There have been so many conversations over the years about how important it is for hosts to connect with the radio audience. It’s been said approximately 9,000,000 times that hosts should be authentic and relatable. It hasn’t been mentioned nearly as often that spending time and sharing experiences with the audience can lead to stronger connections.
Not only is Matt Chernoff a successful host on 680 The Fan in Atlanta, he’s also the Chief Marketing Officer of Atlanta Sports Trips. It’s a company that organizes road trips to various stadiums complete with cool meet-and-greet opportunities. It’s one thing to take a phone call from John in Buckhead. It’s another thing to eat a hot dog next to that same guy while cheering for the Braves at Wrigley Field.
Chernoff is a boots on the ground kind of guy. He isn’t just a CMO hiding behind a desk or microphone, Chernoff is going to all of these venues. It’s a win-win; he’s enjoying great experiences and also connecting with the same people that might be listening to his show regularly.
In our conversation below, Chernoff also chats about doing radio shows with Chuck Oliver. Chernoff also includes a one-liner gone wrong when he used to do sidelines for the Atlanta Falcons, and touches on the very remote possibility of working for me one day. Enjoy!
BN: So tell me about Atlanta Sports Trips. What led to you creating the business?
MC: There’s a company in Philadelphia called Philly Sports Trips. John Kincaid, who I used to work with, was either endorsing them or promoting them. He and I were just shooting the breeze one day about some stuff. I said I just love the concept. I love travel. I love the idea of going to road games. And I loved their concept that they put together. We had a bunch of meetings with them, they invested in us, kind of got it off the ground.
The whole idea behind what we’re doing is also trying to be sort of spun off around the country. There’s a Boston Sports Trips now. There are several other cities that are doing the same. Just the whole idea is to give people a plug and play, pick a couple of good games. In this case, we’re going to Georgia and Vanderbilt in Nashville. Not that Vanderbilt is a great opponent, but it’s a great city. It’s a fun trip. And we’re going to Knoxville for Georgia-Tennessee in November. That might be the game of the year.
The whole idea is, let’s give them a hotel that they’re going to love. Let’s give them transportation from the hotel to the game. Let’s give them a meet-and-greet with a former player. It’s just a turnkey fun trip, tickets involved. It’s worked out well so far. We just did Braves-Cubs last month. We had a great turnout. We had Jeff Francoeur come out and do our meet-and-greet with our group. The hotel was in downtown Chicago. We did Wrigleyville and did a tour of the ballpark. It was an awesome trip. It’s just now about scaling it, taking it from five or six trips a year and then hopefully doubling it and just seeing where it goes from there.
BN: What’s it like to coordinate all that stuff when putting a trip together?
MC: For that part of it, I don’t do that. I have a trip coordinator who’s in charge of that. She’s a full-time travel agent. She’s done it for years. My part of it is simply marketing the trips, branding them, promoting them both on the radio and through other partnerships and relationships that I have. But as far as the logistics of the trip, I need to stay out of that. Nobody needs me messing that up because we would end up in a Motel 6, you know, 45 minutes away from a stadium. I have a great person who works with me as a co-owner of the company and she handles all that from a logistics standpoint.
BN: Do you typically go on the trips yourself?
MC: I do. Part of it, sort of tongue in cheek is, yeah, you get to hang out with Matt as part of it along with, like I said, we got Francoeur for the Braves trip. We did Eric Zeier and DJ Shockley last year for our Georgia trip. I’ll end up hosting the Q&A that we do with them. We open it up for questions from our group, and pictures and autographs and all that stuff. It’s a nice little thing.
We do get a decent bit of our listeners who do appreciate interacting, which I love. Then there are a lot of people who sort of come across us in different ways from us marketing the company in different areas that are there for the athlete or for the trip and kind of get the best of both. But yeah, for now, I’m on all the trips, which I really enjoy. There’s nothing more fun than being in somebody else’s stadium as a road fan and just getting to see it. I had only been to Wrigley before this one other time. To be at all three games for the Braves-Cubs was awesome. It was the perfect weekend, it couldn’t have been any better.
BN: Do you have a best or worst experience going to all these games? I don’t know, the bus broke down or something like that?
MC: There are always little logistical things that you’ll run into. Our biggest trip we did so far, we did a Georgia national championship trip this last year. But our spin on it was instead of taking the group to LA directly, because Los Angeles was just gouging people on these trips, for hotels, and just all of it, we said let’s do three nights in Vegas. We gave people the MGM Grand for three nights, and we had three motorcoaches. Really nice, Wi-Fi, TVs, bathrooms, the whole nine on the buses from the MGM Grand to SoFi in LA.
Well, that morning, we got a call that one of the buses wasn’t going to show up, which oh God, no, that can’t happen. So now we’re scrambling in the 11th hour to try to replace that because we had nearly 200 people. It’s the last thing somebody wants on the morning of the national championship for that to happen, but we put that fire out.
BN: What does it mean to you to be an Atlanta native? From doing your daily show to all these trips, when it’s not faked, when you’re not a transplant, when these are the teams that you grew up rooting for, what do you think that means for your show and for the trips that you do?
MC: I discovered a long time ago, there is sincerity in you being you. Atlanta is a transient city, whether it’s just people who move here for any number of jobs, but specifically media. In my career, I’ve worked with [John] Kincaid from Philly and Steak [Shapiro] from Boston and Mike [Bell] from New York and all these people. It shouldn’t have to be lame to say I’m from Atlanta.
I wear it as a badge of honor. I love my city and I’ve always appreciated getting a chance to be a real voice of this community. The Falcons lost the Super Bowl, my heart was as broken as the guy listening. Braves won the World Series, the guy listening understood I enjoyed it as much.
I’ve never positioned myself as a journalist. It’s not what I am. It’s never what I’ve been. I’ll call it as straight as I can when I’m critical of teams and upset with the teams. That’s always been real. I’ve never had to position myself as I can’t root. No, I got into this as a fan. I will always be a fan.
I joke with my kids, they watch me watch a game. I’m 46 years old and I’ll watch it like I’m 16. I watch with my kids and I’m like, I probably shouldn’t be acting the same way they are. But that’s that love for watching what you watch and the fact that these are my teams, it makes it so much easier. I said the sincerity is there because I think people recognize that. I’ve always appreciated that.
BN: What area do you think you and Chuck Oliver have grown the most as co-hosts throughout the years?
MC: It’s an understanding of each other. I always talk about it; anything you do on the radio is going to be an exaggerated look at your personality. I position Chuck as ‘Oh my God, you don’t understand technology! It’s getting worse as you get older.’ That’s going to be an exaggerated look. And he leans into it.
I will give Chuck credit on this, he has never had a problem — neither of us have — of being the butt of the joke. We will make fun of other people on our radio station, we will poke fun at other people in the market, but we’re just as quick to make fun of ourselves. Either when we mess up or when there’s something that is easy to poke fun at. I think as we’ve done this now for two decades, I know the buttons I can press to kind of exaggerate some of the things in our personalities.
I’m trying to remember an example, oh, so the Immaculate Grid, right? Everybody’s obsessed with Immaculate Grid. Well, Chuck can’t even figure out how to log on and do the Immaculate Grid. He will write down his answers, give it to a producer to plug in. How he can’t understand it, I don’t know, but to me when I see him feverishly writing during the show for the Immaculate Grid, that will give me a couple of moments to make fun of him. There are so many elements to that, that I think we know after working with each other long enough, and can hopefully be funny for the audience.
BN: That’s hilarious, man. So how’s the quesadilla quest going for you?
MC: This is a bad habit of mine, Brian, I’ll fully admit this, I get very gung ho about ideas. We did six or eight of them and then I failed to keep consistently doing them.
The listeners know I have a couple of loves in my life, my family, my teams and my quesadillas. I love a good quesadilla. I’ve got to get back on the horse of doing my quest. Some of it was just a cheap imitation. We joked that Portnoy’s pizza one bite challenge, we just said we don’t have the creative bones in our body to come up with our own thing, so we’ll just try to copy that. But even that I couldn’t follow through with because I’m just too lazy. Just a typical media member, I lose interest.
BN: Going back to your days doing sidelines for the Falcons, do you have any funny stories?
MC: I got to do it at a pretty young age. And looking back, I probably didn’t appreciate how cool it was. I understood it to a degree. It was 2003. I’m 26. The first report I did was Michael Vick breaking his leg in a preseason game against the Ravens.
BN: Oh, wow.
MC: That wasn’t fun. The season quite obviously went into the toilet. There was a Monday night game in St. Louis, which, again, the Falcons were dreadful. I think they lost the game 36-0. It’s 1 a.m. I’m on the sideline. The game is out of reach. It’s deep into the fourth quarter. They throw it down to me, Matt, what do you got? My answer was, I want to go home.
I thought it was the funniest line. I’m the funniest guy around. The Falcons apparently did not appreciate that one very much. When you’re 25, 26, you’re like, oh, my humor, they’ll get everything I’m doing. That one didn’t go over very well because now I’m making fun of the product that I’m covering. I see that now and I can see it from their perspective, when in the moment I’m thinking, you guys are taking this too seriously. It’s not that big of a deal. To them it was which I understood later.
BN: Are there any goals that you have in mind over the next few years, and would you entertain the idea of working outside of Atlanta?
MC: I don’t think at this point. I never say never. I’m not good at the goal question because there was a point in my career where at 25, that was probably a different view of my goals. At 46 now, to pick up and do something full-time somewhere else? Probably not. Again, do I want to do a radio show and sit by the beach one day and we have the best of both worlds? Yes.
I’ve always been one — and maybe it’s a good quality, maybe it’s not — that I’ve always loved to have multiple things going on. I can get bored rather easily. There was a point where I was doing a cable TV show every night and I was doing radio in the morning. I could do two things and I loved it. The money was fun, and I had the energy, it was great. I was doing an NBC show on the weekend and doing the radio show during the week and doing a podcast. I’m always like that.
There are always other opportunities and that’s why I thought it was a fun time to start a business to give myself something else, another challenge. I can’t see me wanting to go, okay, I’m going to go work in South Florida. I love South Florida, I have family and friends down there, but what would my brand be in South Florida that would do anything for them? What would my brand in New York be? What would my brand be somewhere else in a way that I’ve built it here for two decades? That matters to me.
A) I love this city. B) my family’s here. I’ve got kids where one will graduate high school in a couple of years, one is in middle school and one is in elementary school. I cannot see it being something goal-wise to move on to something somewhere else. But add something to the fun, sure, yeah, I’m always up for all those type of things. Are you offering right now? What kind of money are we talking?
BN: [Laughs] I’ll let you know if I hit the lottery first and then we can definitely start some sort of business venture.
MC: I know about that Barrett Media money. There’s some long coin over there.
BN: There is, deep pockets at BSM.
Brian Noe is a columnist for BSM and an on-air host heard nationwide on FOX Sports Radio’s Countdown To Kickoff. Previous roles include stops in Portland, OR, Albany, NY and Fresno, CA. You can follow him on Twitter @TheNoeShow or email him at bnoe@premierenetworks.com.
