RADIO BROADCASTING: THE INVASION OF THE BEAN COUNTERS

I’m back in the thin, dry air at 8,000 feet, reflecting on a long weekend down at sea level.

Each year, radio guru Dan O’Day brings together radio people from around the globe.

His International Radio Creative & Production Summit (which he has previously vowed to rename if you can come up with a title more pretentious) is two full days in a LAX Hilton conference room, packed to the gills with radio professionals.

Dan always limits the event to 100 attendees.

This year, something interesting happened. (Besides the convention of “leather enthusiasts” arriving next door.)

Nobody was wait-listed.

The room was only about half full.

And something else happened.

It was possibly Dan’s best Summit ever.

ENTHUSIASM IS CONTAGIOUS.

While good as always, I’m not sure the Summit presenter lineup was really that much better than previous years.

But there was an electricity, an energy, that hasn’t been experienced at the Summit for a while.

My guess?

It’s because the economy sucks.

Radio stations are making cuts left and right.

Those cuts include “unnecessary” expenses like sending creative and production people for training.

So the vast majority of attendees were there on their own dime. They were there because they wanted to be there.

And something else interesting about these folks.

To borrow the lovely British expression, many of them (yours truly included) had been “made redundant” by their employers.

Actually, I should qualify.

UPPER MANAGEMENT AT MY COMPANY TRIED TO MAKE ME REDUNDANT.

My boss wanted a compromise, which meant making me an independent contractor.

My response was, “OK, I’ll do it,” then using the ensuing free time to start my own company (with the invaluable assistance of my lovely wife).

And this leads me to the other really cool thing about so many of this year’s Summiteers.

All of those people who’ve been let go or chosen to leave jobs have really exciting things going on.

The inimitable Bob Souer, who so many readers would know as a long-time Salem Broadcasting production and voiceover figure, just left the Billy Graham organization.

Bob’s voiceover career has flourished remarkably. He’s now devoting himself full time to breathing life into other people’s scripts. He is also employing both his son and his daughter as part of his operation. (Maybe it’s just me, but Bob was also looking as if he might’ve wanted to join the leather enthusiasts next door.)

Pam Tierney, a long-time TV sales rep and part-time actress in Chicago, has been coming to the Summit for years to soak in the voiceover training.

She was planning to leave her job, didn’t feel right about it, waited, and a week later was laid off with full severance. She has plenty of cash and her acting career is flourishing wildly.

The most surprising attendee was legendary California disc jockey Bobby Ocean.

Bobby was there because the radio broadcasting landscape has changed. He wants to see about reinventing himself in the 21st century.

It was also Bobby who put voice to something that partly explains what’s going on here, and defines the problem with radio — why so many of these fabulously talented people are doing so incredibly well outside of broadcasting.

“THE PEOPLE RUNNING RADIO TODAY ARE NOT BROADCASTERS.”

His statement was short, efficient, and loaded with dynamite.

Indeed, there are no broadcasters in charge of broadcasting at large.

Yes, there are pockets of resistance. There are small station groups and family-owned companies that will stay healthy.

But by and large, it’s bean counters who make the decisions.

In my case, this explains how a national award-winning Creative Director — who can document his ability to generate ROI for his clients — gets axed after more than a decade of performance far beyond the level of the meager salary he was being paid. (That’s not puffery. I’m good at what I do. I’m also flawed. And I was earning about half the national average — a trade-off for the freedom that came with the gig.)

Evidently, the people in charge at the top had no concept. It’s not as if anyone knew enough to say the ridiculous: “He’s keeping our clients on the air? Let’s get rid of him!”

THE IDEA THAT IT WOULD COST THEM MONEY TO ELIMINATE AN EMPLOYEE CERTAINLY NEVER OCCURRED TO THEM.

Similarly, talented creative people across the nation are being eliminated from positions where they’re really needed rather badly.

Without talent, without dedicated people committed to making the medium better, you have nothing.

In one rather inexcusably cynical cost-cutting measure, the head of one major broadcasting company eliminated all the overnight air personalities, replacing them with full automation.

Quizzed on it, he is reported to have said, If these people were any good they wouldn’t be working the overnight.

Where do you think new air personalities come from? They’re hatched fully formed from the head of Zeus or Mel Karmazin?

Imagine if anyone had been asinine enough to say that about a legendary figure like Jean Shepherd, who was a middle-of-the-night sensation for ages.

ZERO UNDERSTANDING, ULTIMATELY LEADING TO ZERO REVENUE

It’s fascinating that people who are in charge of a medium that requires creativity to operate have no comprehension of creative capital.

And the proof that these people are indeed creative is evidenced by their continued success once the corporate conductor punches their ticket and sends them on their way.

Good, talented, creative people are going to thrive one way or another. That’s why so many of them, even in difficult times, are flying in from all over the country to convene at an event like Dan O’Day’s (and possibly consider an avocation in leather enthusiasm).

However, broadcasting companies that were once filled with these good, talented, creative people are suddenly going to find themselves pointless, pathetic and unprofitable.

You can’t eliminate the people who breathe life into what you sell, who give your clients’ advertising the fuel for success, and expect to continue having success.

It’s tragic, really.

For the companies, that is.

For those of us who’ve had exit strategies foisted upon us by ignorant, unaware, bean counting imbeciles (I mean that with love), it’s just an opportunity we never counted on.

Granted, the bean counters will always have jobs. They can use numbers to rationalize their way out of anything and continue failing upward.

As for those of us who convened at the Dan O’Day International Radio Creative & Production Summit, we are busy being profitable and having a much better time — including the opportunity to wonder about the leather enthusiasts.