The Infinite Dial

Note: This is the complete text of a recent speech I gave at the NAB Radio Show in Philly. The topic was "A Stimulus Package for Radio." This speech has sparked a lot of interest, so I've decided to reprint the transcript here for all of the Infinite Dialers who couldn't attend.

Good morning. I'm Larry Rosin, President of Edison Research. This is my 22nd consecutive NAB Radio show - I have been at every one since the 1988 show in Washington DC.

I am a graduate of Princeton University class of 1984 and have an MBA from Wharton here in Philadelphia. I pretty much never mention this in my 'radio life', but it is germane to what I want to speak about today.

While there are so many issues challenging radio, at least most of them are on the agenda at this meeting. But other than the heroic efforts of, mostly, my colleague Edison VP Tom Webster, there is almost no one discussing one core issue. We are fast becoming an industry of old men and an industry with a glaring HR crisis.

Industry of old men? Take a look around at this conference. I am still, after 22 years, among the youngest attendees, just as I was in Washington in 1988. If it weren't for Daniel Anstandig I might actually be at the age of 47 one of the whippersnappers of this industry still.

Take a look at this panel, despite appearances, I am the youngest male member of this panel. Thank goodness they asked Heidi to be a presenter so it wasn't just a meeting of the grumpy old men.

Our panels are largely panels of old men saying things like: "We really need to develop a digital strategy." And for the record, this is at least the twelfth straight NAB Radio show with mostly the same increasingly older men saying that radio needs to develop a digital strategy. And oh, what sweet memories I have of the 2000 NAB Radio Show, now incredibly nine years ago, the best one ever. Held in San Francisco if you remember that one. I'm sure most of you do because almost everyone here is a long-time attendee of these conferences. Ah that 2000 show, when more Internet companies showed up than radio employees. I know because I gave one of the principle speeches at that conference, about the Internet, and as I stood in a room and spoke to an audience of over 2000 people in the Moscone center and asked: "Raise your hand if you work in traditional radio" and then I said: "Raise your hand if you work in the Internet" and more hands went up for the latter.

The Internet companies showed up at that show with a million plans to transform radio, and course simultaneously build it into what it could have become. But their bubble was about to burst, and most all of them were gone by the time of the 2001 show. Radio's 'masters of the universe' seemed to mostly say: "Phew - glad that's over and we can go back to the fundamentals of radio - building clusters, acquiring stations, and firing people."

So my radio stimulus plan is largely more of a dream than an actual plan. At the risk of sounding bitter, I have promoted endless numbers of practical, real plans to help the industry in the short and long terms, and most of them have gone unheeded, and for the record so have many of the other people on this panel suggested many practical, inexpensive things that could be done to help radio, and mostly they have been ignored. So why not dream?

Let me steal from Tom Webster's writing, just yesterday, from our company's radio blog the infinite dial dot com.

He had been sitting through yesterday's group PD panel, when one of the panelists, a group PD for - let me just say a really really big radio group - said that radio does have a way for young people to get into the industry - by starting in the tiniest markets and working their way up. Tom writes:

The biggest problem in broadcast radio is not their digital strategy, but their HR strategy. Work has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, and the workplace of today has little in common with the workplace of the previous decade. I sit on the Alumni Board of the business school from which I got my MBA, and from an admissions and retention perspective, the world of work has changed irrevocably. Where MBA programs used to get mid-level managers from big companies in droves, those big companies and those mid-level managerial positions have disappeared. The potential student body for our program has become the thousands of young entrepreneurs in our area that the Internet revolution has created, and our challenge is no longer to give an assistant manager the sheepskin they need to be a manager--it's to keep these thousands of entrepreneurs in business and improve the economic climate of our region.

Into this new world of work comes today's talented young creative professional. They have the tools to create their own future, and they are using them, not waiting around for their "shot." Attracting young talent has to be the primary focus for the radio industry today--there simply are not enough young people in the business for it to be sustainably competitive in the medium term. One of the panelists reiterated the importance of their digital strategy, and that young talent will think radio is "cool" when they are able to use all of the digital tools to make it so. This is the wrong end of the funnel. Today's web-savvy young creatives already know how to use the tools, and most of them are free. They already have that knowledge, and they are already using it. The solution is not to make a bunch of tools and hope young creatives are attracted to the business to use them--it's to hire the best young creatives now and tap into the knowledge they already have.

In one breath, a panelist in today's session proclaimed that "we need to have a strong digital strategy" to attract young talent, but then added "I don't know how we are going to pay them." THAT is the problem, in a nutshell, and all the Twittering in the world won't really address it.

Radio needs two basic types of professionals: creative talent (for on-air, programming and promotions) and business talent (the quants and marketing analysts that will blend science into the art). In the case of the latter, Radio has never done a good job of attracting the best talent. I've noted before in this space that when I finished my undergraduate degree, I had three choices: I could go to graduate school, I could take a high-paying job with one of the McKinsey/Andersen/PWC-esque companies recruiting on campus, or I could get Carlos and the Chicken's coffee for two years in the hopes of getting an overnight shift someday. Guess which one I didn't choose. Attracting the best minds in marketing, analysis and finance is not a matter of working people from Kaline to Moline and asking them to tough it out--it's attracting the best people NOW and creating attractive positions, favorable working conditions, and humane career paths that don't involve uprooting families every 18 months.

For creatives, things have changed dramatically. There was once a time when we could expect creative talent to gravitate to radio, tough it out for a decade or so, and finally crack the big time. Today, however, all the most creative people need is a Mac and a mic and they already have the same potential access to a digital audience that we do, without all of the restrictions of corporate broadcasting today. The brightest young talent today is more entrepreneurial, and has the means to syndicate themselves anytime they want--and do things their way. Maybe they will fail, maybe not--but they can do it on their terms, and that is increasingly important to today's potential young talent. If they are going to "pay their dues" for little money, they are more willing to do it on their own than ever before.

Wow. Bravo Tom. I couldn't have said it better, and thus I didn't - I just stole your work (Tom's post, and all the comments it has generated, can be found here.)

My stimulus plan again is a dream, as is exposed by the quote embedded within Tom's piece - "I don't know how we are going to pay them." My dream, then, is that we get the government to pay for, with their monopoly money, radio to start hiring, developing, and using an entirely new generation of young people to take us into our future. Since radio's masters of the universe decided to use all of the monstrous profits radio creates to just leverage up for more and more debt, instead of reinvesting in its future, we will need the government's money.

And what will we do? We will go to the Harvard Lampoon, and instead of letting every one of their graduates go to work for The Simpsons, or 30 Rock, or Conan O'Brien, we will get them to begin filling a real talent pool of creativity for the industry.

We will hire the very kinds of young business students Tom is describing, emerging from today's business schools with an entirely different picture of media and of the world, who will guide us into a real future, not one where many prescriptions for the industry are to 'go back to what worked in the 1970s.'

We will start aggressively recruiting the best podcasters, the best talents from YouTube or whatever other new media stars we can find and say: "Take six months, hone your craft further on our HD stations - don't worry no one is listening any way -- and invent the future of our medium. We will hire these people by the dozens or hundreds, and we will let them loose. In this way we would truly be doing nothing different than radio actually did in the 1970s - when FM was essentially a similar kind of playground. Look at the geniuses who emerged from that period - and it's not hard to do so - a huge portion of that crew is the crew that continues to come to this meeting.

An astonishing number of the people who have propelled this medium for the last 30 years are graduates of that era, the early FM days when 24 year old geniuses could become GMs, and 21 year olds could become major market program directors.

And most of the people who populate radio today are people who just knew at incredibly young ages that this is what they wanted to do with their lives. So they started hanging around at radio stations at the age of 14 or 16. This has been radio's recruitment strategy for the last several generations. Hope and pray that talent just walks in the door as a teenager.

But ask yourself, if a brilliant creative talent walked into a radio station today, or for that matter walked into the group office of a radio company today, with a college degree, looking to make - oh -- $35,000 per year - where would he or she be placed? Let's face facts, we simply do not have anything close to a career path for that person. Could we really ask that person to go find a job in Topeka doing overnights? Well we all know the answer is no - because we long ago eliminated live talent there. I suppose we could offer them a job in sales, and if this person were desperate enough to work in 'media' to take such a job, he or she would be discouraged and gone within six months.

So please, Mr. Obama, give me the money, as radio stimulus czar, to build a team to identify, hire, nurture, and let loose this talent onto radio's future. So that Daniel Anstandig has someone within 20 years of his age to hang out with at the NAB Radio Show 2012.