Last week, BIA Advisory Services revealed the top 10 radio revenue-generating stations for 2023. In what has become as expected as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West, Hubbard Radio’s WTOP was once again the top earning station for the year.
The projections claim WTOP earned $66.3 million in revenue for the year, which is nearly $25 million more than second-place KIIS-FM in Los Angeles. It was the ninth consecutive year the Hubbard Radio all-news brand took home the top spot, and the 13th time in the last 14 years it held first place.
It would be easy to question just what the secret formula is that leads the brand to the mountain top each and every year, but WTOP Senior Vice President and General Manager Joel Oxley believes it’s a relatively simple formula.
“We’re out there trying to work out marketing solutions and find marketing solutions for clients. We do everything we can to make sure to get things that work for them,” said Oxley.
“And whether that be WTOP just on the radio, or digital, or any number of different types of events, or more sponsorable things, we want to move the needle for them. So we’ve been concentrating on results for a very long time and working with clients to do that.”
That pure, unadulterated commitment to providing solutions for their advertising partners requires the brand to be early adopters of emerging platforms.
“We have to be extremely innovative to get in front of them. Most of the clients have heard it all,” continued Oxley. “You can’t just go in there and present. You have to go in and have a good conversation with them and try to uncover what their needs are and where you can help. Sometimes there’s not a good fit, but most of the time — with all the assets that we have, meaning digital, radio, and online, our websites — there’s a lot of different answers that we can come up with that will hopefully move the needle for somebody.”
A cynic could quickly dismiss the brand’s near-constant success as simply receiving millions in agency buys as a byproduct of being one of the top-rated stations in the eighth-largest media market in the country.
But that isn’t the case with WTOP.
“We’re now over 70% direct,” revealed Oxley. “While we always want to work with agencies and love working with agencies, that situation has just changed over the years. There’s not the amount of avails that there used to be, so we’ve had to go out and be very creative and work really hard and make sure to do the numbers.
“You got to prospect well, and then you’ve got to make a lot of outreaches. Then you’ve got to get a ton of appointments to hopefully get to the proposal stage to where you can close something. And then you’d have to make sure you deliver results because we’re dealing with people or CMOs and marketing directors and business owners who need to make sure that they’re getting results. That’s what we’ve concentrated on for decades here. We just keep after it.”
Despite being mostly focused on direct sales, WTOP — and sister station Federal News Network — also benefit from being in the nation’s capital, especially from federal contract advertisers interested in reaching employees of the federal government.
“That is something that we’ve worked really hard at,” Oxley said of the company’s relationships with the different advertising audience that many stations don’t have. “The combination of WTOP and the Federal News Network is a real good one.”
Oxley was quick to praise the station’s Director of Sales, Matt Mills, for his role in leading the station to be radio’s top-billing station year after year. He credited the consistency of working together for nearly 25 years as a driving factor in the continued revenue success.
And while the brand is focused on serving advertisers, that doesn’t mean that Oxley or Director of News and Programming Julia Ziegler lose sight of the fact that they also need to remain focused on serving Washington D.C. news consumers, too.
“It’s definitely a fine line to walk and we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure that out,” admitted Oxley. “But one of the things we’ve realized over time is that we’ve actually had to go and do fewer minutes of advertising over time. We’ve just had to because, when you look at the broader landscape well beyond radio, you got to understand that there’s an awful lot of media out there that has a lot less advertising. And we’ve got to make sure that we’re at least somewhat competitive with the other media out there.”
Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
