State of the Show - Q2 2016

Attracting Quality Sponsors

From the outset, we recognized that attracting well known, blue chip sponsors would be a critical success factor and a significant challenge. We sponsors who not only saw the potential of Texas Business Radio in Houston but across the state. To attract blue chip sponsors we offered a low sponsorship cost AND a guarantee that in all the market areas they sponsored, initial sponsor’s price would NEVER increased. This means our initial sponsor’s value would increase as we grew!

The following blue chip sponsors sign on in the first six months:

• Amegy Bank
• Chief Outsiders
• Texas CEO Magazine
• Corporate Finance Associates
• Fizer Beck
• Insperity/GrowForce
• Strategic CFO
• Bernstein
• The Rand Group
• The University of Houston

Texas Railroad Commissioner, Ryan Sitton, signed up to give a monthly Texas Energy Update.

What Results Do Our KPIs Show?

Broadcast Listeners

“Cume” is an industry standard representing, generally, the average listenership of a radio station. For example, KPRC AM950 has a rating around 45,000. KTHR 740’s rating is closer to 750,000. For a new show, tracking cume is important because it takes at least six months at the same timeslot to get a reasonably accurate gauge of a program’s listenership. Thus, cume is the only reasonable listenership measurement we have.

Our cume count has grown 200% from month one to month six! Based upon conversations and preliminary discussions with iHeart and other broadcasters, we expect to move to KTRH 740 by year-end giving us a Month-One over Month-Twelve cume growth rate of twenty times or 2,000%. Initial sponsors have been grandfathered into two additional markets at no cost.

Digital Listeners / Viewers

As we are more than a broadcast radio show, we put much effort into driving traffic to our websites where listeners / viewers can see our sponsors, videos, and some of the information we have posted there. Our sources of these visitors come from several places:

• Search traffic
• Listeners driven to the site from the broadcast
• Listeners driven to the site from station promos
• Social media

The traffic to the website has grown in the first six months and will continue to grow. This takes a while to ramp up but ramps up pretty quickly. We expect the growth to accelerate as time progresses.

Video views are another metric we examine. These video views do not include places where we directly upload the video, such as Facebook. These metrics also do not account for other online listening / viewing channels like the iHeartRadio mobile platform and iTunes.

Markets: Two-Thirds Through our Three Year Goals

Our initial goal was to prove the show’s viability in the Houston marketplace in 2016, expand into San Antonio and Austin in 2017, and in 2018, Dallas and beyond. But by the end of our fifth month we had reached the market cities we set as a goal for the end of our second year!

Segment Inventory and Guests Satisfaction

In January and February we struggled just to drive four CEOs a week into the studio. In March we started gaining serious traction and began building an inventory of segments. From December through June, our segment inventory looked like this:

We have fifteen weeks of programming already committed. The impact is significant.

• We can raise the quality of our guests,
• We can make the weekly themes more structured and thought out,
• We don’t have to spend hours upon hours searching for guests, thus giving us time to find quality sponsors,
• If we have a technical glitch we are covered, and
• We can focus more on the quality of the interviews themselves.

In April we began surveying our guests right after their interviews. The results are simply astounding (1 to 10 scale, 10 being highest):

Thirty-nine out of forty (39/40) guests would gladly do it again!

All in all, though, we are very pleased with the progress being made to attract highly successful CEOs and service providers into the studio and we are ecstatic about their evaluation of the interview process.

Awards

In our first six months, Texas Business Radio has been honored to win three awards:

• 2016 AVA Digital Award’s Gold Medal
• HERMES Creative Awards, 2016 Gold Medal
• 2016 Videographer Awards – Distinction

You can learn more about these awards HERE.

Conclusion

When started, we had no idea that the Texas Business Radio would become almost statewide in only six months. Our initial sponsors have been grandfathered into two additional markets at no cost. We have grown 200% from month one to month six.

Based upon conversations with iHeart Media, we expect to move to KTRH 740 by year-end giving us a month-one over month-twelve cume growth rate of twenty times or 2,000%.

The advantage to our initial sponsors is huge increases in their exposure with NO Increase in cost AND a commitment to no future increases in the market they sponsor.

We hope all our Initial Sponsors realize the value proposition that increases monthly with no cost increases. We are just beginning.