There aren’t many companies in this business as big as iHeartMedia. Not many companies can claim their success in multiple areas of what we now call the audio business. That is what keeps Kevin LeGrett so busy.
LeGrett is the President of iHeartMedia Sports. It means running more than just the strategy for the company’s local stations or FOX Sports Radio. LeGrett is an integral part of growing iHeart’s footprint in sports podcasting as well.
He shares his thoughts on politics on sports radio, what evolutions FOX Sports Radio could be open to in the future, and so much more. Enjoy today’s conversation in our Meet the Leaders series presented by Point-to-Point Marketing.
Demetri Ravanos: iHeartMedia Sports is such a big, diverse endeavor. Do you have a strategy that you start each day with to make sure everything gets the amount of attention it needs?
Kevin LeGrett: Well, I think the most important thing for us is we’re very focused on making sure a couple of things happen. Number one, we are putting together the best programming content possible. That includes our 85-plus owned and operated sports stations. That includes the Fox Sports Radio Network, which Don Martin and Scott Shapiro oversee. That includes our play-by-play partnerships. That includes making sure that our daily sports updates and all of our extensions, events, etc., are all up to the standards that we expect from iHeartSports. The second part of that is making sure that we’re delivering on our commitments to our clients. So, it’s really important that we’ve got the best programming content out there, but that we’re also delivering on the commitments we have for our clients and the communities that our stations serve and that the network serves. Then lastly, it’s really making sure that we’re delivering for our partners and kind of spend every day making sure that we get together, that we’re putting everything through those three filters, because at the end of the day, if we deliver on those three, we’re going to consistently be successful.
Our approach has always been every day you have to win the day. So if we’re winning the day at the end of the day, that then allows us to win the week and that allows us to win the month and allows us to win the quarter and ultimately to win the year. That’s the focus. Every day matters.
I took that a little bit from when I ran radio stations, whether they were in the Northeast or whether it was out here in Los Angeles for the last ten years, running LA and the West Coast. If you have the commitment to day-by-day excellence and the commitment to really distill it down into specific ways that you define success, the process is then going to lead you to ultimate success day in and day out.
DR: So let’s dive into success as it relates to some of the stations you guys have recently turned on as pure plays with Fox Sports Radio. They’ve been on smaller AM signals and HD signals. Do you have local goals for those stations or are they purely in service of the national network’s goals of being on in as many markets as possible?
KL: Our goal is to continue to extend the Fox brand. I’ll take a step back here. The fact of the matter is, when people think about iHeartMedia, they always think of us as the Taylor Swift Company. Taylor Swift comes out with a new album, we play three songs from her every hour. We’d play an interview at the top of the hour, and lo and behold, she’d play our iHeartRadio Music Festival or be on our Jingle Ball tour.
But during Covid, we spent a lot of time looking at our assets and looking at areas that we really believed we could grow. One of the glaring verticals that we had was sports. We were a dominant player in sports, and Bob Pittman and Greg Ashlock, as well as Rich Bressler, decided that they would stand up this vertical and really stick their chest out a little bit and show people that we are a dominant player in audio when it comes to sports.
That’s allowed us to really look at stations, some performing, some underperforming, and make sure that we’re giving them the tools and the resources to succeed. Now, I’d be foolish if I didn’t say that in each market, our expectation is that if we have a sports station, it’s the number one sports station in that market, and quite frankly, that it complements the other stations that we have within the cluster, but there’s a lot of ways to go about doing that. The one thing that we know is that fandom is enormous in each and every market. So if you have the right associations, the right brand, and the right content and you’re giving people the opportunity to have some sort of talk back, you’re ultimately going to be successful.
DR: The right associations you mentioned, I struggle to think off the top of my head of an iHeart-owned sports station that does not have a strong play-by-play presence. Am I wrong or is play-by-play central to what you view as the ingredients for making a successful local sports station?
KL: I’m not sure that you have to have that each and every time, but I would say it sure makes it a lot easier. It gives you the opportunity to have a forum where the fans can vent. It gives you an opportunity to have a forum where you can actually tell the stories behind the stories.
I think that when you look at our successful our biggest, most successful stations like like KFAN in Minneapolis and our association with not only the Minnesota Vikings, but with the Timberwolves, with the University of Minnesota, with the Minnesota Wild. You look here in Los Angeles and the great job KLAC has done with our association with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the association with UCLA, and Angel City Football Club. There is a partnership with multiple stations here with the Los Angeles Chargers. It definitely helps both from a content and an access opportunity.
But I do think that there are stations out there that, quite frankly, can be propped up because they’re so large and they have big personalities. We’re just blessed with in our most successful markets that we have really great personalities, like KFAN with Paul Allen or like here in Los Angeles with Colin Cowherd, who’s based here, as well as having Petros & Money and Fred & Rodney. It really does make a difference.
DR: The juxtaposition is interesting. A few years ago, I did this story talking to Don Martin and some other folks who have been integral in the growth and success of Fox Sports Radio. Don described launching Fox Sports Radio as wanting to be the “columnists network” to ESPN’s “reporters network,” and he said that at the time, they viewed no play-by-play as a key part of that. It was always going to be opinion-driven.
It is just interesting that that has remained the case at the network, while local stations in the iHeart family are prioritizing play-by-play.
KL: Well, I think that there’s always room for room for evolution. I think that if national play-by-play was an opportunity, we would probably stick our nose in there and at least explore it, and we have explored it. But I think Don hit it on the head.
The baseline of how Fox Sports Radio was created was to have the best personalities, which we do, having the best conversations and doing the best storytelling about the world of sports.
The great news is sports has evolved so much. It’s not just the NFL and it’s not just baseball anymore. There was a storyline 365, whether it’s around women’s sports, whether it’s around college and all the evolution that college sports are going through, as well as all the other leagues, the NHL, the NBA, etc. It leads to real tune-in daily, where you want to hear what Colin Cowherd has to say. You want to hear what Dan Patrick has to say. You want to hear what Covino & Rich or The Odd Couple or our up-and-coming show right now, it’s doing spectacularly, which is Two Pros and a Cup of Joe with LaVar Arrington, Brady Quinn and Jonas Knox. People who listen to those shows really join the tribe and part of being part of the tribe is you want to hear daily those takes, but you also want to hear who they may be interviewing and who they may be interacting with.
DR: In the age of sports podcasts and younger listeners gravitating towards digital audio, what is the state of network sports talk? Obviously, with iHeart, you are in a luxurious position of not only being strong with network radio but with podcasts as well. I wonder when you are talking, be it with partners or with advertisers about Fox Sports Radio, what adaptations have you had to make in your presentations?
KL: We really haven’t had to make an adaptation. What we’ve had to do is we have to make sure people understand that we can enter through several doors where our competitors can’t.
One of the reasons why we’re the leader in sports audio is the fact that we own 85 sports stations – more than anyone else. We own the dominant sports network in Fox Sports Radio. We have over 140 play-by-play associations, the most in the NFL, 11 play-by-play partners. We’re strong in Major League Baseball, NBA, NHL, MLS, etc.. In addition to that, we have our iHeart Sports Daily updates that we run on over 500 radio stations. That’s something that Don Martin and his team created.
So our commitment to sports is outside of just our owned and operated sports stations. It’s actually updates on all 500 of the 860 radio stations that we own. That’s a lot of commitment to sports.
Then you forget the other piece, the secret sauce, and you alluded to it, which is podcasting and the fact that we’re the dominant player in podcasting. In fact, if you pulled iHeart Sports out of iHeart’s podcasts and made it its own standalone company, it would be the fifth largest podcast company out there, and that includes exclusive deals that we have with the NFL and with the NBA. We’re in talks with other leagues right now and bringing on really great personalities like we did this week with Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman.
We’re always looking at evolving and part of that evolution is just back in June, we launched the Women’s Audio Sports Network, which includes updates on women’s sports across not just sports stations, but all of our stations. In addition to that, launching a podcast slate. In addition to that, looking at other strategic partnerships, whether it’s with the New York Gotham in New York City or Angel City Football Club here in Los Angeles, we’re really looking and making a commitment to making sure that our coverage of sports is more balanced, because in many cases it had tilted almost 90% towards men, and that may be a conservative number.
DR: I want to wrap up by asking you a question that is probably 2024-specific. I wrote a column earlier this week looking at the rising importance of podcasts to political candidates this year. It used to be pretty common, and in fact, on Fox Sports Radio it was pretty common, for candidates to make time for the biggest national sports radio shows during an election year.
I wonder what your advice would be, though, if Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wanted to go on with say, Dan Patrick. Are we to polarized at this point for there to be an obvious win for the host if a campaign approaches them in that way, the way they might have in the past?
KL: That’s a really interesting question, and if you don’t know this, besides wearing the hat as President of sports for iHeart, one that I absolutely love, I also wear the hat of president of political sales strategies here. So to your question, I think we would be open to at least having those discussions with the Vice President or with former President Trump. Depending on the show, if they felt like it could work, we would explore and exhaust all options to see if we could get something like that on the air.
I will point out, which I think is really important, is that we just did that yesterday with The Breakfast Club and Charlamagne tha God. Charlamagne had an intimate conversation, a town hall with Vice President Kamala Harris. It was hugely successful. In fact, on social we broke records based upon anything else she’s done up until this point, which is really powerful not only for us, but it shows the power of where audio and broadcast radio is.
I still think there’s that fallacy out there that, “Hey, no one’s listening to the radio. They’re all on podcasts. They’re all on streaming this and that.”
What I say to people all the time is, number one, streaming is awesome. There’s no question people use streaming for convenience. But the fact of the matter is companies like Spotify and Pandora, they put record stores out of business because when you want to escape the world, you listen to those. When you look at where Spotify and Pandora are with ad-supported, it’s much, much smaller than where iHeartRadio is.
Then when you think about podcasting, people will say, “well, podcasting listening has to come from broadcast radio.” Well, in fact, podcast listening is coming from social. It’s coming from the time that you spent on Instagram, the time that you spent scrolling on Facebook. There’s research after research that shows that. So when you combine the fact that you’ve got a dominant position in broadcast radio, a dominant position when it comes to podcasting, and a dominant position in streaming, those three things combined add up to why we’ve been successful for so long and why our talent get those opportunities.
DR: So the follow-up or pushback, I’m not quite sure what the right way to frame this would be, is that Charlemagne is a really good example and The Breakfast Club is a really good example of a show that has conditioned its listeners to know that nothing is off limits, right? It might be a little bit escapist, but they have a long history of having political figures from both sides of the aisle on their show.
I wonder if there is any sort of preciousness about the escapism of sports during a year where it seems like we’re always in contentious conversations about everything else.
KL: Well, I think I think your pushback is justified. Maybe I didn’t answer it clearly enough, but with any situation, we would sit down with the personalities and we would do our own research. That’s the one great thing about working for a large company is that we have research out in the field almost on a daily basis, and we will find out how our core listeners would react to something like that. And then we would collectively come together and make a decision. We’re not going to make a decision in a vacuum.
Obviously, if we did something like that, we would have to offer equal time, which means Dan Patrick or Colin or whichever show it is would have to not only offer it to former President Trump, but they’d have to offer it to Vice President Harris. That may put them in a pickle, so we would work with the talent on that and make those decisions.
I can’t say unequivocally that we would welcome political talk on to our stations. I think with anything, it’s kind of a let’s take a step back. Julie Talbert, myself, Don Martin, and Scott Shapiro, we would all huddle up, and have a discussion. We would bring in obviously Bob Pittman and Rich Bressler, who are very hands-on within our organization. We want to make the most intelligent choice possible to make sure that we’re serving our listeners and not alienating them.
To learn more about Point-To-Point Marketing’s Podcast and Broadcast Audience Development Marketing strategies, contact Tim Bronsil at tim@ptpmarketing.com or 513-702-5072.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
