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When it comes to influential programming minds, Cumulus is not lacking. If you’re a Barrett Sports Media lifer, you no doubt know about all Bruce Gilbert has accomplished, but maybe you are less familiar with Brian Phillips.
Phillips has programmed his share of legendary stations. He has also helped usher revolution, some of it good, some of it not so good, into country music, during his time programming CMT. Now, he is the Chief Content Officer for Cumulus.
In today’s conversation for the Meet the Leaders series presented by Point-to-Point Marketing, Brian and I discuss what innovations in our industry have actually made things better. We also talk about why Phillips wants to have a direct line to his company’s top talent and much more.
Demetri Ravanos: In what ways is programing a music station, regardless of format, like programing a music television channel like you did with CMT?
Brian Phillips: Well, you have to remember the span of years over which I’ve programed music radio stations and then my interval with the MTV Networks (CMT’s parent company). When I came back to radio, it had changed dramatically.
I would say that I walked into television feeling reasonably confident that it might bear some resemblance to radio, but really it was kind of upside-down land. Thanks to MTV Networks and Viacom and everybody at CMT, I had terrific teachers who got me through it so I wouldn’t fail. That was 2001. My bigger mistake was to imagine that after the TV and film run, that I could walk back into a big radio group and pretty much find my way around. So much change transpired from 2001 to 2019.
I think at times I could be fixated on what hadn’t changed. There was some discomfort in that, frankly. Really though, it was a completely different business.
To answer the original question, there are things this culture and the MTV Networks culture have in common. I like to think that maybe, during my CMT run, I picked up a little flair and some cultural sensibilities that I can now impart on the people at Cumulus.
DR: One of those big changes in the radio that you came back to that didn’t exist in 2001 is all of the new types of competition and how our business has adapted to or answered them. Whether it is because you had time away or because of your overall experience in entertainment, can you look at some of those responses and see what has actually revolutionized our business and what is cost-cutting being passed off as innovation?
BP: We are in a state of perpetual reinvention of the things around radio to help keep it up to date, modernized and relevant, but there is a tipping point.
If you look at our core 400 radio stations, among those are some very big brands with gigantic morning shows that we love and great talent and notorious program directors. Then we start building on all of the essentials, and I would say they are essential in 2025. You’ve got to get good at short form video. You have to have extraordinary social media skills. Obviously, podcasting is a big part of our business. You don’t have the choice of not embracing each new trend that comes along.
I guess the trick is never letting the extensions of the original product get in the way of the source product. You can’t fall down the hole of spending a disproportionate amount of time trying to make sure that every stream on every station is perfect. That’s somebody’s gig within our company, but if I make it too much my focus, then what suffers? What doesn’t get the attention?
It cannot be the talent. Those are the people doing amazing local work on behalf of their communities, so much so that their communities are in love with them. Never forget that that’s the core business. That is still what gives you the best shot at success.
DR: I’m glad you said that, because one of the things I wanted to ask you about was the state of big personalities, usually morning shows, but it could be any day part on music radio. A lot of the shows that we associate as the big spoken word brands away from news and sports are mostly podcasts now, but that’s national, right? Locally, what is the state of the big personality radio business?
BP: It’s my favorite part of what I do. In a perfect world, I would spend the better part of each day just listening, both in real time and then to podcasts and going back in and paying attention to our biggest and our best local morning shows. We have them all over the map, in places like Atlanta and Dallas and Knoxville and Nashville. It is the defining proposition of a radio station on any platform.
My personal strength, I think is that I’m very collaborative. I bring a lot of people in, send out a lot of pings and get reaction back. “What do you think if we did this?” That’s probably my reputation. But with talent, I’m very impulsive.
I’m likely to have a five minute meeting with somebody and say, “Well, there it is. That’s the person for for that job.” You know, obviously, you do a little bit of checking, but I’m very motivated and inspired by great talent.
There’s no reason to have this job if you can’t have all those people on speed dial and call them up. What a great luxury, to hear somebody do a great break in Chicago and call them and just have a laugh! It’s what makes the job rewarding and fun. From my perspective, it’s how the listener enjoys the station, so I’m just a stand in for the listener.
DR: Plenty has been written and said about attracting young people to the talent side of radio, but I wonder what about young people that might be great programmers? How does the industry make it clear that it’s a path that still exists for the more analytical minds in the entertainment business?
BP: I think we’re breeding a good crop of analytical minds with this entertainment technology ecosystem that exists right now. I never fear that we will run out of people who are capable of adapting to the analytical side. I more fear that the people who possess some magic or some ability to discern greatness from average programing, that those people will become harder to find.
It worries me a little bit to see how process driven we’ve made these programing jobs. I worry that we bury people under process and boxes to be checked and information to be relayed. They may not have the luxury that I enjoyed of being the program director of a big radio station or the head of a TV network and be able to sit back and have a minute to think about the property, where it’s going and what magical new thing might be possible.
That person is probably doing an air shift, some production, maybe some voice tracking on other stations too. People are working so much harder now than they ever did in the field of radio. It really should be acknowledged now that the people who sign up for this are Navy SEALs, in relative terms, obviously. We’re trying to acknowledge the fact that all of this process work that goes into creating radio and audio is getting handled, but also give them the bandwidth to create. To me, those are opposing forces.
DR: So I hope you appreciate that I did my research on you before our chat. Something you said there reminded me of an interview that you did with The Tennessean in 2015, where you said that you would hope country radio specifically would let go of some of these rules that it has made up for itself. I think this was in response to the “you don’t play two women back to back” idea that was out there a few years ago.
BP: God, what a terrible time for radio that was.
DR: Every format has their own rules. Before I made the switch over to sports, I was in every iteration of rock radio you can imagine. Even though it was never said out loud, I’m pretty sure we had the same rule about no two women back to back, right?
Every format has their own version. So do you find yourself still fighting against those? As you said, you have to kind of be a Navy SEAL now to be a programmer. Is it hard to get people to break some of those rules? In some cases, I would think following them make this very complicated job a little bit easier.
BP: It’s a great question. One of the things that stifles the advancement and change in the way we deliver a station’s sound is the fact that we’re so busy cranking it out that nobody has time to rewrite the rules.
Mary Berner will challenge me. We had a conversation just last week. We were talking about formats and why there really are a limited number of format variants that we all practice slightly different twists of depending on the market.
She said, “What if we landed here from Mars, and somehow we had access to a medium that could reach millions of people? Would this be what we would choose to do with this?”
Would we be able to be like the pioneers of AM and FM over the last century, who sort of made it up as they went along and found things that worked? I think what we’re doing now is we’ve fallen into a cycle. The lingo may change, and of course, the music changes. The way people talk to each other evolves in society, but the way it’s delivered on conventional over-the-air radio still owes a lot to eras gone by.
That’s a pattern we’re trying to discourage, obviously, at Cumulus. We want you to ask yourself why you said what you said there and what are the real implications for the listener in 2024.
You’re exactly right. Radio has some traditions that it clings to, and often we find that when we separate ourselves from those traditions and take a new path, we’ve invented a brand-new thing, and I can think of both music and personality-based formats where we’ve done that and have been the beneficiaries of a lot of acclaim for it.
DR: At some point, we are, as a business, going to have to get back to that pioneer mentality out of necessity, right? We can’t do the angry shouting white guy thing forever on news talk radio. Like at some point that model burns the audience out. Look, I’d say the same thing about country radio. I think I’ve heard enough about trucks and beer and cute girls’ butts for a lifetime.
BP: I’m with you, Demetri. I’m always the one saying enough of that. I’ve heard it my whole lifetime.
When I walked into CMT, this is around 2001, once in a while there would be producers at CMT or on another country show that was shot elsewhere in Nashville, that when they had a country artist play, they would have somebody come out and play surrounded by bales of hay. This would happen on like The Tonight Show too.
I would always think “We have a bunch of big soundstages here. I never want to see things on any of them for a performance at CMT. We never want to see a picket fence. I never want to see a poorly painted set piece of an old front porch with, you know, a swing on it. I don’t want to see hay bales, and I don’t want to see cornfields.”
We go through eras when we think about why do we do the things we do, right? We went through a phase where we said, let’s make country more accessible to the masses. This is probably around 2010. I thought some people who might be country music fans are put off by some of the trappings that go with it. And I think you could say this about any format or any lifestyle.
I decided “Enough with this look, enough with these kind of go to lyrics, enough with the black cowboy hats and the videos with the sides of barns! Let’s get rid of some of these totemic things that suggest country to see if we can move the genre along on its timeline.”
I think there’s a lesson here for radio. The research came back that the audience looked for those things, or in the case of radio, they listened for certain subliminal cues that what they were listening to was what they’ve known and want.
So sometimes, Demetri, the part of me that says, “let’s just keep reinventing,” has to take a break, right? That’s for the sake of the audience. But I think the real genius is in striking the balance.
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.
