One Year After Taking The Helm, Kelli Turner Says Content Is Audacy’s Power Play.

Audacy CEO Kelli Turner is striking an upbeat tone about the company’s trajectory and the broader advertising environment, even as the radio industry continues to navigate structural change.

“We’re feeling optimistic,” Turner said. “We’re making a lot of interesting moves that we’re excited about. We all face some challenges, but we feel pretty good about the direction of the business and where we are.”

Turner, who has been in the CEO seat for the past year, has mostly kept a low profile. But in an interview with Borrell Associates’ “Local Marketing Trends” podcast, she said audience engagement gives her reason to be bullish.

The past year has brought a resizing of the Audacy’s workforce, and several top executives have departed the company as Turner has put her imprint on a new leadership structure designed to better align programming strategies across its markets.

“Our company is a content company,” Turner said. “The only thing that really changed is that we are going to better coordinate our content management.”

Using the company’s sports portfolio as an example, Turner said that while Audacy’s 30 sports stations were previously managed largely within their individual markets, brand managers will now report into a centralized format head.

“In this new configuration, the brand managers are still in the same local markets,” she said. “But all of those brand managers will now report into one centralized head of sports format.” Yet Turner emphasized that programming will retain a local focus.

“The people programming the stations are still local. They are still the decision-makers,” she said. Instead, she described the move as an effort to share best practices and create more collaboration across markets. For advertisers, she added the restructuring does not alter the buying experience at the local level.

Turner, who had been a board member, rose to the top job in January 2025 when Audacy emerged from bankruptcy. Under the reorganizational plan, the company’s largest stakeholder is a fund with ties to billionaire George Soros. Turner said the investment is overseen by the family office’s media lead, Michael Del Nin, who now chairs the Audacy board. “He is quite involved,” she said. “We’ve never interacted with the Soros family. It’s managed on behalf of them.” She also clarified former CEO David Field “is not involved anymore.”

Turner also sees podcasting as a key growth area for Audacy. “It’s growing nicely,” she said, explaining the scale of Audacy’s local sales force provides an advantage for partners. “The fact that we have around 500 local salespeople around the country really helps them get access to more local advertisers, in addition to the national advertisers, who have been very strongly buying the podcast space.”

Digital more broadly has become a meaningful revenue contributor, representing roughly 30% of revenue. Turner said the company’s digital business — which includes podcasting, streaming and digital marketing solutions — has been “a bright spot” and its revenue is continuing to “grow nicely.” Now privately held, Audacy hasn’t released any specifics, however.

Looking ahead a decade, Turner said Audacy’s identity will remain rooted in content, even if the delivery platforms evolve. “We’ve always been content first — and I think 10 years from now, we will also be a content company,” she said. But while audio remains central, Turner expects the company’s format mix to broaden as it likely expands further into video.

“Will someone be turning a dial on a radio in a car in 10 years? How exactly will they get our content? I can’t answer that question,” Turner said. “What I can tell you is, we want to be everywhere that our audiences are.”