Bob Pittman, CEO and Chairman of iHeartMedia, and Jarl Mohn, CEO of National Public Radio, delivered the closing keynote at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2018 Podcast Upfront.
iHeartMedia is the largest commercial radio podcaster and NPR is the largest non-profit radio podcaster in the U.S.
After the onstage talk, the media titans chatted backstage about their friendship, the secrets to media success and how technology is creating the "Golden Age of Audio."
Court Stroud: Tell me how you two met.
Bob Pittman: We were these two young guys in radio. I was a teenager. I think you were 19 or 20.
Jarl Mohn: Yep.
Pittman: He's just slightly older than me. He's the old guy. [Laughs]
Mohn: I was a disc jockey in Louisville, Kentucky. A friend of mine, who actually worked for a competitive radio station, moved to Louisville and needed a place to stay. He was out one night. The phone rings. I answered it and it's this guy [Pittman]. We started chatting.
Pittman: We both had this great interest in research.
Mohn: No one was doing it then.
Pittman: We wanted to do research, because everybody else had the golden ear. We were saying, 'If you call people and ask them which songs they like, then we'd get a much better view of what music we should be playing on the radio station.'
I was from Mississippi. I was working in Detroit. I stopped off in Louisville, met him and this has been a life-long relationship.
Mohn: 45 years and we’ve always been great personal friends.
Stroud: What’s the secret of success in media?
Pittman: A lot of luck.
Mohn: A combination of things. We both spent a lot of time, and still do, using research, but that's a piece. Good fortune is another. Trying a lot of things. Allowing the creative people that you work with to experiment is a piece.
We all know people that are 100% research. We know people that are all 100% golden, got the golden ear. You need all those elements at play. Because we’ve been doing this for a long time, we probably have a better pattern recognition than most.
Stroud: Pattern recognition?
Mohn: Pattern recognition—what works. We’ve a sense—because we've been around for so long—of what’s going to work and what’s not. It's not infallible, but there's something to be said for having done all the things that we have. Whether it's in radio, online, television, it’s understanding what the consumer wants.
Now with this relatively new thing, podcasting. We’ve a sense, a general idea of the direction of what works, and then we experiment with it.
Pittman: I've been in a lot of businesses. I've even been in the theme park business, real estate business. To me, it's always follow the consumer. Jarl and I both worked with a great programmer who said it's a mix of the math and the magic.
Research can tell me what that consumer's doing. That doesn't mean I can entertain them or excite them. I need magic to do that.
Mohn: A consumer-first [approach] allows you to move through any technology change. Technology is just an enabler. The consumer behavior is what they want, how they want it, what they're into. The one rule I've always found in consumer behavior is make it more convenient.
Pittman: Mobility—radio has always been mobile. With Alexa now, I don't even have to get across the room and turn on the radio. I just say it. We're in a time in which technology is turbocharging audio.
Mohn: When people say, 'It's the golden era of audio. Audio's hot.' It is. We're listening to the consumers and building products that excite them, on every level.
Pittman: When I took over what has become iHeartMedia, everybody said, 'Radio? That's dead.' I go, 'I actually think it's going to benefit from technology.' That was my bet, that we would be enabled by technology to do things we’d never done, as opposed to we’d be harmed by technology.
Stroud: Will terrestrial radio survive new technologies like podcasting?
Mohn: I care greatly about the public radio system and I care greatly about our partners at the local stations. Four years ago, the argument was 'NPR's getting too old. It's not changing with the times.'
Podcasting is a feeder system into the network. We've discovered in the success of our podcasts that we're bringing younger people to the network. We see it as one thing. Brands that wouldn’t ever think about advertising on our network get very excited about the podcasts. We use the podcasts as a way to get marketers excited about being on the network.
Pittman: I'm bullish. One of the things that we've been talking about that none of us had thought about or planned—smart speakers.
I got very worried when I got here about a long-term trend. People who had a clock radio had gone from 40% or 50% to 20%. I'm going, 'Gosh, this is terrible.' We were out talking to manufacturers. 'We'll pay you to make clock radios.'
Suddenly, Alexa appeared. Duh. There's the new clock radio. Already 18% of our listening hours that are streamed are for smart speakers.
Stroud: How do you ensure that podcasts don't cannibalize terrestrial live radio?
Mohn: That's one thing member stations ask me every day.
This goes back to the thesis that if we do great content on all of our platforms—whether it's the NPR One app, our podcasting, or our network, whatever it is—people gravitate to great content.
We’ve seen growth on the network, growth in podcasts, growth on the apps. It's been huge for us. We aren't seeing the cannibalization. Everybody was concerned about it, particularly our member stations. We had to tread very carefully, but we said, "If we don't experiment, the world will leave us behind."
Pittman: The general rule in business is if you can be cannibalized, then cannibalize yourself. When Ted Turner came after MTV with cable music channels, we started VH1. When I had AOL, we bought CompuServe. Steve Jobs realized music was going to be on the phone. Instead of trying to defend the iPod, he built phones. Good idea, huh? If you're serving the consumer, you'll figure out how to make money.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
