Barrett Media produces over 20 stories per day on the music, news, and sports media industries. To make sure you’re updated on the latest happenings across the media business, sign up for our newsletters to get the news delivered straight to your inbox.
Since John and Margo Catsimatidis purchased 77 WABC in 2019, the station has soared to new heights. Along with the Catsimatidis family, Red Apple Media President Chad Lopez has been an integral part of the station’s turnaround, and he’s taken an against-the-grain approach to help the station’s resurgence.
The predominant thought process in radio today — especially in the news/talk space — is creating as much advertising inventory as possible for more sales opportunities.
That’s not the playbook utilized by 77 WABC, however.
“We put the product first,” Lopez said. “It really made me look at the product in a different way, where — when you’re selling it, and when you’re managing it, and realizing that if we have the right talent, we have the right names — it didn’t matter what we were doing from the revenue standpoint. Because when I started with John, he said, ‘What’s the vision?’ And I said, ‘The vision is, really, we’ve got to do radio the way radio is intended to be.”
He shared that he believed in the mantra enacted by Clear Channel in previous decades: “Less is more.”
But the station didn’t simply speak those words and do something else. They fully adopted the idea and implemented it. WABC didn’t shift avails around to keep the same units per hour. Instead, it wiped $2.7 million off the books from brokered weekend programming, and added live and local shows. It also shrunk commercial time by a massive amount, helping lead to larger audiences who weren’t disillusioned by constant marketing.
“We went from 21 minutes. It’s no secret, anyone can listen. In most of our hours. we’re down to six to eight minutes from 21 minutes. But to do that, we had to open up other verticals. When John bought the station, it was just WABC Radio. Now, we have a syndication network that’s on 330-plus affiliates across the country that’s taking WABC’s content. We bought WLIR. There are ratings on WLIR now because of the way we’ve been programming it. And we have an advertising agency that we operate out of Red Apple Media Group.
Chad Lopez freely admitted that working for a locally-owned company, rather than a corporate giant, has helped him implement his vision for the station.
“It’s very different when you’re working for someone who’s not beholden, the company’s not beholden to the shareholders. John is the shareholder, and he just wanted a great product,” he said. “If I worked for a major corporation where the bureaucracy would say, ‘No, we can’t do it. We just need the revenue.’ We walked away from it. My salespeople — I mean, even I, coming from a sales background — said, ‘I don’t know if this is good, but alright. Let’s do it.’ And we immediately saw the results once we put in on the weekends live programming.
“Yes, it cost us more. We walked away from the $2.7 million. We took on additional expenses. And then we put on a product and we watched the audience start growing and growing on the weekends. Then it started transcending into the during the week.”
The strategy for Red Apple Media has been a simple one at it’s core: aggregate a large audience, and leverage that listenership to advertisers. And, unsurprisingly, that has been a successful modus operandi.
“We knew that if we take that inventory out, we’re giving the salespeople less opportunity. But we opened the video, audio, podcast and the syndication, and it’s just training our salespeople that that’s part of the radio station,” said Lopez. “It’s part of everything. The revenue will come in.
“I think the industry has gotten away from really managing inventory and holding rate. If you hold rate or the less inventory you have, the higher your rate should go up. And our rates have gone up significantly because our customers know it. And when you look at the ratings and what’s going on, we say, ‘Hey, this is where we are, and we only have eight minutes in this hour. I know you love the show. It sounds great, but we only have eight minutes in that hour.’ We didn’t take it up drastically. We just slowly went where we needed to be,” continued Lopez.
“At the end of the day, it’s a business, right? So we got to make sure we’re covering our expenses. It’s not a not-for-profit company. However, we make sure that it’s not just the money that’s driving the product and revenue that’s driving the product.”
The success of 77 WABC, both in ratings and in revenue, is supplemented by the growing list of affiliates for shows from Red Apple Audio Networks. The syndication arm of the company has more than a dozen shows available to local affiliates. And the affiliates list keeps growing. Stations like KMOX in St. Louis, KDWN in Las Vegas, WGN Radio in Chicago, and 830 WCCO in Minneapolis, along with hundreds of other stations, have added programs from the company.
And while there are challenges that come with operating a syndication company without owning hundreds of stations, Chad Lopez admitted that potential mergers and acquisitions with other groups and stations remain at the forefront of Red Apple Media’s mission in the future.
“Obviously, it’s no secret. Everyone knows we’ve talked to a lot of groups. We’ve talked to all the groups,” Lopez said of potential purchases. “John — and I say this candidly — has the money. He’s not going to a bank to try to get money to buy the station. He’s a billionaire, he has the money, he’ll sign the check. There’s no asking. He could sign the check today if it’s the right deal. So yes, are we looking at FMs? Absolutely.
“It’s not just AM that we’re focused on. It’s the product, and how do we get the product across other platforms. And it’s not even just radio stations. We’re looking at TV stations, looking at social media companies. There’s a lot of people that we’ve been talking to.”
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.
