Highlights from Legacy Vs. Social Media Roundtable

At our Legacy Vs. Social Media Roundtable last week former Clear Channel exec Jim Meltzer focused on the future of radio content. While Pandora and satellite radio have taken market share and offered new options the increased needs for advertising revenue on satellite is more challenged by Pandora’s model and there seems to be a limited shelf life for the sustainability of the model. Radio still controls certain channels in advertising as well as local market content distribution. The more radio leverages their local market advertising advantage and the ongoing need of local weather, news, entertainment and other content they have a foothold that can be expanded. The problem is that industry financial and corporate driven non local content (franchising programming in particular) has limited further growth. Could they team sales with national partners in search and couponing? There are creative new paradigms that CBS and some larger players somewhat seem to understand but new paradigms could be very opportunistic.

Larry Cornett formerly of Yahoo talked on search and Google’s opportunity for growth. From couponing to advertising the discussion highlighted the many alternatives that Google has positioned and can leverage versus the models from Facebook to Groupon. As the revenue and content mix moves more to advertising the challenge of balance is a potential threat. At the same time Larry discussed the switch of advertisers to online resources and the substantial future opportunities still ahead. Measurement capability, behavior and location tools are some of the overwhelming advantages. As mobile grows the top and bottom line expansion in the space is still a market size unknown and search internationally is still worthy of premium growth expectations.


Jim Meltzer is the principal of Meltzer Media Management, a broadcast management, sales, internet and organizational firm founded in August 2008. Mr. Meltzer was previously a Vice President and General Manager at CBS Radio. Prior to that, he was a Regional Vice President at Clear Channel Communications.

Larry Cornett is the founder and principal of Brillant FORGE which provides Product and Design Strategy and Management Consulting services to Fortune 500 companies and startups. Prior to founding Brilliant FORGE, Larry was the Vice President of Consumer Products for Yahoo! Search, leading a multinational team of product managers, designers and developers who were focused on creating world-class Search experiences to compete with Google and Bing.