When you work with a guy for over thirty years, you get used to the consistency, but you have to know the conversation is coming. At some point, one of you will turn to the other and say that it’s over.
That is how I met Jay Davis. When Chris Baker told him he was ready to step down as Program Director of 98.1 The Sports Animal in Oklahoma City and retire, I reached out about the job.
Obviously, I am still working with JB and not in the middle of the country. While it didn’t work out the way I hoped though, Jay and I stayed in touch and remain friendly.
I wanted to feature him this season in our Meet the Market Managers columns, presented by Point-to-Point Marketing, because of that monumental shift he and his building are dealing with right now.
In this conversation, we discuss what happens in the moments after Baker made his announcement, how this political spending season could be different than in the past, and why his stations are have never had trouble finding good people when there is an opening.
Demetri Ravanos: The Sports Animal is experiencing its first change in literal decades. So let’s set the staff side for a second. How do you adjust to working with someone new when for so long you knew what you were dealing with? With Chris Baker, you guys had a good relationship that worked for a long time.
Jay Davis: Yeah, we’ve been very lucky here. Chris started with us in the early nineties. I got here in the late eighties, but he was a rock. Not only did he oversee The Sports Animal, but for many of those years, he was an operations manager. So his imprint is on our success here or at least a large part of it. He certainly deserves full credit.
He was great. I loved him as a coworker, but also personally, he’s a personal friend of mine and just a great guy. Enjoying his retirement is well-deserved.
The person who took his place, Robert Mueller, a guy we call ‘Cisco’, had worked for our company also for ten or fifteen years, and then he left us for six years to try some other things that he was wanting to do in the business. But again, he had been around our stations for many, many, many, many years, so he already had built-in credibility with the people on air, our sellers, and our clients.
There were a number of very, very talented candidates that we visited with for that job, as you know. In the end, he made the most sense for it in terms of just being able to come in with knowledge. There was zero learning curve. I mean, he could literally just hit the ground running on all these different fronts. So yeah, we’ve been very fortunate to have what could have been a very difficult transition be a pretty easy one.
DR: So one of the things that you and I talked about during that time was sort of the parochialism or perceived parochialism of Oklahoma City. Is Robert’s experience, not just in Cumulus but in a market like this one, a necessary thing? Does that familiarity and knowledge translate in the decisions a programmer makes in parochial market?
JD: Obviously, if somebody knows the market, it helps and he does know the market, our stations, our personalities, and our presentation. The Sports Animal is such a big radio station in town. It could have been an earthquake with Chris leaving. Instead, it’s just been more just of a transition. And it’s been a good one. We were lucky.
DR: So that day that it becomes public that Chris is going to retire and it’s found out in the building, are the air and sales staffs immediately coming to you with their ideas of what sort of knowledge or qualities the next PD needs to have?
JD: Chris was obviously so well-liked inside the building. I was happy for him. There’s no doubt about that. As you would imagine though, it was a two-fold thing.
It’s just like, “Oh, what the hell are we going to do? What’s that next?” Because he’s such a mainstay and a big part of what we do and all of our decision-making. Of course, there was an anxiety that came along with that.
The timing was something else. Cisco had been reaching out to me in the months prior to that just to say “hey, if you ever have something in Oklahoma City…” He was just looking to come back home. We just got lucky in terms of the timing of it all.
I was ready to tell people “Hey, listen, don’t worry, guys, we got to plan here. We’re not in as big of trouble as you might think.” We didn’t have that interim for too long where we had to worry or have client fears or sales fears or on-air staff fears. We were able to quickly soothe that tension.
DR: So it’s 2022 and one of the issues that I think every radio group around the country is talking about this year is obviously political spending. And I wonder, with you guys being in a pretty solidly red state, how does that affect spending in a state with so many assumed victories? Do you see less of a windfall than you could somewhere that is more competitive during these years?
JD: Oh, there’s probably some truth in that, but you know, at the same time, there’s still issue ads that are that could be meaningful. Listen, no one is counting it in the bank anymore. We’ve seen in the last two or three years, what you thought might have happened politically doesn’t happen.
We’re just now kind of getting into some of those ads. We’re receiving some dollars on the political front and expect to get more. So no, I don’t think so. But again, it’s such a crazy situation now. I mean, people are going to really want to spend to make sure their person wins because you can’t ever count on it.
DR: What about the way the changing media landscape affects that spending? With the pandemic, suddenly Netflix and Hulu and Disney Plus and all of these streaming TV services become every day parts of our lives and not luxuries anymore. Could you foresee more candidates spending on radio because it still has a widespread penetration that maybe traditional TV is losing?
JD: Yeah. I’d like to think that that’s true and that that could happen, and I do think you’ll see a little bit of a shift that way. Television has obviously been the traditional way that they have gone about it, but as it continues to be challenged in that way you mentioned, it certainly leaves it open for radio to maybe get a little bit better share than we’ve had in the past, especially with the stronger, more powerful, wider-reaching signals that that that would be able to provide both a frequency and a reach.
You know, in a candidate’s mind, it will just kind of come down to cost to some degree. I think people are going to continue to do TV no matter what because that’s all they’ve known. But to your point, I do think that we will see a little bit more headed our direction in this cycle, and hopefully in the coming months and years.
DR: So you guys have chosen not to pursue either Oklahoma or Oklahoma State as a play-by-play partner. Why has staying neutral in that way been the right play for The Sports Animal?
JD: Well, you know, those rights fees don’t come cheap. Listen, don’t get me wrong. We’re in the Oklahoma and Oklahoma State business.
We’re the flagship station for the Oklahoma City Thunder. So, you know, having both of those might be a hard thing to pull off just due to the commitments that come along with them.
Even if we’re not the rights partner per se for OU or Oklahoma State, we certainly are in the business of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State football. That’s what we do most on air. It’s something that I guess could always be considered whenever those rights come up, but they are expensive and you do have to weigh the value against the cost and make your decisions from there.
DR: In the sports format, Cumulus seems to have a lot of stations in markets your size and in your situation that are doing very, very well. There’s JOX in Birmingham and The Zone in Nashville. I mean, these non-major market stations where sports fandom traditionally was built on college sports and now pro sports is a relatively new thing.
Do you look at any of those stations as either a role model or a partner, someone that you want to be part of an information-sharing relationship with to help The Sports Animal evolve and grow?
JD: We do, yeah. I’ve had conversations with both Birmingham and Knoxville. Even The Ticket down in Dallas is a brand we look to, although they’re obviously a monster. But you know, we’re kind of a monster in our town.
We’re open to any and every idea that our infrastructure gives us access to obviously. We’re encouraged to reach out to other markets if they’re doing some things that we need to be doing. They’ve reached out to us as well. We are very lucky to have some very, very good support stations in our community of stations.
DR: How are you going about recruiting for jobs that are not on-air jobs right now? Sales, promotion, whatever? What is the best way for the broadcast business to reach young jobseekers?
JD: Well, again, I’ve been at these radio stations since 1989, and we’ve got very strong, very well-branded radio stations in the market. The Sports Animal is just omnipresent in Oklahoma City. The Cat is a heritage rocker that is just awesome. It is a great, great radio station and has been around for 45 years.
We get our share of people just wanting to put their foot in the door on-air, on the sales side, just to get into radio period. We haven’t seen, with the obvious exception of COVID, how that affected everybody else. In terms of calls or resumes we stay pretty in demand. We’re just lucky that way.
We’ve had these great radio stations for a long time and we’ve kept our top talent on the air. So we’ve been very consistent with what our presentation sounds like, looks like, etc. I think people see it as destination employment.
DR: I was thinking about this watching the NBA Finals last night. Crypto companies, whether it’s coins or exchanges, are spending a lot right now in terms of sports marketing, both on TV and live sponsorships. How about radio? Is that sector seeing growth for you?
JD: Well, we have not seen that yet. Now, that may come to Oklahoma later than it might come to New York or L.A. or someplace larger. I’m not sure. But we have not yet seen that. But again, this business is growing and expanding in so many different ways with, you know, with the advent of how important digital is becoming into our sales process and into what we’re doing for our clients. So, you know, any of these things, such as what you’re talking about or I’m sure destined to be here sooner than later.
