Beasley Media To Launch Self-Serve Ad Portal In ‘Digital-First’ Push.

It’s possible to buy just about anything these days with a few clicks and a credit card. Caroline Beasley thinks radio advertising should be sold that way, too. That is why the Beasley Media Group chief says her company is working on building a direct sales product.

“I don’t know of any radio company that offers you the ability to go online and buy advertising online. Well, we’re working on that product today,” Beasley says on Borrell Associates’ Local Marketing Trends podcast. She says the effort will begin with digital products they own, and eventually add traditional over-the-air inventory to the menu. “We’re making it easy for advertisers to buy our product,” Beasley says.

That direct sales portal could help overcome what Beasley says has been a slower embrace of digital than what she would like by salespeople. The company had targeted reaching a goal of 20% of its revenue coming from digital sales by 2020. It may have missed that target.

“We have such large brands, and there was such demand for traditional advertising with these large brands; they were still focused on radio first, and digital was an afterthought. It took some time for that mindset to change, more time than I really anticipated,” Beasley says. She believes that in the past, only a third of sellers fully embraced digital, but that has changed.

“We have had to let some people go. Some people have just walked on their own because they saw where our company is headed, and they just were not comfortable,” Beasley says. “But there are things that we have done to address this. Number one, we are developing a digital-first strategy.” That includes doing more training for sellers during the past 18 months, while focusing on recruiting people with strong digital sales experience, some with no radio experience. And Beasley says they have increased “accountability” on every proposal, requiring that digital products be attached.

The results point to a new embrace by reps. Five years after missing its target, Beasley Media Group this week reported that 25% of its second-quarter revenue came from digital sales.

The emphasis on digital may not be all that surprising for the company, since through the years it has embraced new technology as it has come along, such as its investment in Quu, the tech company that enables radio stations to display messages and images on vehicle dashboards. There is also a new push to leverage artificial intelligence and large language models to develop new products that will demonstrate to ad buyers how audio sales fit into their media mix.

“We're focused on connecting the dots between digital and traditional platforms,” Beasley says, “so that we can show attribution to our advertisers.” She says on the podcast that they have quietly been working on a product that uses machine learning and utilizes Nielsen and in-house data to reveal how radio and digital can work together and result in website visits and sales.

The race to make Beasley Media Group more digitally-focused than ever is based on where Caroline Beasley thinks the business is heading. She expects that within the next decade, radio’s digital sales will surpass traditional revenue.

“I believe our brands will continue to be important, although the delivery method and the way that these brands are consumed will be different. I'm actually betting the farm on this,” she says. Beasley also predicts that broadcasters are not going to require the large physical buildings and fixed costs that they have today, as stations convert to cloud and internet-based infrastructure, and AI will be a part of everyone's business.

“We're going to be operating more like a digital company than a traditional media company,” Beasley predicts. “We're going to be working smarter.”