Audacy Inc. could be liable for a $14,000 Contest Rule violation released on Friday by the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau.
It’s tied to a multimarket national cash promotion conducted across the first half of 2021 by the company formerly known as Entercom.
The licensee was then-known as Entercom, and is today known as Audacy Inc.
And, the company led by David Field has been handed from the office of Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture “for failing to conduct a contest in accordance with its announced terms.”
As such, Audacy “apparently” violated the Commission’s contest regulations.
What happened? As the Enforcement Bureau explains, the Commission’s contest regulations require that licensees fully and accurately disclose material contest terms and conduct contests substantially as announced or advertised.
In this case, Egal says, Audacy’s announced contest terms specified when winners would be selected and when winners would be notified of their selection. But, despite being required by its own contest terms to select winners on or about the next business day following
each contest day, and to notify winners within 72 business hours of being selected, Audacy
“frequently failed to adhere to those deadlines.”
With the proposed $14,000 penalty for the violation, the Enforcement Bureau reiterated the Commission’s “longstanding commitment to protecting the public from deceptive broadcast contests.”
The matter regarding Audacy’s contest dates to April 5, 2021, when a “National Cash Contest” was underway across the first half of the year. On that date, the Commission received a complaint alleging that one of the company’s radio stations had purportedly not conducted a contest in a manner substantially as announced and advertised.
As is common across large broadcast radio companies, this multimarket promotion was conducted on 194 stations licensed to Audacy across 27 weekdays between March 11 and April 16, 2021.
Once per hour between 7am and 6pm local time (totaling 11 times per day), each of the Audacy-owned stations participating in the contest announced a keyword. Listeners could submit their contest entries either by texting that keyword to a specified shortcode number or by submitting the keyword via the internet by the end of the hour in which the keyword was announced. Based on the contest rules, terms and conditions, one national winner was to be selected randomly from each hour’s eligible entries from all participating stations, for a total of 297 opportunities to win. Each winner was to receive a check for $1,000
In other words, Audacy planned to select up to 297 potential winners to receive the $1,000 prize.
The Enforcement Bureau then went to work and issued a Letter of Inquiry on August 23. Audacy responded on November 12, 2021. Of particular focus to Egal’s team is that the contest was supposed to select randomly one entry as a potential winner from all
nationwide eligible entries for each respective Contest time slot “[on] or about the next business day following each Contest Day.” Next, “[p]otential winners w[ould] be notified … within 72 business hours of being selected,” with prizes then mailed out within 8 to 12 weeks of Audacy’s timely receipt of all required documents and information from the verified winner.
However, Audacy found during an after-action internal review of the contest, partly in connection with the Enforcement Bureau’s inquiry, that human error is to blame.
In particular, Audacy told the Enforcement Bureau that in some instances, a part-time employee charged with selecting winners never did so. Furthermore, this part-time employee’s manager had not provided proper oversight to ensure that all winners had been selected in a timely manner. Additionally, Audacy confirmed that some of the selected winners had not been notified of their selection.
In conclusion, Audacy acknowledged that, due to those omissions, the company did not act timely in selecting and/or notifying 50 winners out of the 297 time slots — 16.8% of the potential winners.
Once the failures were recognized, Audacy in October and November of 2021 took measures to select, notify and award “replacement” contest winners. And, by the date of the company’s November 2021 response to the Enforcement Bureau’s Letter of Inquiry, Audacy had selected and notified potential winners for all 297 contest hours. All prizes had been awarded to all eligible winners who had submitted the required paperwork.
Nevertheless, the Enforcement Bureau ruled that the FCC’s rules were broken by failing to select and/or notify winners in a timely manner. And, given the totality of the circumstances, Egal concluded that upward adjustments to the base forfeiture are warranted.
RBR+TVBR has reached out to an Audacy spokesperson for comment.
