22 RADIOINK•COM AUGUST 12, 2019
the show, work with the sales team, go on
remotes, etc. Now we say, “Do that, and
we also want you to embrace this digital
platform, blog twice a day, connect with
your audience on our social platforms, add
videos to YouTube and Snapchat, etc.” It
is important to be in front of the team to
give them that context.
Same for the local sales team, in terms
of how much harder their responsibilities
are. It’s really important as we have re-
oriented ourselves back to a “local first”
premise. The company’s performance is
tied 100 percent to their performance.
They understand how important they
are to their communities. I want them to
understand how important they are to
the company and be empowered to be
successful in their role. If they are miss-
ing anything to achieve success, I request
that they tell me so we can work together
to fix it.Radio Ink: How have you have gotten
the company so successful at digital?
Wilson: First step is building a great team.
The assets and brands were always there.
We had great talent on the air, and the
best sales team in every one of our mar-
kets in terms of size and quality. We have
great local leadership.
We have a great strategy, but that
means nothing if your teams are not
executing. The execution is coming fromall of our local market leaders, division
leaders, and their teams. One of our core
tenets is “Continue to train until you can’t
get it wrong.” A lot of repetition. We are
purposefully not operating in the top 50
markets because of the strong connection
our on-air talent has to the community, as
well as the lack of competition on the digi-
tal front in particular with our solutions.
When we have solutions like Townsquare
Interactive, which is our marketing solu-
tions company on the digital front, and
Townsquare Ignite, which is our digital
programmatic offering, combined with the
strength of our own websites and social
channels, we’re generating strong digital
results. I haven’t seen any competition
actually operate with in-house solutions in
the markets we operate in to offer those
digital solutions to clients. Rather, I have
only seen local competitors in radio, TV,
and print leveraging third-party solutions
— which creates customer service chal-
lenges, as well as less powerful solutions
since they are not part of one ecosystem
for clients. A combination of our in-house
solutions set, our assets, our training, and
most importantly, our people is driving our
success.Radio Ink: You get digital nailed, then
social media comes along. Was it a big
transition?
Wilson: We were fortunate. It was a morenatural evolution at that point. If we had
not started aggressively with digital as we
did in 2010, it might have been more dis-
ruptive. As social media exploded, we were
able to take advantage of that and harness
it. We get a tremendous amount of traffic
from social media as well as from search
engines. We have our on-air talent creating
content across all those platforms.
On a weekly basis as measured by
Nielsen (about 70 percent of our stations
are measured by them), we reach over 12
million radio listeners. Our owned-and-
operated local media websites, which are
companions to our radio station brands,
reach more consumers than our AM/FM
broadcasts. Given that fact, you get the
benefit of positive reinforcement for the
on-air talent. We’re asking them to do all
this additional work, but the great thing
is they instantly saw the benefit of the
communities interacting with them via
digital. They were surprised that people in
the community cared so much about what
they had to say online.
It’s a great proof point that we now have
more people coming to our local radio
station websites than listen to our AM/
FM broadcast. At the same time, our latest
rating period, the fall of ’18, we had half a
million more people listening to our AM/
FM broadcasts than have listened over
the past two years. In the face of Pandora,
Spotify, and all of this media competition,Some of Townsquare’s market presidents and RVP Kevin Godwin at a regional meeting in Charlotte (HQ for Townsquare Interactive)