Paul Ferguson: Local Is Still Alive and Well

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound off podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
I want you to meet Paul Ferguson. He's the VP of programming and operations at starboard communications in Belleville, Ontario. The radio stations in question are cool, 101 just country and hits, 95 five, which plays a lot of popular music from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s without really telling you. So we're going to talk about a few things, and it's going to be largely focused on local radio and being in a market where there is no chorus, there is no Rogers, there's no bell and no Stingray. The only competition is also independently owned. This makes for a fabulous discussion about radio. Paul is also in a group chat with a bunch of my other friends, like Warren cop Nick from Sony Music and Brett Gelfand from media base. On this chat, we basically bitch and moan about the Buffalo Bills, 24/7, 365, so if you're wondering why we talk about that at the beginning of the show, that's why. And now Paul Ferguson joins me from Belleville, Ontario. How did you become a Bills fan?

Paul Ferguson  1:19  
I grew up north of Coburg, and we didn't have cable. Cable didn't extend that far, so over the air, television is all we got. And a lot of that came out of Buffalo, so got a lot of bills coverage. And just, you know, I grew up predominantly a baseball guy. Hockey was second, but then a football game was on TV. And I thought, I'm going to try to figure out what exactly is going on here. It was about 1988 the bills were just about to start to get on the uptick, but the first moment, I would suggest, was I watched live coverage of Jim Kelly arriving in Buffalo. I don't know they made it seem like a big deal, and so I thought it was a big deal. And that was the embryonic stages of me becoming a Bills fan. What

Matt Cundill  2:00  
a great moment, 1986 and the Kelly is God. Banners were out, and the USFL is disbanded. And yeah, if you're a Bills fan, that was a big moment. It was

Paul Ferguson  2:11  
and then it all came full circle for me a few years ago at a CRS event. Black River entertainment is owned by Terry pagula and Kelsey Ballerini, being the flagship artist. Her single at the time was called legends. So a few of us go over to the event, and what do they do? They trot out Jim Kelly and Thurman Thomas at the beginning of the event, and cop Nick myself, galvant, we're just going out of our mind. And then at the end, everybody got a few minutes to go say hi to Jim and to Thurman and to Kelsey. And so in that moment, I said to Jim Kelly, I remember watching live coverage of your airplane landing in Buffalo, and I was about 11 years old, turning 12, and he said, I barely even remember that.

Matt Cundill  2:56  
That's great. Yeah, it was fun. Have you always grown up in the Belleville region,

Paul Ferguson  3:01  
grew up about an hour from here, but my my radio for me, has almost always been in this market, and I know it's a bit of a unicorn situation, and I knew the 49 year old decision was coming. I'm either gonna settle and have a family and maybe this business bleeds out for me, or I'm gonna do the up and down the dial thing, and it's worked out both ways. In a sense, not the up and down the dial, but here I am still in the business, so I'm about an hour from where I grew up, basically put roots down here. Tell me about the market. Belleville is, in a radio sense, it's like it's in this little, comfortable incubator in that our company's privately owned, our competition is privately owned, and there is no corporate ownership at all. And so there's no no bell, no Rogers, no chorus, no Stingray. It's two privately owned companies still largely operating in the way radio is always operated. We have newsrooms, we have our own traffic departments, we have our own creative and so it's strange in a way, because I don't know of another market in the country of this size that doesn't have any corporate ownership. I'm checking to say that perhaps Thunder Bay might be one. Yeah, I think you're right. Thunder Bay may be in the exact same situation, and that might be the only other example of a market that doesn't, you know, have corporate ownership, and that comes with his its advantages, and it comes with its disadvantages too. But Belleville as a market is, you know, radio still pretty healthy in terms of the region itself, or, you know, an hour and a half out of Toronto, two and a half out of Ottawa, three out of Montreal. The disadvantage to that is, you're not close to any particular airport, yeah, but lifestyle wise, it's awesome. Do

Matt Cundill  4:56  
you talk to your competition a lot to try to solve some problems? Problems, whether it's locally or with radio, or how to do things, or do you guys keep to yourselves?

Paul Ferguson  5:04  
I wouldn't say we keep to ourselves. You know, there's, there's a mutual respect there. And you know, I do we talk trade a lot on a day to day, week to week basis, not necessarily, but that said, we're both certainly very much interested in keeping radio alive and healthy in this market, because we feel it's a good radio market. We'll fight it out for, you know, listenership and and dollars on the street. But yeah, we like, we both like the fact that it's a very healthy radio market, is it a race to local? Yes, I think so, both content wise and advertising wise. And in particular from a news standpoint, you know, they have three stations, two FMS and an am very heavily invested in news. We have two FMS. We're pretty invested in news, and their newsrooms a little larger than ours. But that said, you know, pound for pound, the market's very well covered. So, yeah, it's a race to local. And really what it does is all ships get raised in that high tide. I think the the market's very well served. Give me the history of starboard communications. Starboard was established Labor Day weekend, 2002 that's when the charade family bought what was then Belleville radio limited from a guy named Tony Zwick, and so the sale closed in the charrettes were here in September 2002 and it wasn't just an arms reach situation. The charrettes moved their family here, and they had spent their lives in Toronto for the most part up to this point, and but they knew it was important if we're going to operate radio stations locally, I'm stealing this line, I think, from John Wright. But when it rained in Belleville, the ownership head had to get wet, and they understood that. And so their kids were young at the time, family moves down, and they made it a big priority to be integrated in the community. And so at the time, CJ, OJ, FM, had been established for a number of years. Chc, Q, which is our country property. It had only been on the air about a year, in fact, maybe just under a year. So that property was still growing, and they knew at the time a heavy investment was going to have to be made in infrastructure, new equipment, the whole thing. And they put that investment in so slowly but surely, the radio stations improved, the staff grew, and here we are today. That's, that's the very short version of the history of starboard one of the things that I think the charrettes did that was really smart in terms of establishing the fact that new ownerships here were going to be local and were serious. Sponsorship availabilities were were available for the Belleville waterfront festival, you know, so you could buy sponsorship of the Midway or the food tent, or the this, or the that they went to the top of the rate card, and they bought the sponsorship of the entire festival, and it was the most expensive sponsorship available. If we're going to be noticed and we're going to be taken seriously, then we're going all in. And that was one of the first moves they made from a marketing standpoint, you

Matt Cundill  8:21  
touched on news carefully there and local, but I think that that's kind of obvious. I think if you ask somebody local, what do you want a radio station? That's what they'll say. But what else do people really care about? What do you hear from your listeners?

Paul Ferguson  8:34  
Well, I think people, obviously, they choose their radio station largely based on the music they want to hear. But what we hear pretty regularly, what gets the most reaction are the most human pieces of content. When our Air Staff really puts themselves out there in a real way, that's what generates the most interaction. For example, one of our morning guys. And this was two, maybe three years ago. He was driving into work, and coming down loyalist road, there was an abandoned kids. John Deere, you know, those rideable toys that we all wanted. The guy finds one on the side of the road abandoned, and so he brings it to work. And what his idea was is, let's restore this thing to working order and auction it off for the United Way. The traction that bit got, we ended up getting a John Deere dealership to say, we'll try to restore that for you. And if we can't, we're going to give you a new one to auction off for the United Way. And so that's the type of stuff that we get the best reaction out of. And when we get feedback about the radio stations, when there's compelling conversation, that's what we hear the most about,

Matt Cundill  9:54  
what about the way you sell the station? For years, we've done 30. 30s when, you know, you mentioned the chorus, the Rogers and the bells, they come with a little bit, you know, they've got other ways that they'll sell it too. But when it's just you guys, what can you sell beyond the 30?

Paul Ferguson  10:15  
That is a great question. And we still do sell 30s and fifteens, and, you know, some clients want 60s, but we're working towards being more innovative. And I think just in radio in general, that's something that we're all looking towards. So we have, and this ties back to the local news element. Years ago, 10 years ago, we established a pretty robust news website, and to be fair, our competitors have one as well. Inquity.ca, and we thought, we don't want this just to be somewhere where we cut and paste radio news onto a website. We want this to be as robust as what maybe a newspaper would put together. So we invested heavily in that that became saleable, and it's been quite a success, both editorially and on the business side. We also are, you know, we'll sell social content. You know, we're looking into other ways to monetize the radio products, not only terrestrially, but with our stream. What can we do to make money off the stream with digital ad insertion and such, so we don't have the national scale that some of those other folks have. We're working to be more innovative with what we do have on our lap, in addition to 30s and 50s. Yeah.

Matt Cundill  11:35  
So I really, really love the news website and the news idea. It a lot of people. It's not the only one that I've talked about on this show. I believe I talked about something called 716, in Wisconsin, which was, I'm trying to remember the area wasn't Wausau, whatever one of those wonderful places is on my way to the green pack, Green Bay Packers games, right? So, but you know, to have that. You've got a website, and I'm not sure if you have a newsletter that may go along with it, but because you have tools like that, you can sort of fly below the radar of a Bill C 11 or C 18, and just drive people to the website, and lo and behold, there's your local news.

Paul Ferguson  12:17  
We do have a newsletter that goes out every day at the end of the day. It's kind of got the five things you need to know if you happen to miss the news. We also have, and we're really proud of this. It goes up Saturday morning, 8am and it's called good news in Quinte. And the idea was born over the course of the pandemic, when so much of the news, and it's just an ongoing thing, so much of the news is heavy, and yes, we have to report on that. It's important stuff. But what we do every Saturday morning is aggregate all of the positive news out of the community that we are able to report on, and it gets blasted out Saturday mornings at eight o'clock and we hit it head on. Not all the news you hear is great, but there is good news, and you can subscribe for free, and it arrives on Saturday morning with the idea being, pour your coffee and read what's good in your community.

Matt Cundill  13:08  
I love Saturday mornings. In a smaller market, it's probably your most listened to Time of the of the week. A lot of people don't talk about that. It's not 815 during the week. It's Saturdays.

Paul Ferguson  13:16  
No, that's that's an interesting point night. I would love to be able to flash charts and graphs, and I'm sure I could, if I had them my but I also agree that's triple A time.

Matt Cundill  13:26  
It's high sampling, right? So all the people who had to get up early, who couldn't listen to your morning radio show because they had to be at work early, want to get stuff done on a Saturday, sleep until eight, nine, and it's high traffic listening. Great, great time to be out there live on the radio, whether it's remotes and whatnot, and a great time to put out your newsletter, as you mentioned. And here's something else I notice about the news website in quinte.ca it's not cluttered. Yes, there's sponsorships up there, but it doesn't look like a mess. So how do you find people who are smart like that to make it look neat, because I would make it look like a mess, because I'm messy.

Paul Ferguson  14:03  
That version of inquiny.ca that, if you load up right now, is the third iteration of the site. And I appreciate your observation on that, because that is 100% the objective. We don't want the radio stations to sound necessarily like a NASCAR looks. And we also don't want that news website to look like a NASCAR the previous version of inquiny.ca We felt had too much white space, and so the way it's built now is much more streamlined, with the tiles. And you know, the ads are there, but they're not intrusive, and that is by design, to be fair to you. You know where you say, you may make it look like a bit of a mess. The first couple of versions we had of that were not necessarily perfect, you know, and that's okay. We'll, we'll acknowledge that they were successful, but we, you know, wasn't necessarily broken, but we thought little too much white space, and maybe if we did this in a more streamlined manner. And the version that we have right now, we did have a local company do the design for that for us.

Matt Cundill  15:07  
I feel also that because you've got a nice website and you've got some other tools set up, I don't feel pressured as much to to lean on social, to get the word out, other than to promote what's on the website, right? I'm not even sure how much social you do. I know a lot of radio stations have backed off X. You can't be on Facebook necessarily now, with Bill C 11 still kicking about, that's, that's dead and buried for a lot of media properties, but you feel it's, it's kind of, it feels kind of nice to not have to worry so much about social other than just, you know, driving people to your website

Paul Ferguson  15:40  
Well, and that's, you know, and of course, C 11 made that tougher for sure. And we did see decline in numbers, you know, because we can't share the news on social media. That was a massive driver of the traffic to that website. So I guess what it became was, and you're right, we were never terribly heavily invested in next or Twitter previously, but you know, it's what can you do with what you have? And there are ways, you know, we do that, by way of news on the radio, where we can maybe make a news story a little tighter on the radio and have our anchor say, for more information and photos, go to inquiny.ca and so we do everything else we can, and we're not perfect at it. I'm sure there's more we could do to direct people to the website. You know, it's interesting with C 11. It goes to show you, you know, that we maybe should invest heavier and focus more on platforms we own and control, and not leave so much up to stuff that can go poof on you. There

Matt Cundill  16:43  
was a radio company in 2008 said, Don't bother getting on Facebook. We're going to make our own platform at which was laughable at the time for the people at you know CBS who did it. And of course, everybody joined Facebook. But I think this is a good example. I think for Canada itself. I know there's been talk of a Canadian only social media platform just built for this particular purpose. So I'd love that. So that's that's in the works, that's in the works. I would love that. No, me too. What's the role of voice tracking on your station inter and, by the way, in terms of, like, maybe people from from outside, who are not local? Would you have any of

Paul Ferguson  17:18  
that we don't at the moment, we have had in the past. Because, again, we're not different than any other broadcaster. We're trying to do more with less. That's just the way it is. We are, surprisingly live. Morning shows are live. There would be some recorded hours through the day. Generally speak like I on pm, drive on cool 100 on live every day, and that's important to me. The phone right there, it still rings. You're two to six, right? Yeah, yeah, two to six. And I, maybe I'm the youngest of the old guys, but I still believe we shouldn't sharpen the knife that we're going to put in our own back. In other words, if there's a perception that there's not live people on the radio, don't prove their point by having no one answer the phone. Now, not everybody's in a situation where they can do that. So again, what can you do with what you have if the phone rings, can you forward that thing to some human in the building. Now, in my case, again, if somebody calls and, believe it or not, still happens where we had an issue, where a pedestrian had been struck by a vehicle maybe two weeks ago, and our news guy comes in lets me know about it. We go on the radio and say, police are asking you to avoid this area because X, Y and Z. Listener calls up maybe five minutes later and says, Hey, by the way, that's now open because I live right beside where it happened. And, son of a gun, I hate the idea of losing that connectivity to your community. And so the role of voice tracking it augments. We lean on it heavily on the weekends. I wouldn't lie to you on that, you know, and we're doing a little less of it on the weekends, only to take a bit of the pressure off the air staff, who's responsible for it. But through the week, when the sun's up, we're as live as we can be. So we do do voice tracking. Certainly be open to the idea of having voices from outside the market be a part of that. But if they're going to be, there's a responsibility on us to make sure that they're in a situation to do it. Well,

Matt Cundill  19:27  
yeah. So that's what I was thinking. It would be kind of hard for somebody to come in from from away, who wasn't plugged into the region at all, because the station is, you know, there's an expectation of local and kind of living here, yeah, well,

Paul Ferguson  19:41  
going back a number of years, we have a staff member who's since moved to the market and is here every day. Prior to that, she lived in Kitchener Waterloo, and she would voice track. She had a studio in her home, and would do mid days, and did an exceptional job of it. But what I did for her, and this was. Pre social media, or certainly, social media was in its infancy, where you could maybe keep an eye on an other community through social channels. Every week, I would email her a list of what's going on in the community, not just events wise, but construction is going on over here, like just things she needed to know to be as entrenched in the community she could be, you know, again, social would make that easier today. But you know, to me, if you're going to do it, do

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Paul Ferguson  20:57  
Can you share a breakdown of the percentage of people who would listen terrestrially versus those who might tap in on your live stream or maybe on an app, if you're on an app, I can't necessarily give you the I mean, we have our streaming data, but in terms of extrapolating for this market, specifically, what the ratio would be, there's an industry ratio that I've recently heard that's about 11 to one, meaning for every listener you've got online, there'd be 11 on the terrestrial feed. I'm a bit of an analytical geek as in addition to being a goof. So I love knowing data like that, because I have a month to month eye on our streaming data, and I look at that year over year to see what are the Not to belabor the point, but let's say the month of June's tuning. I look at that against June last year, because in the month of June, people typically do the same things year to year. So that gives me a good idea of what's going on. And I kind of use that 11 to one ratio in my head.

Matt Cundill  21:56  
Is there an app I can listen on? Are you on radio player Canada, or anything like

Paul Ferguson  21:59  
that? We are on radio player, but we've got our own proprietary apps as well. And we, you know, like any other radio station, will promote download the app, but we kind of have started taking the messaging a little further and saying, give us a tile on your home screen, because your phone's probably just like mine, a million apps, you got folders, there's everything else, and then it's easy to forget what apps you have on your phone for that reason. And so we've started asking our audience to give a prime piece of real estate on that iPhone. And that isn't just a clever idea of mine. I would not take credit for it. I learned that at CRS down in Nashville this past year, everybody promotes the app. But are you asking for that prime piece of real estate? And if someone's going to give it to you, give them a reason to want that app.

Matt Cundill  22:51  
Yeah. So you go to a market, let's say Halifax, there are 18 radio stations you can punch in on your presets, and yes, you can probably get 18 on some of the newer model cars, but it's really only the first six that are gonna really get the activity. And then we found out it's the exact same thing with your iPhone. Is that I have 55 apps on my phone, and I'm really only using five of

Paul Ferguson  23:15  
them, and it's also muscle memory for your finger to go to where they are on your phone. You know, whether it's Instagram, I could almost hit Instagram on my phone and not look at the screen, because, you know, again, it's muscle

Matt Cundill  23:25  
memory. A lot of people don't want to, like, do the little pull down and then the search, right? I have to teach this to people all the time, to do this

Paul Ferguson  23:33  
and again, not gonna lie, that's not something that would come easily. I've recently learned to do that because I knew there was an app on my phone and I couldn't find it, and eventually I came across the search bar and solved the problem. But we're trying to, you know, program people to give us that tile on their especially this time of year when people are traveling. You know, they're on vacation, and you know, we'll go on tell people take a bit of home with you on the road this summer, you can put the cool 100 app on your home screen and stay in touch with what's going on at home while you're on the road. You know,

Matt Cundill  24:05  
did you want me to cut that audio and send that to production for the for the promo?

Paul Ferguson  24:13  
Yeah, that might have been the greatest moment I know, the greatest moment of clarity I'll have all day.

Matt Cundill  24:19  
Is there an app freeing quinte.ca

Paul Ferguson  24:20  
we're working on that. What we're doing to make a long story longer. We're taking in Quinte, and we're actually reformatting it again, you know, for the fourth time. And we're doing that because then we don't have to rely on an outside service provider if we want to make changes. With that is going to come an app. And again, we are actually quite excited looking forward to having that in Quinte app, because with the challenges of distributing your news on social and such, we figure this is going to be the best way we can go about making it even more readily available for people. Because again, you know, fewer people go to the desktop to read in Quinte, not zero, but fewer. Fewer than what use the phone. So when we have the app a we're going to be able to have people read the news on that app, and then we can put our station streams there as well and help cross pollinate.

Matt Cundill  25:09  
Still early for me to bring this up and speculate, so by the time people listen to this, they'll have a better context of of the issue. But I look at an app like that. And then the ability to push notifications out, you know, at a level. It's not quite at an amber alert level, where we're going to make the phone Bing at night. And then you see what happened in kerwood, Texas. And I like, Where was radio for this? I know it's 146 in the morning when this stuff is coming up. You know, here's an opportunity to drop accidents, local stuff, and there's a real shortage of that in Canada.

Paul Ferguson  25:47  
Maybe I'll lift that clip out of you, because you're absolutely on point with that. With this app, we'll be able to a consumer will be able to enable push notifications, and it will allow us just to again, build our traffic, because we can put day to day news in a push notification. But for the reason you describe absolutely and summer, traffic's always heavy on the 401 or if there's an accident on the 401 and it's Sunday afternoon at four, you know, we can jam a push notification out there

Matt Cundill  26:16  
really quickly. Here's a dumb, crazy theory I'm gonna throw at you. The lack of local news, and I'm talking across Canada, has led to distrust, which is why, in the pandemic, you're going to get some dude go to your website, give you a one star Google review, say you're too far left leaning woke, whatever you know organization, and then you say why, and they can't even tell you why. But that sort of distrust is really is there and and talked about that way because of the lack of local news that is being fed. Do you agree or disagree?

Paul Ferguson  26:51  
I agree because I've, I've lived the experience in a couple of cases where we used to have this commentary on the air. And the gentleman who had put that together for us, it was pretty thought provoking, you know, and it would evoke reaction in people, good, bad and different. And so there was an instance, and I don't even recall what the but it was around pandemic time, and I don't recall what the specific column was about on the air. And so, but I get a phone call from a guy who believed his tax dollars were funding the radio station. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not true. We're privately owned. We earn revenue through advertising. He didn't believe me. He said, I don't know about that. I said, Hey, I've been in this business a long time, and I'm pretty sure. And he challenged me a second time on it believed his tax dollars were funding the radio station, and that we shouldn't be taking a slant one way or the other, you know. And again, it was a commentary that he was talking about, and I said, I'm happy to have any conversation with you. But if we're going to do this, we're going to do this based in fact. And the fact is, we're a privately owned company, and we're not funded by the government. And so to your point, yeah, even in a situation where we have local news, you know the there's there is not in every case, but there are people like this gentleman who I had to convince his tax dollars weren't funding our

Matt Cundill  28:23  
company. Yeah, that's, I mean, there are stories that get floated about talking about, you know, media rescue funds and things like that that were largely designed for newspapers. But when you use the word media, that could be just about anything these days,

Paul Ferguson  28:36  
well, that's right, yeah. And to be fair to anybody, you know, I always treat any listener, whether it's this fella. People only half hear things. You know, they don't necessarily pay attention to all details. So to your point, they hear media rescue funds, and they believe that pertains to everybody. And I don't fault people for not necessarily getting right in the weeds and knowing everything about everything. And so every now and again, you got to take a phone call like that and explain it to somebody.

Matt Cundill  29:05  
You got a good relationship with the labels. It's not like again, it's not like, it's chorus, Rogers and Bell. And you can get like, somebody in Toronto to send you the interview, and you can cut and splice it together. You actually do the interview. You just got to interview Keith Urban recently I

Paul Ferguson  29:18  
did, and I loved every moment of it. And credit to Keith Urban, because he has always, always made himself available. There's been two or three instances where Keith's been available for small town radio, like, like us and country's a bit of a unique beast in that way. But super, super experience. Like, if he's going to do it, you know, he'll find out, okay, who am I going to be talking to and this, you know, type of thing, and the guy's just a gem of a person.

Matt Cundill  29:47  
I love birthdays. I love radio stations that read birthdays on the air. And you guys have, like, on the website, I can send you my birthday, and you guys will read my birthday on the air.

Paul Ferguson  29:57  
We will. And, you know, it seems like it's one of. Those old school radio isms, you know? And the reality is, it's still a big deal to people, especially kids, to hear their birthday on the radio. And, you know, we sit and we bang our heads against the wall trying to figure out, how do we make radio cool for young people. Don't give up on stuff like that. For a little kid, seven years old, you know, we need mom and dad's help to make sure they're in front of the radio and the whole thing, and that's probably mom and dad sent it in. So they'll, they'll do their part. That same little bit of magic a kid here on their birthday on the radio is the same magic you and I might have felt when we were kids and got into radio. And so again, it goes back to, let's not sharpen the knife that we're going to put in our own back by eliminating that experience for a kid. And if we want young people engaged in radio, that's pretty good way to start. And you know, there's a fella did our morning show. He retired a year ago. He was fabulous at it. And how do you make something like birthdays enjoyable for the rest of your cume whose name's not on that piece of paper? So they go through the local birthdays and that type of thing, and everybody's day is made. But then on the celebrity birthday side, the way they would play the game is the co host would give him a descriptor of the celebrity whose birthday it was, and he had to try to figure out who it was. And so all of a sudden, birthdays became the ultimate play along game. Even I on the inside, if I were listening to our station in the Hortons drive through, I'm trying to figure out who those celebrities are whose birthday and so there are ways to take what might seem as a old and tried radio bit and still breathe life into

Matt Cundill  31:43  
it. No, it was, what big contest was the 100 back in the day? Was the, was the birthday contest that sort of vaulted them into number one in New York. Yeah, yeah. Also about birthdays, what we have today, which we didn't have 20 years ago, and that's the ability to film the person listening to the birthday announcement and filming and capturing the reaction for social and getting, you know, some extension out of that now you've got the listeners doing your social for you. Oh,

Paul Ferguson  32:14  
gosh, yeah. And I mean that that's a great idea. I'd be a liar if I said that. We've sat around a table, and even I might steal that, because it's no it's a really good idea. And you're right, like, you know, we kind of like to think of certain elements of our product in a Wikipedia way. It can be user fed, you know, and you can be a part of this. And that's a great example of how

Matt Cundill  32:34  
we've been talking a little bit on this show about government and regulation and radio. And I know a lot of people find it boring, especially to Americans who are like, what's going on up there? But I think you're in a good position here, because you deal with both, especially country, but as well, you also deal with with the with the more contemporary side. To sort of see how this has evolved, you started programming music back in the 90s, when it was pretty cut and dried. How it worked, we would play the record, the listener would listen to the record or the song on the radio, and then go and buy the album, and hopefully buy tickets to the concert as well. It was a wonderful cycle. Yeah, sure was. And then Napster came along, and then the the internet took over. And, you know, right around things began to really, really change. Probably 2009 or 10, when Canadian artists who largely successful, would go find other places to record and the current system that you're dealing with now. So tell me yours to somebody who punches in the music every day, who programs it, who sees it, who deals in the metadata of M, A, P, L, that's the maple system. You need two out of the four of those to qualify as can come. What are some of the things you'd just like to see happen for the future.

Paul Ferguson  33:42  
What I would love having just had one of our stations go through a CRTC review, performance review, I would love, even if we continue to work on what the model looks like for Canadian content help us with the administrative burden, because what happened is, we got the note you have two weeks to submit your package. Everything I do to help, you, know, create the product, make the product better. All of that had to go on the shelf for two weeks because I spent day and night getting everything in order to submit the package the way the commission would like to have it submitted. And those are the rules, and that's what we had to do. And I'll go so far as to say, hey, we're happy to provide it, but we would love it if the administrative burden were more streamlined. I think technology could help us on that. For example, media base logs, most radio stations in this country, what they do 24 hours a day? Can we not somehow use that service to help provide the commission with what it needs? You know, and you've probably heard it a million times, the burden falls on radio to identify what's Canadian and what's not. There's not a database that exists, and our results came back pretty good. How? Ever there was a song that they challenged, not that it wasn't Canadian. They said we don't have sufficient evidence that it is Canadian on file. And so now I've got to spend more time trying to prove that love is fire by the Parachute Club is indeed a Canadian song. And so and I thought, I can't be the first person who's submitted that song on an audit as having played on our station. So how does that not exist somewhere?

Matt Cundill  35:30  
Can we not get Lorraine sagato on the phone?

Paul Ferguson  35:33  
That's what another person suggested. I might

Matt Cundill  35:38  
have been having beers with that person at one point.

Paul Ferguson  35:42  
But you know, so what I would love in the short term is if that administrative burden were streamlined. I don't think you know if, again, we want Canadian radio to be a part of Canadian culture and to provide a service. Two weeks of my time was not spent providing that service. It was, you know, answering to that call. So it's a big challenge, and that's top of mind for me, because I just that, that I just lived, yeah,

Matt Cundill  36:10  
so metadata, right? So you mentioned media base, and I think that's a great tool. I mean, if we had a central database where the metadata was properly input at the Music level and the artist level, and you check off your mapl and whatnot, and then that was a running live count through media base that you could see whether you're tracking a header behind this feels very easy to me. It really, this feels like a very 2006 solution, and here we are, nearly 2026 and we're just kind of talking and figuring it out now, but it's see, it seems really easy. And if I feel I could write the code for this, oh

Paul Ferguson  36:56  
my gosh, you probably make a lot of dough. But you're right. I think the answer, in part, is nothing's without its challenges. You know? I mean, if media base has a reporting issue or a transmission issue or a receiving issue, whatever it happens to be, nothing's perfect. I understand that, but certainly it seems like that's a piece of the answer right under our nose.

Matt Cundill  37:17  
I would actually start to like to put forward that the CBC should be in charge of that. Oh, oh, all right, yeah, I'd be open to hear that conversation. Why not? Yeah, CBC is a, it's public broadcaster. We're making a music hub. And, you know, let's, let's all drive it through. There interesting theory. Thank you. That's what I'm here for,

Paul Ferguson  37:41  
not in a host of other things.

Matt Cundill  37:45  
Have you thought about podcast as a role for your company and how you would work that we

Paul Ferguson  37:49  
have? There's a couple of employees here, a couple of girls that just have a great give and go together. They're very tight. They work together in our digital apartment. They have a podcast that they started a couple of years ago, it's called Babes of Quinte. And at first you might think that they've labeled themselves the babes of Quinte, but in fact, the name of the brand was meant to reflect people in Quinte. Anybody can be a babe, and it was. It's an endearing term for the people that they have, and what they really do a great job of is, on a weekly basis, they'll pull somebody in and help that person tell their story, because it's amazing. You could pull anybody off the street, everybody's got a story. And so you know a lot of community leaders and people of note, business, small business people, people from all walks of lives, they'll pull in and share their story. And so they've done that with success, and you know, it's become a very sought after product in the community. And you talked earlier about other ways that we can generate revenue. You know, that one, albeit it's a local podcast, doesn't necessarily have the national scale. We've had advertising interest in that. So to answer the question, we are in that space, I think there's more for us to do in that space. But you know, again, we're a small but mighty team, and you know better than anybody with this podcast, which is wildly successful, that a lot of work goes into that, and so we see more of it in the future, but that's where we are with that right now. And those they do a really good job

Matt Cundill  39:25  
of that. Yeah, we're even discovering now that having numbers at a national scale is not enough to get you some you know, everybody paid for on the team so well.

Paul Ferguson  39:34  
And that's, you know, I've heard it said, whether it's mathematically correct or not, that 3% of the podcasts out there make 97% of the revenue. And so you know that that is absolutely a challenge. You can put a great product out there, but you know, finding the caramel secret of making the dough at that is the challenge.

Matt Cundill  39:56  
Paul, this has been so much fun, I feel like I want to come back and work for you. Oh

Paul Ferguson  40:00  
my gosh, careful what you wish for. I appreciate the invitation, because when I open up broadcast dialog every week, I love reading the dialog. It's a it's the day before Friday. I know the weekend's coming when I see broadcast dialog in my inbox. I love that. But I always love going for the sound off podcast. And what I see sometimes, and I've always been curious, is that I'll see on social media, you'll be live with somebody, and I'll bump in, you know? And I'll kind of jump in and see what you're up to live too. Yeah, consume

Matt Cundill  40:29  
this by video. You mean, right? Yeah. Who's gonna watch two bald guys talking about radio for like, 45

Paul Ferguson  40:36  
minutes? That's a great question. Other bald people who feel a sense of comfort with two others around. No, I really appreciate this. I enjoy hearing the podcast. And when you invited me on, you know, I appreciated that. And it's nice to kind of, you know, because I have some people ask me about this radio market, often for the reasons you did as well. You know, it's kind of unique, maybe us in Thunder Bay, where you've got two local operators kind of doing their thing. And our challenges are unique, but the opportunities are also still unique,

Matt Cundill  41:07  
and a lot of people are only going to listen to it if they're driving up and down the 401. Paul, thanks so

Paul Ferguson  41:12  
much. I appreciate it. And again, as Bill sympathizers, you know, we spend a lot of time in a particular group chat, either celebrating or commiserating, and so it's nice to be a part of this. Thanks, Matt go bills. Go bills, God bless. What was the line? Be good? Do good? God bless. Go bills. The sound

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  41:31  
off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan sirminsky, edited by Taylor McLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.