Once again, the Jacobs Media team is headed back to Hollywood for the Worldwide Radio Summit. Every year, All Access and A&R Worldwide team up to host this gathering of radio professionals from around the globe. It’s become an annual tradition for our founder, Fred Jacobs, to reveal the finding from our latest Techsurvey, the radio industry’s largest online survey, at the summit. Over the last decade and a half, we’ve tracked how radio users use new technologies. We saw them abandon landlines, adopt social media, and start streaming. This year, among other things, Fred will take a close look at how radio listeners are using podcasts, smart speakers, connected cars, and voice commands.
While Fred has been onstage, I have spent the last five years at the summit hanging out in the lobby, where I record a series of interviews for the Worldwide Radio Summit podcast. This year will be no different. Every year, I have candid conversations with a cross-section of radio broadcasting professionals. I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to CEOs, on-air talent, consultants, digital strategists, voiceover artists, production directors, and more.
These discussions are always one of the highlights of my year, because I love talking shop with talented people and hearing their points of view. More than anything, these conversations remind me why I got into radio in the first place, and why I still find it so interesting to this day.
Four years ago, when I first started recording interviews for this podcast, I was not yet working for Jacobs Media. In fact, even though I had been a client of Jacobs Media during my tenures at KNDD in Seattle and KPNT in St. Louis, I had never met Fred before. Fred and I met for the first time when we sat down for an interview for this podcast. A few weeks later, when Lori Lewis announced that she was headed to Cumulus, Fred hired me as Jacobs Media’s Digital Dot Connector. To this day, I like to joke that I got the job by interviewing him. You can hear that conversation with Fred here.
At the end of almost every interview, I ask my guest to make a prediction: “In five years, what do you think we will be talking about at the Worldwide Radio Summit?” Next year, it will be five years since the first round of guests made their predictions. It will be interesting to go back and listen, and see how well the predictions from Fred, Jeff Smulyan, Bubba the Love Sponge, Norm Pattiz, and more hold up.
If you’re also headed out to Hollywood this week, you can get into the spirit of the event by listening to my podcast. And if you’re not attending this year, this is the next best thing.
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