We had numerous responses to our Interep Severance Pay story yesterday, posted on the comments section below the story itself. However, this one came in via email from Focus360 Director and former Interep employee Dave Logan:
“I don’t know anything about severance but I do know this. The loss of INTEREP has seriously hurt the radio Industry. Taking Interep’s sales staff off the street has in many ways impacted the relevance of the medium. Advertisers seem to talk more about cable, internet, matchbook covers etc. Interep’s 600 sales people created a strong presence for the medium. They were everywhere. Interep’s young/old girls never missed an industry party. They worked hard and had a good time.
Clear Channel/Katz, the company that drove INTEREP out of business with their sales guarantees, in my opinion, is currently renegotiating these guarantees (they will probably deny these accusations). What did these station groups, advertisers, the entire radio industry gain by going with [Katz]? They promised but could not deliver.
The financial types who took over the medium have devastated it with their backward MBA thinking. For example: The radio broadcast groups run by these guys (they may also have been internal financial guys) would overpay for a station, then go to the representative firm and their individual sales staffs and tell them they had to increase sales by 50%. Their rationale: Smart guys don’t make financial mistakes — they didn’t overpay, the station had been undersold. This worked for a while during the dot com boom, then the chickens came home to roost and reality set in. By then most of the financials wizards had moved on to mortgage financing or the automobile industry.
I am experiencing this today. Competitors of mine made big guarantees, but now can not deliver. It hurt me big time. When these guys with their big guarantees promised a world in which I could not compete, now that they cannot deliver.
Nobody cares, like Donald Trump/Ted Turner/Wall Street/ Congress, someone will give when another shot to replay the same game.”
Editor note: There is a lot of chatter going on from many on this issue of Interep. Go to www.RBR.com comments and view and voice your observation. We care at RBR-TVBR.
