Meet The Leaders is a special 8-week series created in partnership with Point to Point Marketing. Today’s feature is on the President, iHeartMedia Insights, Lainie Fertick. Follow along with the series and revisit former conversations by checking out the entire category.

Lainie Fertick is the President of iHeartMedia Insights, where she leads the company’s research and consumer intelligence efforts. Her work focuses on understanding how audiences engage with audio across broadcast radio, podcasts and streaming, while examining the behaviors, attitudes and cultural trends that shape today’s media landscape.

Fertick is a frequent voice on the evolving role of audio and its value to advertisers and consumers. She has presented iHeartMedia research on topics ranging from Gen Z and multicultural audiences to advertising effectiveness, consumer behavior and the continued impact of radio. Her work helps translate audience data and research into insights for marketers, media professionals and iHeartMedia’s broader business strategy.

In this edition of “Meet The Leaders,” we dive into her day-to-day duties overseeing every element of research with her six oversight of six departments, the data behind the company’s “guaranteed human” model, her use of artificial intelligence, the growth of iHeart’s partnership with Magellan, and what she’s looking ahead to in 2027.

Fertick spoke with Barrett Media from the road in Las Vegas, NV.

Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

John Mamola: Looking back at 2026, what would you say was the defining metric from your perspective that illustrates how iHeartMedia has grown this year compared to previous years?

Lainie Fertick: Lots of interesting tech things, but I want to talk about a not at all tech thing. I want to talk about our work on the human consumer. We started in 2014 naming a word of the year. We’ve taken tens of thousands of pages of open-ended consumer data, fed them into now large language models and precursors for those. Trying to come up with something that says, where’s America? What are people thinking about, talking about, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, geography?

Last June, I thought it would be fun to run it and see where we landed. The word was so clearly human by such a large margin that it blew our minds. Aliens would have to land for the word of the year not to be human come December when we tend to pull it.

We did that research on where’s that coming from? It was coming from a bunch of places. ICE raids and conversations around that. The concern over whether children and immigrants are fully humanized. The return to work. A lot of people say, and I don’t feel like my boss sees me as a human. But of course, the response to AI.

We went in and made that guaranteed human promise at the end of last year. Not really sure whether the conversation would continue. Boy, did it continue. If you’ve lived in America recently, you have seen what concerns over AI look like. What a gift that we wrangled, wrestled, and freaked out over all that stuff a year before all this was happening here at iHeartMedia.

Our focus on our guaranteed human promise allowed us to make really clear lines around not playing AI artists. We’re going to play real life, human creators. That’s been valuable for our relationship with the record labels and the industry. Our promise is to put on real life human voices in our radio hosts and podcasters. To ensure that there would always be a human, there had all sorts of consequences from listeners being so thankful for that promise. But also for our own employees.

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The first people I heard from after that were a lot of our own air talent and programmers. We kind of forgotten we’re all grappling with and wondering with what this stuff means for our lives.

So for me, the word of 2026 really has been human. Rethinking how do we engage with, how do we connect with the humans we serve, and the humans in our own building. By far the biggest thing we’ve done and thought about.

JM: Everyone utilizes AI in some capacity. With the amount of data that you’re seeing on a daily basis, how does someone in your position utilize AI to help your process?

LF: It is a gift to a person who deals in reams of data. No one deals in more reams of data than iHeartMedia. Running 860 stations, we’re doing 10 to 12 million consumer interviews a year. That is too many interviews for me and my people to read. AI has allowed us to collate, summarize, and analyze all of those responses. It’s also allowed us to go back and find the things we need a lot quicker.

To be clear, we use AI at iHeartMedia when it’s a tool that we control. If it’s a productivity tool, we are all using it all the time. My sales researchers are using AI to find the best stats to help advertisers connect the right message on the right stations and measure it appropriately. My programming researchers are using it so that we can keep all these focus blogs. We can keep talking to consumers and get faster insights on what are they saying, and what are they feeling. We actually have a whole process by which the humans check and vet the stuff we see in AI, and it’s super accurate.

AI is an analytical tool. What’s the difference between how young consumers and older consumers are experiencing TikTok radio? What should we promote with Black listeners compared to Hispanic listeners on this hip-hop station? AI is answering the questions that used to take hours of digging in seconds. It’s amazing. The faster we can answer, the faster we can get it out to everyone.

JM: With that being said, what is a typical day-to-day for you?

LF: It’s changed a lot. The last two years now, I’ve moved from running Critical Mass Media where I was general manager and had worked for the 20 years prior to that to running all of iHeart’s research teams. Every day, I’ve got leaders of those teams that I need to engage with to figure out what’s going on in that world.

I’ve got the music research and analytics run by Elizabeth Falke looking at weekly call-out, online music tests, library tests, music maps. All sorts of music strategy, and station strategy.

I’ve got content research run by Kellan Asbach looking at dial tests and focus groups and talent GPS studies. Trying to understand how well our talent are engaging, what features are working.

I’ve got digital listening analytics for the iHeartRadio app run by Joseph Toyoshima. I’ve got UX research, led by Dawn Sakaguchi-Tang, where we’re looking at how actual users are experiencing the app. Campaign insights run by Cara Weiss looking at how we can target our advertising campaigns more appropriately to help advertisers with their goals and KPIs.

Measurement and attribution with guys like Brent Lightfoot looking at who’s visiting the website when they’re exposed to this campaign. Also, corporate research so that we can tell our story to the board and investors.

So, on a typical day I will have interactions and meetings with leaders from across all those groups. Figuring out what are their biggest priorities in any given day. Then where am I needed to jump in. It might be that we have a coaching call with a really big show. But it might be that we have a really big client who has a renewal coming up. So, on this day I’m going to spend a lot of that day looking at four different measurement tools. How many people visited the website, searched for the brand, foot traffic into the store and making sure we’re telling the best story we can with them.

What’s interesting and weird about my job is that because I run all six of those different research groups, my day is different depending on which area needs me the most. That’s not to say I don’t have phenomenal people running each of those areas. They’re all fully capable of running their own space, but there’s always something that kind of needs my attention there. In any given day I’m going to talk to all six of those leaders, but I’m going to dive in deep on whatever the biggest fire or the biggest priority is.

I also run our relationship with Nielsen. On a lot of given days I’ve got to engage with Nielsen on something. I’m trying to sort of centralize a lot of the operations of how we put out surveys and measure analytics. On any given day I’m working with our operations director to make sure that we’re dealing with stuff like fraud and surveys. As great of a gift as AI has been analyzing data, it’s made it easy to be a bot who takes a survey. We’re constantly having to stay out ahead of operational things like that.

JM: Every bit of research that I enjoy reading talks about how radio still matters to younger demographics. I think it’s a misconception that radio is just not for the younger audience because they have their phone. When you look at the data for how radio still appeals to younger groups, what are some characteristics that you see that showcases why radio still matters to younger generations?

LF: Young people use YouTube and Spotify, absolutely true. People do use streaming services to access music collections. I’ve been studying this for 22 years. Everyone has always used their personal music collection. Maybe it was records, eight tracks, or mixtapes. I spent a lot of time illegally downloading music on LimeWire in my college days. Let’s just set up the statute of limitations has expired.

I burned CDs and wrote with sharpies on them. That was such a core formative piece of who I was. Then I put those things on my iPod Nano, which has been sitting dormant in the drawer for 20 years now.

The point is we have all always had personal music collections. You know what people don’t have anymore? iPod Nanos, eight tracks, records, and CDs. The personal music collection absolutely has moved over to places like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, or your platform of choice. That behavior isn’t much different, but people go there for a different reason.

What the youngest listeners [Generation Z], nine in ten tell us I use my radio stations and my music collection at different times for different reasons. They can articulate those reasons.

You come to radio because you want to feel like you’re part of something, and feel like you’re part of a community. I don’t just mean a local community, but like hip-hop fans, pop music fanatics, country lifestyle folks.

You want to hear some conversations you can start at the water cooler. You might do it to feel a little less lonely, or do it to feel someone cares. Even if they’re just another person in the studio who you haven’t met in real life. You have that parasocial relationship with them.

We all come to radio to join the world, to feel a sense of connection. In 2020, that was our word of the year. We didn’t recognize that a global pandemic was going to happen, but it was absolutely the right word. We learned that people who kept their routine with their radio show, even if they were no longer commuting, reported better mental health. They felt more connected. It wasn’t just that they stayed connected to the radio, they stayed connected to the other people who listened along with them.

We start the group chat. It gives us something to talk about. We all used to watch TV at night and then come in to talk at work or school about those TV shows. That functionally does not happen anymore. There’s nothing with that cultural power. So, we’re seeing people still coming to the radio for that.

We’re seeing with the youngest listeners, the 13- to 30-year-olds, co-listening is big for a million reasons. Gas is really expensive, if you haven’t heard. So, a lot of them are commuting together to work. Kids are getting their driver’s licenses later than they ever were. More two working parent households. Now, kids have to drive their little siblings around.

We call Gen Z the guarded generation. I don’t blame them, but they’ve grown up in a world where their entire lives were under scrutiny. Their faces were plastered on YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat. Broadcast for the world to see, and they’re a little bit more scared to be themselves. Sharing your personal music collection is a little scary. You might not want people to know you like these songs.

So, they actually tell us I put on the radio because it’s built for everyone. You put it on, it’s communal and feels safe for everyone. Your younger siblings aren’t going to hear anything mom and dad didn’t want them to hear. Your friends and co-workers aren’t going to judge your taste, and your parents aren’t going to be like, he was listening to that. They can tell us that it’s enjoyable. Everyone is welcome, and everyone can enjoy this music and content.

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Gen Z’s not dumb. They know that they’ve missed out on the kind of cultural experiences the previous generations had. They miss that, and they want that, and they tell us they feel a little bit of joy.

When you look at the ad-supported time, because I talk to a lot of advertisers, that Gen Z spends with audio. About half of it is broadcast radio, and that’s a huge part of the reason why. They want to come and join the world and hear the same stuff everyone else is seeing.

The non-ad-supported stuff I don’t talk to ad supporters or advertisers about. They can no longer reach someone who’s listening to their paid Spotify subscription with their advertising no more than I could have reached with my Tupac CDs. That was my personal time. Radio is might come join the world time. We’re seeing as much love and enthusiasm for that now as ever.

JM: Attribution has always been a problem for radio. When I was programming, it was a hurdle when talking with advertisers. What’s been the early results of iHeartMedia’s latest arrangement with Magellan AI and their Broadcast Radio Attribution product?

LF: We had web attribution tools like Veritone where you heard the ad, did you go to the website? The difference with Magellan AI is that they use simulcast data. If you are listening to a radio station on the iHeartRadio app on a digital device, we have the same signals for you and who you are. The same identity information as we have for a podcast listener or a streaming listener.

Suddenly you do have that identity data, and we take those listeners to model out based on what those simulcast/digital listeners that we have those digital signals for, are doing. You can use that to model out what the rest of the folks listening on a car radio are doing as well.

The embrace from the advertising community has been incredible, because it’s real data. These are real listeners, real identity, the same way that we would measure behavior from digital. Lo and behold. It turns out that radio ads work.

We’re able to look at hundreds of events. Do they go to the website? Do they fill out a form? We’re also able to see that it might take them a couple times coming to the website to finally buy the product. Because we have that identity and we know who that person is, we’re learning more than ever about the consumer journey. How long it might take from the time you’re exposed to the ad to when you finally buy it.

That’s really important for advertisers because consumer journeys are lengthening. Consumers have some economic concerns. Old methodologies looked at we played the radio ad, how many people visited the website within 15 minutes? Now it’s we pay played “Laney” our radio ad, and we know that she went to the website three times in the following ten days. On that third time she finally pulled the trigger and bought the product. For advertisers to see that is amazing.

What’s even better is they can see performance by creative, performance by daypart. So, they can actually tailor and optimize radio campaigns. Optimize has never appeared in the same sentence as radio campaigns before, but you can actually see [certain elements]. We thought this message was really cute and funny, but this message is performing better with men. So, we’ll go ahead and switch to more of that message.

Being able to measure more like digital, it’s like a little security blanket. I feel like advertisers like that. They’re familiar with that, and it’s opened a lot of other doors.

I think Nielsen finally really sees the critical importance of measuring performance of radio campaigns. So, in addition to the Magellan AI data, simulcast data, and web visitation, we also now have media mix modeling inputs that Nielsen allows us to share. It allows radio to be measured against all other media. So, big companies take these media mix models and they pour in all the different things they’re buying. It all goes into this model, and it gets run by an algorithm that says how much value did each of these media provide. Plus, if you have one more dollar, where would you put your next dollar? What’s the ROI on each dollar and the potential ROI?

What’s been fascinating to watch this year is that radio has started performing significantly better on so many of those models. We have better input data. The more of these signals we have about real people and their exposure, the better the data is.

The data that used to get fed into MMMs was just, here’s your radio plan. Plan data is a mess. The best laid plans are not how things run on radio stations. To be able to put in that real data and see the actual kind of ebbs and flows of the advertising matches how the consumer engages, it’s the thing we already knew.

Now a lot of these folks in investing in these MMMs are learning that broadcast radio works. It’s efficient, and it’s effective. That’s something we never could have seen given the tech even two or three years ago.

JM: Is there too much data, or is there never enough data?

LF: It is the best question, because I love endless rooms and data and I want to look at it all. But we can’t be paralyzed by data. My job is to have all the data in the world. I don’t want my programmers or my air talent to be mired in data. In fact, it’s sort of a running joke at iHeartMedia that I’m the odd researcher who will say don’t get too caught up in the data.

Our programmers are magicians. Our air talent are magicians. They are amazing creators who can connect with people on a level that can’t fully be quantified by data. My job is to give them enough data to do that well enough, and to know when to say that data point is not the most important one or keep pursuing this.

I really view that it’s my job to take all of the data and figure out which of it’s useful. Which of it’s a red herring, and which of it’s going to get you distracted or send you down the wrong path. If you’re letting data distract you from putting on the most compelling, innovative, and interesting programming. You’re not using data correctly.

It is 50% math and 50% magic for sure. Even how we field our research. Everything that we do is based half on what listeners say and half on what they do. They’re not the same thing. It’s important for me to know that you wanted to listen to something that meant something. You wanted to listen to something that seemed a little bit more important.

In 2016-2017, NPR was having a real tear in the ratings. We could see that people were still consuming all of our gossip bits and everything. But we also knew, because we asked them, that they didn’t feel great about it. We want to put out great, sticky, fun-to-listen-to stuff, but we actually want people to feel good about it.

That insight of understanding not just what they were doing, consuming endless gossip. But also what they were thinking. I don’t feel great about this. I want to feel like I’m hearing things that are meaningful and important to the world. It allowed us to rebrand and retool.

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We don’t have gossip and sleaze segments anymore. We have Three Things You Need to Know or headlines. They’ll include some entertainment news and some other news.

In terms of data, there’s never too much data for me. But that’s because my job isn’t to create. My job is just to assist creators and be in the background and let them do their thing. There is such thing as throwing too much data at creators or forcing them to adhere to it. It’s not what we do. You could call up anyone with iHeartMedia and ask if Lainie Fertick is forcing you to adhere to too many different disparate data points? They’d say no because the goal is again half math, half magic. That’s how you build great content.

JM: The AM Radio in Vehicle Act passed the House of Representatives. iHeartMedia is a big supporter of this legislation. What data have you seen that showcases to the company that the AM band should not just stay in cars, but also something to continue investing in to remain relevant where people know where to go when AM is needed?

LF: AM radio saves lives, literally. One of my most common catch phrases at iHeartMedia is your bougie friends aren’t normal.

If I were running a high-end subscription service where you paid a bunch of money to get access to something that helped you in a hurricane, great. We reach nine and ten Americans on broadcast radio and at iHeart. We have a duty to every last one of them. Some of those folks can’t subscribe to a million things and work jobs that are not as fun as ours. They’re not telling fart jokes on the radio. When you reach nine and ten Americans and you research what’s going on in the lives of nine and ten Americans, AM radio truly is the lifeline. Especially in weather emergencies, for a substantial portion of them.

The New York Times ran an article on the Hurricane Helene coverage in Ashville, NC. It is a last line of technological defense in some of these major disasters. We’ve got to be there. Someone’s got to be there. Someone who is not selling the subscription service to just who wants to opt into it.

Police and fire. AM radio is in that category of first responders that we all as a society have a duty to support. Because every single citizen in America deserves that life-saving information we can dispense and provide.

JM: 2026 isn’t over yet, but moving into 2027. How would you assess the standpoint of the company moving into 2027? What next step do you feel will be coming to fuel additional growth for iHeartMedia?

LF: The big, exciting thing that we’ve been working so hard on this year that you’ll really start seeing pop in next year is AudioGraph. Our programmatic radio offering that allows us to use real identity data. Same concept as we talked about with Magellan AI, to plan, buy, and measure broadcast radio. That’s what the marketplace demands. This broadcast radio inventory for some buyers, it’s a little more complicated or not as top of mind or as easy to buy as some other audio inventory.

It’s nuts, because broadcast has the largest reach. Lisa Coffey has been brought into iHeartMedia to help work on this. She’s doing a phenomenal job setting up all of the pipes necessary so that you can go buy broadcast radio in programmatic settings. You can buy it as easily, simply, and as quickly as you can buy other media.

That’s such a technical thing. It doesn’t sound like guaranteed human, but it’s so important. When you look at where’s the friction for the industry, a bunch of the friction is in stuff like that. Making it easier and more accessible for all of these on-the-go media buyers. They’re just like everyone else. There are fewer people doing the work of more people; they’re doing harder, longer jobs. Making that inventory available is going to be a huge difference maker for iHeartMedia.

Sometimes it’s just the difference of getting on the plan, making it easier to access. Then, of course, the measurement will all follow suit with that. Now that we have this resource to go in and plan more granularly, targeted, and the way that buyers are looking to buy right now. Broadcast radio inventory, we can also measure in the same way. Like Magellan AI, for every other metric, sales lift, place visitation, foot traffic, and brand lift.

We’re going to have more certainty that we know what the people exposed to this advertising did. Everyone’s being asked to put their money where their mouths are right now in the advertising field. We can say that’s not fair to grade radio that way, or we can go put out solutions that actually do it. We’re choosing to do the latter.

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.