As a former Audacy employee, it was interesting to see the news about David Field deciding to step away. The first thing that came to mind is that this decision at this time is very fitting, because like a lot of things with Audacy, it’s probably a few years too late.
I don’t know David Field. I had dinner with him once and was around him on a couple of other occasions. Like most of the employees I knew in the company, I just always thought he was completely unrelatable. He rarely smiled or looked you in the eye and he sort of made you feel unimportant.
When I first started, the company was Entercom. Hardly anybody I spoke to about the possibility of going to work for them had anything bad to say about them. When I first met the team I would be working with in my market, I was blown away by how many long-term employees had been there. They all spoke highly of the company without prompting.
As I would find out shortly after starting, the person who was responsible for a lot of the success of the company then was Weezie Kramer. She knew how to demand a room, get your attention, motivate you and took absolutely zero bullsh–. Her credentials were well known, and she spoke from a place of having been there, done that. You weren’t going to slip something past her.
David came off to most people as robotic. He said little, most of it was written for him and his facial expressions always looked like he would rather be anywhere than in a room talking to employees.
When Weezie left or when Entercom took on CBS Radio, however you want to look at it, the company was exposed. To say they were not ready for becoming a giant radio company is the understatement of the century. It was a mess.
I moved markets, so I got to see it from two different angles. I started in a true Entercom market and then moved to a CBS-turned-Entercom market. The CBS staff I would speak to could not believe what had happened, almost immediately, to their company. The confidence was low and leadership just kept repeating the same things about how much the revenue had grown and used the word ‘scale’ a lot.
The company would brag about the strangest things. They would talk about how much the revenue of the company increased from the year before when they didn’t have the CBS stations. No kidding?
They would buy podcasting companies and then tell us how big of a podcasting platform we had grown. Grown?
They told us the salespeople were going to have a ‘best-in-class’ compensation plan. Any Audacy manager who was in the room when the company attempted to roll out the new plan literally got to see how bad things were live and in person. Nobody understood the plan or could explain it. Instead of gathering to talk about how to attack the future of a business headed in the wrong direction, we were all trying to figure out how in the world we were going to explain something to people when we had absolutely no understanding of it at all. Nobody took charge or responsibility.
Then COVID happened and it became even more important that a company have strong leadership. I don’t think most who were with Entercom during that time would tell you they felt strongly about what was coming down from the top. Managers would sit on calls each week and either listen to things that no longer pertained to their markets especially if you were outside the Top 10. They heard the same general things repeated over and over again.
This is a screenshot taken from a meeting in December 2020. Some of the same verbiage was used today.
I can point to other examples, such as the name change and the bankruptcy. Through it all, no matter what was happening, David and the senior leaders just kept repeating the same lines. You all know the memes with the fire burning in the background and the text, “Nothing to see here!”? There’s no better way to explain what it felt like.
You always heard about market conditions, but never heard David or anyone from leadership take responsibility. So what happened on Wednesday was inevitable.
With all of that said, the company still has a lot of great properties and some really good people. It just has to get out of its own way and become a company that leads from the front rather than doing the same things we have all seen iHeart struggle to have success with. I hope for the sake of the people I still know at the company that Kelli Turner can get the company back to more Entercom, less Audacy.
I have already written part of the solution in a previous column, but the company needs to take a hard look at some of the people in decision making roles and figure out if they are part of the problem or can be a part of the solution. If everyone is trying to figure out how to attract a different generation so radio/audio doesn’t lose them, perhaps there should be more people in high level positions who understand that audience.
When you become too big as a company, you lose touch with what is really happening in each market. You hire senior level managers who don’t want to rock the boat or work real hard, so they choose to just say ‘Yes’ to whatever you think. When I started at Entercom, everyone in the building knew Weezie, because that was the type of company Entercom was.
Somewhere along the line they lost that under David Field’s direction, so it was time for someone else to give it a try. The problem is that time was a couple of years ago.
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