CL King analyst Jim Boyle thinks that when the Radio Advertising Bureau releases its revenue results for month of August, it’ll be talking about a decline of -8% or -9%. That actually would come in at or better than the Wall Street consensus for the beleaguered industry which Boyle says is caught in the grip of simultaneous secular and cyclical challenges. It’ll certainly be the 16th red month in a row.
Boyle expects publicly-traded groups will beat these numbers by 3%-4%. The pace for Q3 seems to be -6%, matching Q2 results. He notes that small market groups are still doing much better than their large-market colleagues, which he attributes to their old-time business values.
“When we listen to radio veterans, they often describe the small market successes as simply ‘old radio,’” said Boyle. “Before the groups built unwieldy giant platforms that had corporate/regional management too far removed from the local pulse, distant from local audience and Main Street clients, there was local ‘Old Radio’ and it used to grow sales 6%-8%.
RBR/TVBR observation: So all you guys and gals down there in Austin are figuring out how to turn this around. Right?
