Paul Mann (l) with son Jason
Mann
From Broadcast Dialogue
Christensen Communications Limited www.broadcastdialogue.com
VISTA
RADIO: THE BIG FISH IN THE SMALL POND
by: SCOTT
LEHANE
Less than
a year out of the gate, Vista Radio — a group that specializes in small-market
stations in western Canada — has been growing aggressively through acquisitions,
investing heavily in new technologies, and filing applications for new
stations.
It begs
the question, what’s going on here? We haven’t seen this kind of aggressive
movement in radio for a while.
Last
spring, Vista Radio arrived on the B.C. scene taking ownership of Drew Media’s
SUN FM in Duncan — a small market in Vancouver Island’s Cowichan
Valley.
In the
short span of time since then, the group has been growing aggressively with the
acquisition of 18 other small-and medium-market stations scattered around
British Columbia, and looking east to Alberta with new applications for licences
in Lethbridge, as well as Grand Prairie, Fort McMurray and Medicine
Hat.
Driven by
a seasoned management team of small-market veterans who believe that just
because it’s a small market doesn’t mean it has to be a small business, Vista
has been buying up clusters of stations in rural B.C. such as CFCP Radio,
Caribou Central Interior Radio, Boundary Broadcasting and Valley Broadcasters,
giving it coverage of such remote rural communities as Smithers, Grand Forks,
Castlegar, Williams Lake and Nelson.
At the
small end of the scale are its stations in 100 Mile House and Vanderhoof (each
with a population of 5,000 or less). The middle of the spectrum would be Vista’s
stations in Port Hardy, Campbell River or Powell River, and its larger markets
would be areas like Courtenay/Comox, with approximately 58,000, or Prince George
– Vista’s largest market where it now owns two FM stations with a potential
reach of about 75,000. Prince George is its only BBM-rated
market.
The
company has also been investing heavily in upgrading its new properties and
standardizing the technical platforms across the group, as well as re-branding
and re-launching several of their new acquisitions.
“I think
the properties we bought all had significant futures if they became part of a
chain, and the chain had a vision which reflected back to the local
communities,” explained Vista President Bryan Edwards. “I think one of the
things we really strive to do is have each of the stations even more local than
they were previously, if possible.”
“Local”
is something of a mantra at Vista, perhaps even the company’s whole raison
d’ętre. Vista aims to be the big fish in the small pond.
“Our
focus as a company — because it’s what we do well and it’s what we’re passionate
about — is small-and medium-market radio. Where we’re investing in a lot of our
facilities and our plant, it’s to put a vision in a line; it’s to treat
small-market radio like big business,” said Executive Vice-President Paul
Mann.
The
management team at Vista go back to the days of the Okanagan Skeena Group, where
Edwards served as president and CEO. Paul Mann, as well as his son Jason Mann,
VP of programming, Barbara Fairclough, company controller, along with CEO Margot
Micallef are all veterans of the Okanagan Skeena Group, which was acquired by
Telemedia Radio in the late ’90s. In 2002, Standard Radio acquired Telemedia’s
B.C. radio stations.
And so,
over the years many of Vista’s current employees have seen several different
regimes come and go.
“I’ve
worked for five different companies over the span of 10 years without ever
leaving my desk,” quipped Jason Mann.
“We
became quite a team and worked well together and it seemed a natural fit a
couple years later, when we saw some opportunities in the industry, that we put
the same team back together,” explained Edwards. “We operate as a virtual
company, in that there’s really no head office. We’re scattered all over, and
what makes that work is the fact that we know each other so
well.”
Edwards
is based in Terrace. Jason Mann is in Duncan and his father, Paul, calls
Abbotsford home, although he admits that he’s basically been spending the year
on the road, living out of hotel rooms, juggling projects and overseeing capital
investments.
Paul Mann
explained that over the years, the team has seen both the good and the bad side
of acquisitions and mergers, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of
working for a small company as opposed to a big corporate
group.
Many of
Vista’s senior management team, including people like Keith James, who came out
of retirement to manage the group’s Duncan operations, and Sean Matheson, who
oversees non-traditional sales, are also shareholders in the company, giving
them a unique stake in its risks and fortunes, not to mention an incentive to
get it right.
“The one
thing about getting to do it for yourself, as opposed to someone else, is it
gave us the chance as we crafted our own business plan, to look at what would do
the same, knowing what we know from our past, and what would we do different,”
Paul Mann explained. “We’ve worked for the large companies, and we’ve been part
of the on-the-ground management team in terms of assimilation, and putting
change together, and now we get to do it for ourselves.”
From a
technical standpoint, bringing together and standardizing systems like traffic
management, music scheduling, broadcast automation and newsroom systems was a
job that fell to Jason Mann.
“Each one
of them (the stations) was on different commercial scheduling software, from a
very old and inflexible DOS DARTS program, to a couple of different versions of
CDSI, and a Windows-based version of a system called Visual Traffic,” he
explained.
“We did
an analysis of what was available in the marketplace and came across an emerging
technology called Wide Orbit. It’s been around for a couple years in the U.S.,
primarily as a television scheduling program but they had just adapted it to
radio. It’s designed by traffic people. So we’re rolling that out across the
company and we’re probably the first radio broadcast company in Canada to go on
this system.”
He
explained that Wide Orbit would serve as the financial backbone of the company,
and that one of the key advantages of the system is that it allows account execs
to log in remotely and write their own orders directly in the system, saving
time and effort and giving accurate real-time inventory
management.
“Typically, you would write out
the order on a piece of paper and then have a traffic person/manager decipher
that handwriting and enter it in a computer,” explained Jason Mann. “So the
reporting that the system allows us as far as real-time inventory management is
just phenomenal.”
In terms
of music scheduling software the company was similarly confronted with several
different systems. “We were on several different versions of everything. We were
on Windows Music Master, DOS Music Master, Windows Selector, DOS
Selector.”
The
company inked a deal with RCS Sound Software and is standardizing on the Windows
version of Selector.
The
underlying platform that ties it all together is OMT Technologies’ MediaTouch.
Company President Edwards was actually one of the first guinea pigs for the
MediaTouch system, and in the early days helped push the company to develop
features for the system that, nowadays, are taken for
granted.
“Back in
’89 or ’90, I went to MediaTouch to ask them if they could do a multi-station
platform with hard drives, because nobody at that time was offering that. People
could do two stations, but not more than two,” Edwards explained. “They built a
system for me and it’s evolved into something very sophisticated now. And
knowing what you can do with that kind of a system, allows us to do a lot more
with the technology. I think that’s one of our strengths.”
Jason
Mann said that another key reason to go with MediaTouch was simply the fact that
a lot of the stations were already using it, and it represented the least number
of changes across the group.
“De-Networking” Is The
Plan
But far
from trying to build a radio network, Jason Mann explained the goal with all of
this standardization is actually to “de-network” their stations and enable the
smaller stations, that were mostly doing rebroadcasts, to stand alone and
develop more local content.
“We’ve
begun the process of de-networking as many of the stations that we’ve acquired
as possible,” he said. “Our strategy is local. In the emerging technological
environment, there’s going to be a lot choice with respect to national services,
so I think our greatest strength and our greatest advantage is going to be in
delivering the highest quality local product.”
For the
newsrooms across the group, Vista has standardized on KLZ Newsroom’s Newsroom 4
for almost the opposite reason — it enables collaborative clusters of stations
to share information.
“For
example, on Vancouver Island we can tie all the stations together where there is
some regional relevance and some sharing between the newsrooms,” said Jason
Mann.
Edwards
admitted that with all the technical upgrades there have been some
“redundancies” in the company, particularly in the back office. But overall the
company has gone from 130 to 144 employees — mostly by adding people in the news
departments and other on-air talent.
In
addition to standardizing and upgrading 19 far-flung stations, the company
recently moved its stations in Powell River and Duncan into new facilities, and
totally redesigned and renovated its Courtenay/Comox
station.
And, SUN
FM in Duncan has moved into a new facility — formerly an upscale Italian
restaurant complete with hardwood floors and a fireplace.
“It will
be one of the premier small-market broadcast facilities in the country as far as
creative environment, and technology,” said Paul Mann.
With the
launch of JetFM in Courtenay/Comox, a station that was previously operating as
CFCP-FM, with an adult contemporary station, Vista has really found its
groove.
Adjacent
to CFB Comox, where the Canadian Force’s 19 Wing is based, the station was
entirely redesigned with a “jet” theme (polished aluminum struts and all), as it
re-launched under its new JetFM moniker as a classic rock
station.
“JetFM
has captured the imagination of the marketplace,” explained Jason Mann. “It’s
hard to explain, but when you tap the vein of the community or when you touch
the nerve in the community with a station and a format that is just firing on
all cylinders, it’s just amazing what can happen. And it truly is one of the
most exciting experiences of my programming life.”
The
company has undertaken several other re-brands and re-launches, but JetFM is
probably the most successful one yet.
“We use
research to go into the market and find out what the market is looking for,”
explained Jason Mann. “You can strike out, but if you look at it closely enough
— and you use the anecdotal information that’s available to you — and all of
your experience and all of your years of programming, sometimes you can hit a
home run. And I dare say JetFM is a home run.”
More
Tangible Branding
Re-branding and re-launching
stations is always a delicate process, fraught with potential pitfalls. But for
Edwards it was a key part of the original plan, “sometimes people get complacent
in smaller markets... and we try to keep a fresh approach, because if you’re
doing today what you did a year ago, then the audience is probably a little
bored with you.”
Overall,
the company is dropping call letters and coming up with more tangible
branding.
“Giving
communities their own identities, that’s part of our agenda,” said Paul Mann. So
operations in Port Hardy, Port McNeil and Port Alison have been re-branded as
“The Port.”
Meanwhile, Vista’s Powell River
outfit became “The New Magic” and moved into a beautiful new facility across
town.
“It
really just operated on a set of call letters all these years. But giving it a
soft rock brand known as ‘Magic’ has elevated it, and we moved it to a new
location — a beautiful marine-drive ocean-view studio — that’s sort of helped to
elevate the product and the perception of the brand in the marketplace,” said
Paul Mann.
Even up
in the northern tip of its reach, the tiny town of Smithers, which sits in the
shadow of Hudson’s Bay Mountain, has had its station re-branded as “The
Peak.”
“The
people of the town identified with it because they related it to the mountain
peak,” said Paul Mann. “And of course, we put fresh imaging and work into the
music side, and the product, and try to put some fun in the station. When you
start to do those things, people inevitably respond in the
community.”
He
stressed that the most important things to focus on were the morning shows and
the local news, and the company has hired people in those
areas.
“These
are the things that give people ownership of their local station, so the
re-brands have been quite substantial as part of the year-one effort, in
addition to some of the physical plant and technology that we’ve been upgrading
to,” he added.
Attitude
goes a long way in radio, and Vista sees its aggressive expansion, and capital
investments as something of a statement. Indeed, the company seems to be
operating with a “build-it-and-they-will-come” philosophy.
“A lot of
success in business comes from your attitude and the approach you take to
business,” said Paul Mann.
But there
is certainly a pattern emerging — a method to the madness — especially in the
types of stations they’ve been acquiring so far.
“We’ve
been successful in putting together a company that is formed from several small
companies that were, in some cases, family-owned operations where these families
were ready for retirement,” explained Paul Mann. “Norma Brown, for example, who
owned the Coast Group of stations in Courtney, Campbell River, Powell River and
Port Hardy — she’s 82 years old, so this was an opportunity, perhaps in her
case, to put the company in the hands of hands-on operators who have a vision
and a solid belief in small community radio.
“That’s
the sort of candidate for acquisitions that we’ve been fortunate enough to
find.”
“I think
it’s the numbers of them,” Edwards added. “We were very fortunate to put a deal
together that got us as many licences out of the gate and that gives us enough
critical mass to make it work.”
The
company hasn’t finished its out-of-the-gate growth phase yet. Edwards explained
that, for now, Vista is focussed on its outstanding applications. Hearings for a
Lethbridge station were held in Edmonton in February, and in June, the Canadian
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) hears applications for
stations in Fort McMurray and Grand Prairie, Alberta.
The new
applications alone would represent a lot of work for a small operator such as
Vista, but the company is still looking to grow through
acquisitions.
“I don’t
think it’s any secret that we’re going to be involved with a few other calls,
and we’re looking for other opportunities to buy stand-alone, or small groups of
stations that are ready to sell,” said Edwards. “In the second go around,
[acquisitions] won’t necessarily have to meet the same kind of criteria, now
that we’re up and running.”
Still A
Tough Sell
Generally, radio has been going
through some tough times in recent years. Along with other “old media” such as
print and TV, radio has generally been losing ground to “new
media”.
And with
the launch of satellite radio, many smaller stations feel they’ll be facing even
more of an uphill battle.
However,
many of Vista’s markets don’t have local TV or daily newspapers. In those kind
of situations, radio takes on added importance as the only source of local
information. But even so, it can still be a tough sell.
“Yeah,
radio is always more of a sell,” said Edwards. “Both print and TV seem to be
more intuitive to an advertiser, but when radio creates excitement in a
community — or it’s relevant to a community — it becomes an easier sell. Our
focus is in growing the market and growing the revenue, and the only way you can
do that is by having the right programming,”
Overall,
everything seems to be going according to plan.
“What
we’ve agreed is that we’re very competent at turning small- and medium-market
stations around and we’re confident with the technology that’s available,”
Edwards added.
“We did
our research and, so far, we’re hitting our business plan, which was a
significant increase in revenue in the first year.”
Freelance writer Scott Lehane may be reached scottlehane@earthlink.net