Approaching The Summit is a series of special interviews created in partnership with Point to Point Marketing featuring speakers at the upcoming 2025 BSM Summit in Chicago, IL. Follow along with this series as prominent names surrounding the event coming up on May 8-9 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) inside the Edlis Neeson Theater and share their insights and expectations for what’s to come in the Windy City.
Matt Moscona is the program director of 104.5 ESPN Baton Rouge and has also hosted his afternoon show, After Further Review, in the marketplace since 2010. Moscona attended the BSM Summit for the first time last year and was recently recognized on the BSM Top 20 list for mid-market program directors.
Prior to the BSM Summit in May, Moscona spoke with Barrett Media about his anticipation for the event and topics that he hopes are addressed on stage.
*Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.*
BSM Staff: You attended the BSM Summit for the first time last year. What are you looking forward to this year in returning to the event?
Matt Moscona: Especially after attending last year, I’m very selfishly looking forward to hearing things that I can take back to our group and implement. So there’s never a shortage of qualified people who know way more about things than I do. So my approach is take tons of notes and be a sponge and find ways that I can make our group more efficient and more profitable.
BSM Staff: What is the value for industry professionals to leave the office and attend the BSM Summit?
Matt Moscona: The networking piece is massive, not only just from a perspective of sharing contacts for content, but I mean, I’ll give you an example. I connected with some folks in Jacksonville, and we’ve opened the lines of communication and sharing ideas for different digital properties and ways we’re approaching branding and marketing. So that component of it, I think, is maybe the most valuable to be able to connect with other professionals in the industry to help each other and share ideas.
BSM Staff: What do you feel are the biggest current opportunities or challenges that you hope are discussed at the BSM Summit?
Matt Moscona: One of the most eye-opening things from a year ago was when we were looking at some of the data of how prominent terrestrial radio is from a sports talk standpoint, but it’s also impossible to ignore how much of a digital shift we’re living in. So what I hope to hear is from people who are winning in the digital space, and how I can sort of marry a traditional terrestrial FM radio brand with our digital properties to grow it because I certainly think that whether it’s in my professional lifetime or not, the majority of our audience will be consuming us digitally. So that’s that’s certainly when I go to the Summit where my eyes are wide open. ‘What are non-traditional ways to generate revenue?,’ and, ‘How can I continue to grow digitally?’
BSM Staff: How do you feel the subsets of the sports media industry as a whole can continue fostering additional synergy and work together to ensure growth?
Matt Moscona: Honestly, I think just the fact that there is such a heavy presence of sort of quote-unquote ‘sort of new media’ there and that both sides are embracing each other is an illustration of that synergy whereby we all realize it doesn’t matter – I don’t think anybody is necessarily romantic about a certain platform – if it’s if it’s am FM radio, if it’s YouTube or Twitter, whatever.
It’s more a matter of we’re all trying to exist and win, and media has become far more homogenous where we aren’t siloed anymore, and so I think having so many people that are winning on the digital platform, they’re helping more traditional media grow in that space, I think it’s very telling of a lot of the people in leadership in media because there could be a school of thought as to say, ‘Why would you want to help someone else garner some of your market share?,’ but I think the general feeling is the world is abundant and we can all win, and we should all help each other have success.
I’ve always believed for as long as I’ve been in media that there’s two types of people. There are people who view everyone as competition and will step on your face to get wherever they want to go; and then there’s people who realize that whatever degree of success they’ve achieved, they had help getting there, and they’re willing to pay it forward. So I always find myself to be the latter, not the former, or I try to be, and I really feel like that’s the group at the Summit as well.
BSM Staff: As you view the return on investment with the BSM Summit, what do you hope to take away from the event and bring back to your station?
Matt Moscona: One of the biggest things from last year that I took back was the the non-traditional revenue events that some of the program directors in Washington, D.C. and Nashville explained their listener events and how they turned that into a money maker. Well we replicated that model several times this year and were able to generate a new source of revenue for our company and engage people in our audience.
So I’m hopeful that this year, I’ll be able to find something else similar. It doesn’t even have to be an NTR event, but something like that, and it’s hard to know exactly what it may be, but effectively uncovering a new revenue stream for our business that other people are doing successfully that I’m not even aware of yet because I know it’s out there, and there’s a lot of people with great ideas, and they’re all very generous to share them at the Summit.
Purchase your tickets to the 2025 BSM Summit here, and for more information, visit BSMSummit.com.
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