Blaine Parker, Slow Burn Marketing, Park City, Utah
We don’t need to tell you how many radio creatives have lost their jobs this past year, nor do we need to point out how many of those were some of the best in the business. The landscape is changing. Those of us who have had comfortable homes in radio stations everywhere, all of a sudden, are finding ourselves wondering what could possibly be next. Opening your own ad agency has been a topic of discussion since the first issues of RAP, but it seems this “dream” is now much more than something we can set aside for those lazy afternoons by the pool. Urgency comes to mind. Is the time ripe for you to make the break? Is the time ripe for specialty houses to flourish? Are you running out of time to just “think” about it? Blaine Parker’s story is about making that break. His recent departure from Salem Los Angeles is off to a good start as he and his wife, Honey, take a one-of-these-days idea and make it happen. Slow Burn Marketing is doing well, and in this month’s RAP Interview, Blaine tells us how it started and why it’s working. We also get a look at his key role as Creative Director for 11 ½ years at Salem in LA before leaving just this past year. And be sure to check out this month’s RAP CD for some inspiring audio from Blaine and company.
JV: Your background is a bit different in that you didn’t really have the usual journey through small market radio.
Blaine: No. Actually, I started in Boston. I was at Boston University, and I was interning at WBCN. I was like, “Man, this is great!” Radio had always been my first love, and ‘BCN was a great station back then. When I got there it was fun, but I thought, this is kind of a weird place to be. It was very intense, it was the ‘80s, and I just decided, man, I am never going to break in at this level, and I have no interest in making that journey through small market radio. So I walked away. I thought, I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I ended up selling stereo equipment at Tweeter, Etc. for a year and a half. Then I went to sea for two and a half years, living out of a sea bag. I was a yacht bum.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I had also interned for Jay Rose… and what an education. I mean that guy is amazing. I love Jay. He and I periodically trade emails today. I’ve got his books, and I don’t think there’s a day goes by where I don’t make use of something that I learned working at Jay Rose Sound. It was a production internship, but Jay really, despite being just a phenomenal engineer, is also a hell of a communicator. I learned a lot about listening and advertising, and it was a great time to be around the place because they were producing commercials for all the big agencies in Boston. One of the things that you’d find is that these local agencies would come to Jay to do demos for their commercials, and they go, great! Then they’d take it to the client and the client would love it, and then they’d go off to New York to produce the real commercial, and they could never quite understand why it didn’t sound as good.
But I actually got into radio by accident. After I came back from being a yacht bum -- because it’s a heck of a way to live but no way to make a living – I was like, wow, I’ve got to do something. I fell into becoming part-owner of a homemade ice cream store in South Beach in Miami, which was then just starting to happen. The Deco District was starting to come alive, and Miami Vice had kind of put things on the map. There were all these old hotels that were in their state of disrepair sort of interspersed with these things that had been redeveloped and were terrific. It was almost like a schizophrenic environment. Well, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine from Boston had moved down there. She was going to open an ice cream store in Boston and ended up doing it in South Beach. So I started doing her marketing, and one thing led to another. I said, “Look, you can pay me or you can give me stock.” So I ended up being part-owner of this thing, and that was the first radio that I did after college, doing radio commercials for this South Beach ice cream company called “The Freeze.”
JV: Did you already have some marketing background at this point?
Blaine: Yeah, it was all the things that I’d picked up along the way. It was very “seat of the pants.” I was self-taught in PR. I’d taken some advertising classes in college. I’ve always been kind of an advertising geek, and it’s worked out all right. I moved on.
I went to LA thinking I wanted to be in the movie business because I’d been working on movie sets in Miami, and I wanted to be a screenwriter. I got to LA and I was like, man, this is intense. So I ended up selling stereo equipment again -- the hi-fi stores seem to be a collecting ground for guys who have worked in radio, which I guess makes sense because you’re around audio equipment. But I was at a job. I’d moved from the sales floor to working for Clifford Electronics, the car alarm people, and I was sitting there thinking, man, I need to get another job; this is not where I need to be.
Then one day Salem Los Angeles had an ad in Adweek. I thought, gosh, are they going to want me? I thought, why the heck not? Let’s take a shot at it. I had just produced a demo, which was kind of a voiceover demo and kind of a writer’s demo. I had done the whole thing wrong, but in doing it wrong I’d done it right because what were they were looking for was a writer, and it showcased my writing, and oh by the way, I can also do VO. So I started there and the rest is history. That’s where my last decade of radio began. I was there 11 and a half years.
JV: How did you apply your marketing expertise to the Creative Director’s job at Salem? How did you do things differently than, say, a typical Production Director that came up through the ranks of radio might do?
Blaine: Well, I should point out that I wasn’t Production Director; I was Creative Director. They hired me to write copy and that evolved. But I came to it with many years of sales experience out in the real world.
JV: Did they have a Production Director at the time?
Blaine: I was a copywriter, and they hired Bob Holiday at almost exactly the same time that they hired me, and we actually formed a pretty solid team. It was kind of fun, but he had no patience for me originally because I was bringing a lot of what I had learned sitting in the room with agency people producing radio spots trying to do commercials in a radio environment. They work differently in advertising. They work it to death. You’ll take a 60 second script, and you’ll use like 7 or 8 different takes in that one 60. I find a lot of radio guys are like, let’s lay it down once and get done with it.
I think Bob did not understand what I was doing. I think he thought I was working them too hard, and ultimately, he began to understand it, and we became a great team. It was great fun. I picked up a couple of Mercury Awards on the way with him.
JV: I saw “emphasis on ROI,” return on investment, mentioned in your bio as part of your advertising strategy while at Salem. How would you factor in ROI when discussing an ad campaign with a client for the station?
Blaine: It’s interesting. A lot of clients have never thought about ROI, or if they have, they’ve never encountered anyone trying to create advertising for them who talks about ROI, and it’s really important. I mean, it’s great to do entertaining commercials and all that, but at the end of the day, we’re still salesmen. And trying to come to it from a psychology of sales and what’s going to motivate people to get off the dime and pick up the phone, or go into the store or whatever it is, that’s huge. It’s funny how you can be in a conference with somebody and mention ROI and all of a sudden their eyes light up. Wow, nobody else has ever talked about that. So that was really big, and especially when you’re working with a sales rep who’s pitching a new account, it can often help bring them closer to the table and get them closer to closing.
JV: Did you actually talk numbers or just ROI as a concept?
Blaine: As a concept. I would talk numbers only in terms of past success, and as you know, “past success does not guarantee future results.” But when you can tell somebody that you’ve had as much as 2,000 percent ROI, it helps bring some credibility to you.
JV: You left the radio station in the midst of this huge economic mess that we’re in. Was this your idea to leave the station?
Blaine: Kind of. What happened was, about a year and a half ago, I decided to move to Utah -- and I love Terry Fahy; not many general managers would have been brave enough to let somebody like me take off, move 800 miles away and keep doing the job. Apparently, he said to my manager, Dave Deno, “You know, this makes me uncomfortable, but all change is uncomfortable, so let’s try it.”
Salem gave me a lot of opportunities, gave me a lot of room to play, and I started working there under Dave Armstrong, who’s now in San Diego with Salem and was in New York. I’ve continued working for him all along, and I think it’s due in large part to him that I was able to accomplish as much as I did because he gave me a lot of rope. He just said, “Just go and do it.” He’d come up with crazy ideas, and we’d implement them and it was fun.
JV: So you basically retained your position and moved to Utah.
Blaine: Yes. I moved to Utah, and I was here for a little over a year when, well, the shakeup started happening. They started letting people go. The writer underneath me was let go, and then corporate finally decided that, I guess, I was getting paid too much money. They wanted to let me go, and Terry loathed doing that. So what he was able to do was to convince them to keep me as an independent contractor. So then they took me off the payroll. I invoiced them monthly, and they didn’t have to pay my benefits and things like that.
And I’d been thinking it was time to do something else. I’ve been here a decade. I really need to stretch. I need to do something else. It wasn’t long after that that my wife said, “You know, let’s start the advertising agency.” We’d talked about it, but I had been reluctant to do it. We started in December, and it just took off. It’s like we said we’re starting an advertising agency, and the world said, great, advertise me. We had seven clients before we even had business cards.
In October last year I was turned into an independent contractor. In December we started the agency, and on April 1st, I left Salem because we had too much work. I could no longer continue serving two masters and do it effectively.
JV: What services does Slow Burn Marketing offer? Tell us about the company.
Blaine: We’re almost like a vertically integrated advertising agency between the two of us. Our overall goal is to bring big advertising thinking to small business advertisers. My wife comes from Madison Avenue. She is a copywriter, but she’s got training as an art director, so she still keeps her hand in the art direction side. I’ve always been an ad geek, and while I’ve been working in radio, I’ve kept my finger on the pulse of big advertising and tried to bring as much big advertising thinking to what I do in radio.
What we’ve done is brought ourselves together. We hire the people that we need to hire to do the things we can’t do. We find that we’re working for a wide range of clients. In fact, this morning we were talking to one of our clients who’s a housepainter, who has virtually no budget. Between the two of us, we do what we need to do to get him out there and get him business with the meager budget that he’s got.
And then at the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got people who are very happy to pay our rate. We’ve got a national chain of restaurants that’s getting ready to kick off in Boston. Our clients run the gamut, but the bigger the client, the more we can afford to bring in people from the outside.
JV: Do you do it all -- radio, television…?
Blaine: Yeah, we’ve done our first TV spot. It’s for an insurance agent who’s based in the Los Angeles area. They sell life insurance and they had no budget. What we had to do is bring to it as much creativity working with very few resources as we could. We actually produced the audio track ourselves and bought some stock footage, did some simple titling-up, and then basically took the audio and a scratch version of the video that we produced here, and took it to a post house in Salt Lake and said, “Here’s what we want to do. Make it look a little better.” And for not a lot of money, we came out with a pretty good looking TV spot.
JV: A radio background is probably a good background to have when you’re out to do things with little or nothing.
Blaine: Absolutely. My wife, even though she’s worked for big advertising agencies, has had opportunities to do a lot with very little. Because there are times when, even though you’re working for a big agency, you are told, “All right, we need to produce a demo spot for this campaign that we’re pitching. Here’s some pocket change; go out and shoot something.” So you’re forced to be creative, and beg, borrow, steal and scrape.
JV: Being a marketing specialist, marketing yourself is something you’ve probably taken pretty seriously. How have you approached that?
Blaine: There is no advertising that’s more difficult to write than the advertising you’re writing for yourself. You’ve seen the web site, and it took us a long time to get there. It required a lot of soul searching and a lot of stepping back and looking at what we’re saying and figuring out how to say it. Basically, what we’ve been doing is getting ourselves out there networking. We’re getting referrals. We actually haven’t done a lot of advertising ourselves as much as we’ve been just talking to people who need help, and they like what we have to say, so they come to us. It’s all been word-of-mouth at this point.
We’re also writing a book, which we plan to use as a marketing tool. We’re also going to begin speaking. Our first engagement is this summer in front of a couple hundred small business owners at a three-day business mentoring seminar. And, I write a weekly email newsletter that’s been merged into the company. Plus, we’re both on Twitter. So, there’s lots of marketing happening, but not a lot of conventional advertising.
JV: What sets you apart from other ad agencies out there?
Blaine: Well, as I said, we’re bringing big agency thinking to small business advertisers. One of the things I find really frustrating when you’re working with small agencies in radio, is they’re not really agencies. They’re media buying services. And they don’t really have much of an understanding of what constitutes good strategic creative. This is one of the problems I’ve had with the word “creative,” is that it seems to preclude the notion of strategy for a lot of people. So we try to keep talking about strategy. And that, I think, is one of the things that definitely sets us apart from other people who are targeting the lower end of the niche that we’re talking about, the people who don’t have big budgets, the people who need a lot of help. I think we bring a lot more understanding of strategy to them, and we’re also willing to do a whole lot more with a whole lot less. When it comes to the bigger clients that we’ve got, yeah, we can bring in outside people. We’re working with people in New York and Los Angeles, and other creatives who are thrilled to be working with us because they don’t have to work through all the layers of agency management. We’re bringing to these clients a lot of creative, a lot of insight, a lot of working in the trenches, a lot of experience that a lot of other agencies our size don’t have.
JV: What’s a typical day like for you?
Blaine: It’s interesting. I often wake up about five in the morning, and if I can’t go back to sleep, I just come to the computer, and I start writing. We’re working on a book right now that embodies our philosophy of trying to bring this big agency thinking to small business advertisers. I’ll work on that for a couple of hours. Then after that, it really depends what’s going on.
Right now, I’ve got some radio that I’m doing for some of my original freelance clients, and then I’m getting ready to go to San Diego. We’re going next week because we’ve got a meeting with a new client who is a Lasik surgeon there. We’re going to be doing some radio for her. We’ve designed her logo. We’re basically doing a completely integrated, multimedia campaign for her. It’s going to include direct mail and a web site. We haven’t even talked about print yet. We’re doing radio and that’s where we are right now, and it’ll probably expand out to other media.
JV: You have a studio at home, right?
Blaine: Yes. We built this house and designed it with two guest rooms, and we no longer have two guest rooms. We have two offices. So it makes it difficult for overnight guests. The closet we turned into an isolation booth. When I have to do it, I produce radio here. I’ve also got a regular freelance gig with a major television network, and I’m doing a lot of VO for them.
JV: What’s your microphone of choice?
Blaine: It’s interesting you asked. I’ve been using a Neumann TLM103 for years. I’ve got a couple of them. Then I read a review of the Studio Projects C1. I said, “I’ve got to try that.” It’s like a $250.00 knockoff of the U87. I did some test recordings with both microphones, packed them off to Bob Holiday in LA, and said, “What do you think?” He said, “Oh, my God, what microphone is that? I’ve got to have one.” I told him and the next day he had one on order. So that’s the one I’ve been using for all of my VO right now, except when I’m doing anything that requires a bit more energy and a bit more volume. I find that it doesn’t handle the dynamic VO as well as the 103. Sometimes if I’m doing things that are very high energy, and I have to get a little more amped up in my read, I find that the 103 does a better job.
JV: What are some of your favorite sources of inspiration?
Blaine: Oh gosh. Every guy in radio of a certain age probably points to the Firesign Theater and Cheech and Chong, Bob and Ray for sure. I might be a little young to be saying that about Bob and Ray, but I found their stuff in high school through a book of their radio scripts – I’m like, this stuff’s hilarious, and eventually tracked down some of their recordings. Dick Orkin for sure. Jay Rose absolutely has been a source of inspiration. He’s suggested people like Tony Schwartz who’s a really interesting guy for learning how to communicate. Dan O’Day, I’ve got to credit him as being both an inspiration and an influence.
Other influences include Roy Williams, who has an interesting, renaissance approach to marketing in general and radio in specific. And, some of the advertising legends who need to be studied: David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Hal Riney. Ogilvy for his pithy, no-nonsense approach to creative and his appreciation of radio as “the Cinderella medium.” Bernbach for his incredibly clean, simple and relevant and, at the time groundbreaking, ad campaigns for Volkswagen, Avis and Chivas Regal, among others. He was also unafraid to tell his clients “No” when they were making mistakes. And Hal Riney, not only because he was incredibly creative and a wild man, but he was one heck of a voice talent. Oh, and little-known 1960s San Francisco ad man Howard Gossage. What a nut.
Nancy Wolfson. Single best thing that ever happened to my VO career. I mean, let’s face it: working with Dick Orkin certainly didn’t hurt. He inspired my first major VO breakthroughs. Nancy brought a level of finesse to my performance -- especially for TV -- that I desperately needed, and her instincts for creating VO demos are spot on. Worth every penny I spent.
Other than that, I take my inspiration anywhere I can get it. You find you get inspiration in the most unlikely places. You’ll be sitting in a movie watching something, and all of a sudden, hey, that’s an idea. You whip out the notebook -- you always got to have it -- make a note and hope you can use it.
JV: The position you had at Salem… have they found someone else to come in there to do their copywriting?
Blaine: Well, first of all, they’ve got a full-time copywriter in the department manager, Dave Deno, who was gracious enough to give me that job, despite the fact I had virtually no experience in radio. He’s still there, and he’s still running the department. I learned a lot from him in terms of how to structure direct response radio advertising and just advertising in general. When I left, they basically made a proposal to the woman who had been laid off prior to my departure, and I don’t know if she’s back or not.
JV: So they may or may not have that second full-time copywriter back on staff. I’m curious because it doesn’t seem that having a copywriter on staff is a real common thing in US radio, let alone two.
Blaine: Not at all. There’s a reason why Salem has full-time copywriters, at least in LA. Years ago, they had a reputation as a Christian broadcasting network, and that still is a huge part of their focus, even though they’ve now gotten into secular talk radio. But at the time, it was virtually impossible for them to get advertising agencies to even look at them, and they had to figure out how to get their clients on the air with locally-created advertising that was effective. So they decided, we need to have a full-time copywriter who understands how to do this. Dave Deno, I believe, was the first one that they had. It was about 15 or 17 years ago. So at least in Los Angeles, they’ve got a culture of having full-time copywriters.
JV: …because they weren’t getting agency buys. Nobody was writing and producing the spots for them.
Blaine: Right. All of their advertisers were local advertisers. And they were local advertisers who had no experience in radio, so they had to create effective advertising for these local advertisers in a major market.
JV: Well not getting the agency buys is going to be true of most any station that’s outside of the top 10 or 20 stations in any medium or large market, right?
Blaine: Oh sure.
JV: So, having a ton of local direct on your hands is probably one of the most common things in radio, but having copywriters on staff that know what they’re doing with that local direct is probably one of the rarest things in American radio.
Blaine: Agreed.
JV: [Laughter] You guys were able to measure the impact of having a copywriter on staff, right? I mean, Salem apparently felt that it was a necessary thing, and they attributed the bottom line of their success to having copywriters paying attention to the clients. I’m sure it was obvious to you, and it was obvious to the Salem people. I just don’t understand why they don’t get this elsewhere?
Blaine: This is going to be a very unflattering thing to say, and I hope people will excuse me for saying it. But generally speaking, in radio -- and there are pockets of resistance -- but generally speaking, there’s a poverty mentality. The idea is we can’t afford to hire somebody to do that, so what we’re going to do is make a Production Director do that or an account rep do that because, really, how hard can it be? It’s just writing the commercial.
And the truth is, I’ve met a few Production Directors and a few account executives who are excellent copywriters, but it really is a specialty unto itself. And I think it would behoove any radio station in any market to put some money and some training into getting good writers, because if it’s not on the page, it’s not on the air.
Bob Holiday has become a really good writer in the years that I’ve been working with him because, again, there’s so much local direct that he has picked up a lot of strategy and tactics along the way. But it’s really almost left to chance for most of these stations.
JV: How do you think radio’s going to end up in five or ten years, given all the layoffs and the homogenization of the programming? Do you think we’re going to be a bunch of satellite sound-alikes soon?
Blaine: I’ve been looking at my crystal ball for months. I have got no answer to that. I do not know what’s going to happen. Things are shaking out in such a strange way. Now one way to look at it is, it’s possible that difficult times will lead people to be more creative because you often get really interesting results out of adversity, and I can only hope that’s going to happen, but ultimately, I don’t know. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
JV: Generally speaking, radio has shoved its creative production people out the door or overloaded them with so much work that they really can’t be creative, except for those few people in those rare situations. I would guess this benefits small ad agencies like yours. Do you think this is opening up the way for more companies like yours, more opportunities for radio creatives to break out on their own and actually survive doing a small ad agency thing?
Blaine: It’s possible. I think one of the things that really makes us unique is the fact that I do come from radio, and Honey does come from big advertising. So we’ve got a dynamic here that most people aren’t going to have. I don’t know if you could survive on radio alone. It’s possible.
I get the impression, and right or wrong, that a lot of the advertising specialty agencies are either stripping down, trying to get leaner, or disappearing entirely. Who knows, maybe they’ve been living too high on the hog for too long. I think what probably is more likely is anyone who’s willing to break out of radio and embrace other media and other technologies, they’re the ones that are really going to do well because you really have to be focusing on those other things, like social media, for instance.
If you understand how to use Facebook, how to use Twitter, how to use the Internet, how to do SEO, all which are things that are coming into play with a lot of our clients now, and as long as you’ve got the ability to think strategically about what it is your clients are doing, yeah, I think you can do something really incredible.
I think you have to break out of the radio box and start thinking about how radio matters in relation to everything else that’s going on out there. One of the things that really has always been my favorite things to do with radio is a client who specifically wants to drive web traffic and is willing to do the right thing in the radio creative, and then is willing to do the right thing and spend the money required to make the web site work relative to that radio message. If you can integrate just those two media to make them work together, it’s really kind of fascinating what can happen.
I think this is one of the things where the shortsightedness of not having copywriters comes into play -- and maybe we should stop using the word “copywriter.” It might be smarter to say Creative Director because, really, the job encompasses so much more than just writing the copy. But if you have somebody who is dedicated to understanding, not just how to put the words on paper, but how to integrate that radio message with all the other media that the client is using, you can have an explosive ad campaign.
JV: What do you enjoy most about what you’re doing now as opposed to the radio days?
Blaine: Believe it or not, I’ve got more time than I ever expected. My time is my own now. I can call my shots. I can decide when I’m going to work. I don’t have to be chained to the desk for eight hours a day. I never had any clue that working for myself and being my own boss would give me the latitude and the free time that it has because it’s completely antithetical to everything you hear about running your own business.
That said, I’m still working like a maniac, but if I decide at noon that I’ve had enough, and I just want to go out and do something, I can do it. I might be coming back and getting back in front of the computer at 6:00 at night and being there for a couple of hours, and we do that. That’s one of the problems with having offices in the house is both of us are obsessive fiddlers, and if Honey is working on a layout or I’m working on a commercial, I’ll sit there and go, okay, how can I make that better? But I have more latitude to do that now without feeling like I’m being overworked.
That’s a personal perspective. But much more importantly, on a professional level, I now get to pick and choose my clients. Working in a radio station, you have virtually no say over who you work with. There might be the rare client you can refuse to work with on ethical grounds or past experience, but by and large you have to eat what you’re served. Now I can decide whether I want to take on a client or not. If someone seems like they’re going to be a pill or high maintenance, I can pass. I just passed on pitching what could have been a very lucrative account. It was a company who’d been a station client. They were very difficult. I flat out refused to consider it because there is no way anything had changed, and life is too short to deal with that.
We’re now working with clients who are paying quite well because they want to hear our advice, not drive their own creative agenda or decide they know what’s better. We just told a client to take one small aspect of her entire business and break it off into a separate company, that it was an incredibly low-friction money mill if she works it right. She could easily make six figures the first year. She didn’t even hesitate. She told us to start doing the work.
Another client just called us from Boston. They had a meeting with potential investors yesterday and today. She was raving. She said the five-page document we developed for her, along with a five-minute sizzle film we produced on our own computers by ourselves, worked like gangbusters. The client left town utterly sold on the idea. And you know what? They didn’t ask us to change one word of anything. You don’t have to spend much time inside a radio station to realize how rare that is.
JV: Are you doing much production at all?
Blaine: I hate to call myself a producer because that’s really not what my emphasis has ever been, but that said, I’ve won a Mercury Award for work I’ve produced so…. And I sell production to freelance clients, and I actually backed into that. It was more a survival thing than anything because things in the radio station move so quickly, and there is so little time to finesse things, that I found if I really wanted it done the way I wanted to do it, that I had to do it myself. So, first I learned SAW. Then I learned Vegas by watching Bob Holiday do it over his shoulder. And Bob Holiday is an excellent producer and an excellent voiceover guy. I think working off each other has probably taught us each a lot about what we do and how to do VO.
But everything I’ve picked up has been by fumbling through it on my own, reading Radio and Production magazine, reading Jay Rose’s books, and just listening and experimenting, asking, how do they make that sound? I wonder if I can do it. My production is still pretty rudimentary, but I think it requires -- and I’m sure the guys who are reading this probably know this -- it requires experimenting and just sort of reaching blindly into the toolbox that is ProTools or Vegas or whatever you’re using, and just fumbling through stuff until you get something interesting.
The other thing that I’ve found is that I think some people in radio need to listen more. It’s not everybody, of course, but I’ve had guys sending commercials and asking, “What do you think? Is this Mercury material?” I’m going, hmm… I understand why you think it might be. I understand where you’re going, but you’ve got to listen to it a little more closely and listen a lot more to things that win Mercury Awards, win Radio and Production awards, and figure out why it is they’ve done that. What’s that extra nth that guys have put into it?
JV: SlowBurnMarketing.com is your main website. Do you have any others online?
Blaine: StopBeforeYourEyes.net, which I actually put up in a real hurry. I did it with a free Weebly web site template because I was pitching a job for somebody in the Midwest, and I thought, man, I’ve got to look a little more slick than what I’ve got going already. So I took a lot of material that already existed on my old web site, plugged it into the template, added new things that made sense and got that going.
I could be wrong, but I think any guy who’s in radio right now needs to have a web site. I find a lot of guys who don’t and I try to find out things about people and I’m going, how do these guys not have web sites? Get a web site. You can get one free through Weebly.com and give yourself an online presence, and it gives people a place to go. You might not necessarily be doing marketing through that web site, you might be using it as an online brochure, but I still think it gives you a level of credibility and accessibility that you’ve got to have.
If you’ve resigned yourself to working in a radio station the rest of your life, and you’re not going to leave that station, you don’t need it.
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