KFAN is a unique brand in the sports radio world. Sure, there are plenty of stations that approach sports as part of pop culture, but as Greg Alexander points out in our conversation: How many of those stations have had the same air staff in place for virtually two decades?
It’s a legendary brand, and yet it still flies under the radar nationally. Let’s change that.
Alexander is the market manager of iHeart Minneapolis. He is also the subject of today’s Meet the Market Managers column, presented by Point-To-Point Marketing.
In our conversation, he talks about this unpredictable economy, how the prioritization of on demand content effects radio advertisers, and what the barrier is to adding more play-by-play content on his station. Enjoy!
Demetri Ravanos: You have a really diverse cluster in terms of formats and audiences. I would imagine, given the way that KFAN talks about sports, it sets itself up really well for joint buys, whether that is with one other station or the entire cluster. Is there good opportunity for audience crossover?
Greg Alexander: Yes, for sure. KFAN’s audience is diverse because of the personalities that we have and the topics they go after every day. It’s not hardcore sports and that’s where we have the success with KFAN that we’ve had. So that attracts people from our country stations and our classic hits station and our CHR station. There is real cross-pollination between the stations in our cluster.
DR: I know as a market manager, your focus is always going to be on how the station and the personalities are perceived by the market. Nationally though, I do wonder if you guys feel like you get enough credit for the kind of brand KFAN is. It’s a powerhouse in terms of ratings, influence and revenue. Sometimes our format gets laser-focused on New York, Philadelphia and Boston. We don’t always give everybody outside of I-95 the credit they deserve, and your station may be at the very top of that list.
GA: Yeah, KFAN is incredibly healthy. You probably have the history on that. It’s built through many years. We just celebrated Eric Nordquist’s tenth year with the station, and he’s our youngest tenured personality and producer on the air. The next closest one is like 19 years, I think.
It’s just an established brand with established personalities who are very creative and they’re very entertaining. With that formula, people in Minnesota grow up on the station. People want to find out the takes or the how someone’s going to handle something. They tune in on a daily, weekly, monthly basis for that. This is where I give credit to (KFAN PD) Chad Abbott and (iHeart Minneapolis VP of Programming) Gregg Swedberg. They’ve created four different shows and Chad will tell you, we’ve got four morning shows. That’s how powerful these different dayparts are. In the morning it’s, ‘Hey, what are these guys doing? I want to be part of that club to P.A. from 9 to noon,’ which is ‘What will his take be with the Vikings today?’ Then we go to Common’s bits and then a hard hitting show with Barreiro. Listeners want to know what is his take on some major news story that may be taking place in the market or nationally and that’s the scope that he has.
DR: How do you sort of convey that to advertisers, be it new partners or long established? I mean, to your point, you have had people on that station for decades and you have had listeners experience life events with them from dealing with their own illnesses to spouses’ illnesses. You had a member of your morning show come out on air recently. How do you even begin to convey to a business what the value is of the fact that the audience cares about the people they hear on KFAN in this way?
GA: Well, I think it truly goes back to our personalities, the engagement that they can create and the realness of who they are. Making big announcements, personal announcements like that; that just makes them human beings as well as entertainers. Listeners are engaged in that. They feel as they’re driving into work, there’s someone next to them that’s their partner and that’s their friend, and they want to find out what their friend is up to – good, bad or indifferent. When they’re driving home or listening at work, they want to know what these these personalities are up to because they’re part of their friend group.
These people are entertaining and they’re engaging and you want to know more about them because they’re human beings. You follow them on Twitter, so you find out what they’re doing on weekends. Social media has been a huge part of their success because you can continue that conversation outside of the three or three-and-a-half hours that they may be on.
DR: Your company was kind of at the forefront, at least among the national brands, of recognizing that radio stations should be investing in digital content as well. So tell me about the changes you’ve seen in how – again, I’ll ask about the clients – because I would imagine going from when KFAN first started recognizing the value of digital to now you are talking with advertisers that are much more savvy about the value of that space.
GA: I just was on a panel and I talked about this. It’s really the thirst that the audience has for our station and our personalities. It’s just bellowing out, and so that leads into social media. So, you know, what we saw first initially was our streaming numbers being massive, and that’s because people wanted to know what our personalities were doing with the shows we’re doing when they left the market or just were outside of our market in terms of Minneapolis. Then the thirst for the personalities led to podcasting and, ‘Let’s do an extra show and just sit there and BS for a little bit longer.’ Well, those numbers are massive. The Power Trip, our morning show, is the 33rd-ranked podcast within iHeart. I mean, that’s massive. That doesn’t happen in a market this size.
Obviously, Twitter grew up and that’s where it really exploded. These guys jumped on Twitter. Our station jumped on Twitter over some of the other social media and that has blown up. You can see what these numbers are: over 200,000 followers.
It’s just for that thirst of, ‘What is P.A. going to say and who’s he going to talk about and what’s his take on something?’ You can get that for three hours each day from 9 to noon, but then, ‘Hey, I see he’s at the horse track on Friday nights or Saturdays’ in the off-season or, ‘What rumors is he talking about?’ In social media and different media platforms, we just continue to extend the brand and what our guys are.
DR: You’ve been in the iHeart system for a long time. I think you predate the name iHeart. So, tell me a little bit about how you have seen that shift in terms of the importance of the broadcast product. Is it still what the company puts out front when discussing itself or pitching to advertisers? How has that shifted over the time you’ve been there?
GA: The broadcast is still the foundation of who we are. I always look at it as how you’re obtaining the content. So I tell people I used to go on a run and I’d have a Walkman and I’d be listening to KFAN. Well, nowadays I go on a run and I put my phone on and I’m still capturing the same show; I’m just doing it through a stream. Technological advances allow us to do that, but it’s still the entertainment and that engagement that I have with the shows. Our listeners do the same thing. It’s just a technological change and access.
Again, this panel I was on – I told 200 people just last week that social media is the greatest thing that’s happened to our personalities because you couldn’t interact with a personality other than maybe getting through on a phone call, which we don’t even do a ton of phone calls anymore. Now I know what he’s doing on a Friday night. I know what Barreiro is doing on a Saturday. Chris Hawkey – I know what band he’s performing with and what location on a Saturday night. And so now I’m closer and can be more engaged with our personalities than ever before, so social media has been a fantastic thing for our personalities.
DR: Forget the the hierarchy of broadcast versus digital for a second. For so long we wondered what the best way to go about monetizing our digital products was. Now, I wonder if you’ve ever encountered a situation where you have an advertiser that sees more value in being on those on-demand products over the live feed – over-the-air; the stream; whatever the case that may be. As a society, we kind of crave on-demand more than working on any network’s or station’s schedule these days.
GA: I think clients will look at the extension products, a rebroadcast of a podcast or an additional podcast. They may look at that as a new audience for them. We talk to clients all the time about, ‘Hey, you want to be on the broadcast, advertise there live,’ but then also the rebroadcast because people aren’t listening to the broadcast and then they’re going to go back and listen to the rebroadcast. So you’ve got to capture that entire audience. They know the best way to do that is advertise on both mediums.
DR: Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. Tell me a little bit about your play-by-play goals and strategy for KFAN, because you had the Vikings, the Gophers and the Wild and in my mind, obviously as a lifelong Southerner, so I might be stereotyping here, but you have the Vikings and you have hockey in Minnesota. You’re pretty well covered, right? Is there a desire to add more if the opportunity became available or given what you have, is the bar set so high that maybe you don’t need more right now?
GA: It comes down to time, honestly. You know, we love to be the sports leader. We’d love to have a lot of sports teams. We’re really happy with the Vikings, Wild and Gophers. We also have the St. Paul Saints. We play a couple of their games on the weekends. It’s on FAN Plus the rest of the time, but if we can get creative and we can have more of that sports audience and ability to work with the franchises, that would be fantastic. We just have to work through the amount of time that stuff is on the air and conflicts that could arise from that.
DR: We are trying to forecast the economy right now and it is tricky, but are there any sectors that you look at as sort of a microcosm for the big picture? Is there any sector you can look at and say, ‘If that’s okay, we’re okay,’ or, ‘If that’s off, that could spell trouble down the road’?
GA: It’s a good question. The uncertainty is is everywhere. You talk to one company, and they’re struggling. You talk to another company; they’re doing great. That’s what’s so weird about what we’re dealing with from an economic standpoint.
You’ve been around. We’ve both seen economic uncertainty in the market before. I was in New York when 9/11 happened. I was there in Miami when the housing bubble burst and Miami was just destroyed. I was obviously here for the pandemic. Every one of those is a little bit different, but this one is probably the most different because we are getting a positive and a negative on the same day and it counteracts. I mean, we raise our our interest to 7% and boom, unemployment goes down. How is that supposed to happen?
DR: I heard an economics professor speak after he put out a paper basically saying, ‘Hey, by definition, we’re not in a recession. People are spending like we’re not in a recession.’ So on and so forth. The rebuttal actually, I thought was very poignant, which was, ‘Okay, if we’re not technically in a recession, but we believe we’re in a recession or the the general feeling is we’re in a recession, is that any different than being in a recession?’ I guess it goes to your point, like we don’t know what information we’re getting right now.
GA: You’ve got housing that’s still going up and you got interest rates that just went up today or yesterday. It’s wild.
We’ve got car dealers that are doing well, but then you’ve got car dealers who aren’t getting cars because of the the slowdown there. So, I mean, every day; every client we talk to, it’s one thing or the other. It’s just it’s so wild because everyone’s like, ‘It’s going to change,’ you know? But we’ve been saying that for probably 12 months now.
