person can easily handle two stations. Happens ALL the time.
Yup... We've got one person handling three stations' traffic where I work. It's been that way for years.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
At the Albuquerque cluster that includes KRKE, there is one program that does the traffic not only for the cluster but several co-owned stations elsewhere that are fed by Internet from the ABQ studios/offices.
The advantage of that is that ad buys across different combinations of the stations are much more easily handled by a single traffic director.
Local stations with lots of dayparted sales, program sales, etc. generally create a bit more work for traffic than one like KOST or KIIS that have almost all pure transactional sales with broad dayparts or just 6 AM to 7 PM ROS buys.
It depends on how complicated the buys are.
But you are right, one traffic person in a medium or larger market can handle traffic, production orders, reconciliation, billing and even A/R if trained.
The problem with that is not everyone who listens to oldies music has conservative political beliefs. "Hate listening" by the left is a thing of the past. There are many businesses that would advertise on a music station that won't even dare touching polarized political talk, no matter which side of the political spectrum its on, especially in this day and age.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
That's the case even with large clusters. Here in L.A., iHeart's talker KFI has an almost entirely different set of advertisers than their FM music stations. I believe the prevailing "wisdom" is that the audiences overlap very little, if at all.
Absolutely and they get to specify that their spots not air in any controversial or political talk programming. I see this notation in commercial logs all the time:
However they're all national advertisers. Local Buffalo advertisers may have a different view. I'm sure Buddy takes care of that.
KFI is also very different from co-owned KEIB, by design. They wanted to keep the controversial stuff on its own island.
I compare it to Catsimatidis owning WABC. He has enough money he can afford to run the station as his megaphone and not as a cash cow. I don't know about Buddy though, although supplement infomercials could probably help him break even.
The only music formats with audiences with significant overlap to conservative talk are either different flavors of country and probably Christian.
I'm sure he'll get a format specialist like Salem to try and sell national ads for the station too.
He'll be running the Salem national ads in their TOH newscasts.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Yes, that's another example which I left out originally to simplify the comparison. But KEIB has few (if any) advertisers who are also on KRRL/KYSR/KIIS/KOST/KBIG.
The syndicated shows come with ads (that is how they are paid), and there is very little national business for local talk station buys. And Buddy likely has a national rep already, and they will cover any available national business.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I am surprised, after the number of times this has come up across multiple boards, that there are still people here who do not understand that.
Probably the same people who think radio executives make decisions based on 6+ ratings.
Or that program directors decide themselves which songs to play.
He's not a client of any of the Katz companies. I think he's contracted with a smaller national firm with fewer resources, so maybe local sales is his top priority. Salem represents some non-owned stations, don't they?