Not many in our business can say they have had the career Bernie Laur has had. Laur, the Director of Digital for Hubbard Broadcasting in Minneapolis has, in a way, had multiple successful careers all rolled into one.
Bernie started as a programming assistant with Emmis Communications in 1985, followed by several years on the marketing and promotions side before entering the sales side of things in 1992 with Heritage Broadcasting. He was an account executive for Hubbard Broadcasting from 1995-1998 and then after a few stops as a sales manager with different companies, he returned to Hubbard in 2008 to be the Director of Digital Sales. Towards the end of 2019, Laur was promoted to Director of Digital.
Marketing and promotions, check. Sales, check. Sales manager, check, Digital sales manager, check. And now, in his fifth year as the Director of Digital, Laur appears to be having as much fun as he has ever had in the business.
Early in 2019, as Laur was still running Hubbard’s digital agency in Minneapolis, Hubbard had made a decision with its sports station that would ultimately change the trajectory of his career.
“I was talking with my Market Manager, Dan Seeman” Laur said, “Hubbard was getting into podcasting, and I liked what we were doing on the podcast side. Phil {Mackey} and the team at SKOR North were already doing podcasts, and we were also having success with our Garage Logic podcast, and Dan asked me, ‘How would you like to handle the podcast side of things?’ And I said, ‘I would love it because it goes back to my audio roots, but it still has the digital focus I have, and it is something relatively brand new.’ I just saw a lot of room for growth. So, I just jumped in there and have loved being part of the amazing growth.”
Hubbard’s 1500 AM, KSTP, had been a sports station since February 2010 and a pretty good one, too. However, a competitor launched an FM sports station and KSTP had started to decline. That is when the team at the station and management at Hubbard decided to try something new.
On January 15, 2019, the station rebranded as ‘SKOR North’ and became a digital-first sports content brand where it would distribute content across multiple traditional and digital platforms including 1500 AM, 94.5 FM HD 2, streaming, a dedicated SKOR North app, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
After it had been up and running for two years, Laur excitedly came on board and the rest, as they say, is history.
“It’s been a long road, some trials and tribulations and a pandemic thrown in. But honestly, we have a lot of great people on both sides, programming and sales and upper management just supporting everything and trusting us and helping us grow, it’s been fun.”
Laur gives credit to the team of Phil Mackey, Judd Zulgad and Declan Goff, along with Hubbard Minneapolis Vice President/Market Manager Dan Seeman, who realized sports fans want to consume content on their timeline and when they want it, they want it immediately. “It started with a few different podcasts and now has exploded; I think we have 13 or 14 different podcasts right now. Those three guys have really built this brand and continue to have it grow.”
Laur said he first got the digital itch shortly after 9/11 when he was the GSM for Radio One and they sold a text campaign. “It was exciting, and it was very different from anything else we had done,” Laur said. “It just kind of bit me. When Hubbard called me back…then we developed Hubbard Interactive. We started growing things like social media management, targeted display, SEO, pay-per-click…and eventually things like YouTube.”
Laur, 60, was in his 50’s then and most of the team was in their 20’s and 30’s. “It was exciting because it was always changing,” he said. “That’s what I love about digital…In radio, I would find myself in management roles and after about four or five years I was like, ‘ok, where is my next challenge,’ and with digital, everyday there’s a new challenge.”
Once Laur made the move to digital full-time he hasn’t looked back. As the Director of Digital Sales, he had the task of working with radio salespeople to try and teach them about the digital offerings.
“It is a learning curve, especially for those who have just been selling radio for a long time,” he said. “But you have to get your sales team to realize you need to do what is best for their client. What does your client need? Maybe it’s a targeted digital campaign that’s targeting their geographical area. We always start with the question, ‘what does your client need?’
“We had some early adapters, say 20% and then you had another 20% that were very slow to adapt and then you had this middle ground. Once digital and podcasting got bigger and bigger, if you are just calling on your clients for radio advertising, you are not doing justice for them because there’s a whole other area you could be talking about to help get them results. And by the way, if you’re not talking to them about digital, somebody is, it’s your competitor.”
SKOR North today has multiple Vikings shows, a Twins show, a Timberwolves show, a Wild show, general Minnesota sports talk and much more. Their YouTube channel has around 30,000 subscribers, their main X account has nearly 54,000 followers while they are over 15,000 followers on both Instagram and TikTok.
“What really helped us grow, this was all audio at the beginning, was when we also started adding the YouTube component. So now, especially the younger consumer who spends a lot of time on YouTube, now they can see the shows and the clips. This has really helped us from a discoverability standpoint as YouTube is the second largest search engine, owned by Google, which is the first largest, so it is great for discovery.
“On the client side it has helped too, because we are not just an audio medium anymore. In fact, our Purple Daily show, about 60% of our audience views the show and 40% listens to the show, so now when we are running an advertisement … they are not only just hearing the ad, but they are also seeing some b-roll video of what the hosts may be talking about. Wow does that take it to the next level as we now have the best of audio and video combined and then we tie in social media as well. The advertisers love it because they are getting a multimedia approach to a single ad.”
Laur has a dedicated staff of four people that sell their AM podcasts and he is currently looking to add a fifth. He also has a dedicated person who works the other 16 sellers in the building helping them to sell podcasting.
“The big thing is that it works,” Laur said. “I have worked for a number of different radio stations, and we have gotten great results for clients, mostly due to endorsements. I have never seen anything like what we get with SKOR North. It’s really ‘lean in’ listening because people have to search you out and listen wherever, whenever they want to, and so they are very engaged. When you have that fun content, you kind of build a club of people that all belong together.
“We get listeners, fans, viewers who come on and want to talk about the Vikings, but before they do they want to tell you about [a particular advertising client]. Our fans are doing the ads for us because they want to support the podcast because they love it so much. It’s incredible.”
Laur says part of what makes this venture so fun is that they are all in it together. “Phil [Mackey] is unbelievable, he is the godfather of this whole thing. Years ago in radio, programming and sales always seemed to be battling to get things done. It doesn’t seem to happen as much in podcasting, at least not with us. I’ll sit down with Phil and a lot of times it’s hard to tell who the sales guy is and who is the programming guy because we are working so much together.”
When asked what advice he would give to any other brand thinking of going the direction SKOR North has he said, “It is the future, but it is a lot of work. We are very lucky that we work for Hubbard Broadcasting and that they allow you to take some risks and allow you to try out some things. But when you know you have the backing of upper management, that goes a long way.
“You do need to stick with it, you do need to try some things, find out what works. A lot of it is trial and error but find out what other people are doing and doing well. You have to be willing to pay some people and incur some expense until you’re able to educate the businesses and the agencies on why they should buy podcasting.”
