ESPN Radio’s Mo Davenport

Mo Davenport

It’s time to write a series of success stories about radio fighting back against all of the negative news. What is it that ESPN Radio is doing that’s working so well? They’re up healthy double digits in their station business and similarly up double digits in their network business—that’s on top of double digit increases in the year prior. We’re talking to the folks that are making that happen. Last Summer we spoke to SVP/ESPN Radio and ESPN Deportes Traug Keller on the special sauce that’s making this all happen (8/23/07 RBR #165).

Today, we’re talking with Mo Davenport, SVP and General Manager of ESPN Radio.

A 23-year ESPN vet, Davenport is based at ESPN Radio’s studios in Bristol, Conn. and oversees all aspects of ESPN Radio content, including talk programming, event play-by-play coverage, podcasts and other online content, commentators and production, as well as distribution, ad sales and marketing initiatives for ESPN Radio’s 700 affiliated stations and five O&O stations.

Joining ESPN in 1985 as an associate producer, Davenport was most recently the network’s vice president, remote production, in charge of the day-to-day administration of amateur sports on ABC and ESPN since March 2006.

Mo played a role in the launch of ESPN HD and was #95 on Sports Illustrated’s 2003 list of most powerful minorities in sports, he is also a two-time Emmy winner for his work on animation (ESPN’s first Emmy) and technology (on football’s “1st and 10” line), and was named the Outstanding TV Sports Executive in 1999 by the All-American Football Foundation. He was a key force behind ESPN’s critically acclaimed NCAA men’s basketball tournament coverage and the company’s extensive women’s NCAA basketball tournament coverage, and began to work extensively on ESPN's college football coverage when he was promoted to producer in January 1986.

Says Davenport: “The first thing I want to do is I want to thank you for doing this.  I do think that radio has probably felt like it’s been picked on a little bit out there in the marketplace. I’ve got to tell you something—we’re so excited at ESPN about a lot of things that we have going on right now and I’m sure we’re going to get into it as we talk through some of these questions.”

The ESPN Radio and HD Radio content offering--can you tell us a little bit about that and why you all decided to do it?

Well when you start talking about ESPN Radio you have to realize that we believe that it is much more than radio--its ESPN Audio.  Our audio can be heard on terrestrial radio stations, on AM bands, FM bands.  It can be heard on the Internet, it can be downloaded in podcasts.  It can be heard on Sirius and XM.  One of the new emerging technologies is HD Radio.  It’s a matter of applying the mission of ESPN: to serve sports fans anywhere, anytime.  One of the things we feel is really important is that if you put out great content it will find its way to consumers.  HD has been sort of a theory for a while. All we really did was figure out the last mile technically to be able to give it life around the Euro 2008.  For Euro 2008, when the games are on you’re hearing the TV audio of the games and whenever it’s not on you’re hearing ESPN News. Kevin Plumb and his engineering team have done a great job figuring out how to get to the last mile and as of right now our FM station in Dallas is able to take this content and put it on the air.  The good news is we know it works and we know there has been a significant amount of interest in being able to put that product on some of the FM-HD channels.

A lot of times with HD Radio if you build it they will come.  If you provide the content they will come. And they need people like ESPN and some smart programmers to do just that—give us a reason to buy a HD Radio.  How does ESPN Radio fit into the overall strategy of growth at ESPN?

It’s almost an offshoot on the first question which is our company just lives off of our mission which is to serve sports fans wherever sports is watched, listened or discussed; debated, read or played.  Through serving sports fans we try to find places to take our audio so that we can connect to them.  Radio, even though it is traditional radio, has a special relationship.  I can only point out that most people as they ride to work in the morning they’re listening to their favorite shows--and I hope that show is Mike & Mike in the Morning.  They feel like they have a personal one on one relationship with the host.  That relationship sort of carries on through the course of the day whether you can glance at it on ESPN2 before you go to work or whether you’re listening at work or if you’re listening on the Internet.

We just need to figure out the combination of putting together great content and then finding the correct methodology by which the consumer wants to use that content.  Connecting those two dots--whether it’s iPod and iPhone, whether it’s Internet-based or whether it’s local station-based is our goal.  That is directly in line with where our company is.  If you look at the different places where ESPN is in the sports world I think we have 50 different businesses, everywhere from ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN News, The Magazine, ESPN Enterprises, the X-Games. You go on and on so we’re the part that keeps that audio piece together.

Yes and sports is really a global thing too so you’ve always got that to expand to as well with all the different ethnic groups in this country alone. 

ESPN Deportes is the key to that.  We’re in roughly 41% of the Hispanic households and we’re looking to get to 60%. Then at some point on my “To Do” list is for us to figure out what our international audio strategy can and should be.

How has the separation from Citadel and ABC Radio affected ESPN Radio if at all?

It hasn’t really affected that much at all.  We continue to work with Citadel and they’re close partners and we have a good relationship.  For instance, their sales team and our sales team work together for our national network sales.  Also Citadel provides some back office commercial integration functions.  They’ve been a good partner to us and we hope to continue that relationship.

 

Tell us about ESPN Radio’s recent success stories.  Tell us about some highlighted ratings that you’re seeing recently.

The headline is we reached 22 ½ million listeners per week and that’s grown from about 20.6 million just a year ago.  I think that’s just part of the story and those are terrestrial radio listeners.  That does not include Sirius and XM.  That does not include a number of downloads we have in podcasts. That does not include Internet office listening so if you’re catching a theme here the theme really is terrestrial is one piece of the business. 

For online, we have 8 million podcast downloads per month to over 1.4 million unique users. There are 230,000 online listeners and some 2,000,000 ESPNRadio.com unique users.

And as you start drilling down, you also have listeners for the local stations as in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles on their web sites.  So if you start aggregating all that up, that 22 million listeners really grows substantially and that’s really the story as to how we’re eventually going to continue to keep the audio business front and center.

I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the revenues.  We have a down marketplace right now but in reality the revenues might be good with you guys.  They’re not great for the radio industry in general but how about revenues for ESPN Radio? 

Well we’re not going to get into specific numbers, that’s probably not a prudent thing to do.  I can just tell you that we’re doing well and we continue to outperform Miller Kaplan in a radio marketplace.  We continue to grow at a double digit pace in terms of both revenue and operating income so luckily for us sports radio has so far been immune to the downturn.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to always be that way but we feel like we have done relatively well so far.

What about some of the new developments on the programming side?

Going forward on the programming side I think it’s real important for us to recognize where the ratings business is going.  They are going towards the PPM sort of model and the portable people meters will allow us to program more specifically and have a more varied content.

So even though shows like Mike & Mike, Colin Cowherd, Mike Tirico, Scott Van Pelt, Sports Nation in the afternoon will be large blocks, we’re also continuing to develop shorter form content like the Erik Kuselias Show on Saturday mornings, NBA Sundays.  We’re doing Sports Center at 5 o’clock in the morning and soon to be announced we’re going to do Sports Center at midnight starting in July.

We’re doing football focus shows because I think football has more than demonstrated it can be compelling year around in shorter forms and one-hour shows.  So as our shows kind of mature and we feel like our weekday lineup is solid, it makes us more and more excited to develop early evening, overnight, weekend programming and starting to look at a little shorter form as opposed to being tied to large blocks of time. Because that’s the way Arbitron always sort of measured things.  It was three-hour blocks based on recall.

What about recently adding Scott Van Pelt?

Scott Van Pelt is a terrific talent.  He and Tirico form a wonderful pair.  We certainly miss Dan Patrick and we wish him well in his new endeavors but we’re real happy to have Tirico and Van Pelt together.  Van Pelt’s got sort of a quirky, just funny personality and Tirico is sort of straight.  He plays it down the middle.  I think Scott Van Pelt is the only person that can get Mike Tirico to just crack up consistently on a daily basis which to me turns out to be fun radio, great chemistry between those two.

What about the consumer insight behind the recent promotional campaign for ESPN Radio, “You know us, we know sports.” How did you come up with that and what’s the strategy?

We went out and we did focus groups with our five owned and operated stations.  We did a bunch more research but what we found was that relationship that fans, that listeners have with ESPN is based on this one-on-one like you know us and you know that we know sports and sports is currency.  Sports is the ability for you to be smart around your buddies, your pals.  So we came to this brand position of sports radio is a relationship worth having.  Just based on that one-on-one relationship, it’s like you can talk to them. Ever find yourself in a car and you start “arguing with the radio,” arguing with Golic or arguing with Greeny? How can you have that opinion?  That’s what we found that relationship was like and so we set out with a great team of Weiden and Kennedy to capture that inside of these commercial offerings/spots that we had.  It’s kind of fun it has that sort of ESPN sensibility where you don’t take yourself to seriously but it also captures that one on one relationship.

What is the strategy(ies) behind ESPN Radio’s successes?

You start out with the fundamental premise that one, content is king and then secondly if you serve the consumer--if you serve the listener--then you will have success.  It’s a fundamental principal which sort of guides ESPN.  How do you continue to serve sports fans?  That’s the litmus test--if you’re serving your sports fans then there’s a good chance that you’re also going to be able to make some money down the road.  There are times frankly that we won’t worry about the revenue implication. There was no way that we knew that we would be able to make any money at all by having a Sports Center from 5 o’clock until 6 o’clock.  But that’s a risk worth taking for us because if it’s a good service and you know the commutes are getting longer why not see if that Sports Center resonates?  The one thing that you sort of recognize in radio--I come from a little bit of a TV background.

I’ve been doing TV 25+ years before I came to radio last year this time--I was accustomed to ratings almost instantaneously, next morning.  In radio, we have to be patient.  You have to go with your gut, you have to if you make a decision this is going to be good content, this is going to be a good service to the consumer and that will eventually allow ratings to catch up and then you as a business will be able to grow.

What’s next for ESPN Radio to tackle?

Oh, everything.  We continue to look at any and every type of distribution platform.  We certainly see there are opportunities for HD.  We just recently were granted a license to broadcast an experimental FM radio station in and around Bristol, Connecticut.  We’re looking to support our affiliates by providing them with shells so they can have a new affiliate Internet network that broadcasts ESPN Radio along with their local content.  One of the company goals for Mr. Iger is simply put to use technology to help us grow and lucky for this team we’ve got someone as talented as Kevin Plumb and the engineering staff and team from 1050 in New York and groups in Chicago and LA and Dallas that help us take advantage of those technologies.  It was their breakthrough in a meeting just two weeks ago where they figured out hey here’s a way that we can take and deliver content to any subscriber around the country through and Internet based website.  They just subscribe to this website download the shows you want and here’s the content that allowed us to launch an HD network.  That’s what I think makes it pretty special to be here at ESPN.

Yeah with technology moving fast you never really can sit still.

You sure can’t.

Tell me a little bit about this experimental radio station. 

It’s an experimental FM license the FCC granted.  We applied for a license to broadcast roughly eight miles in and around the Bristol area and that allows us to experiment with HD subchannels.  We’ll probably have three or four networks up and running in about four to six months.

This could be nationwide across FM HD stations then?

Well yeah it’s a way for us to test and develop both content and see how technology works.

That’s what we’ve been saying all along--there are these HD multicast channels all over the country in every market now and you should be able to network those things.

Absolutely.