KGAY is a lifestyle, but it doesn't matter if you're 18 or 80. KGAY is the gay radio station, and it's playing, hopefully, the music that you like, a lot of the music that you remember, and then, from that basic thing, then comes the magic.
Welcome to BRANDwidth On Demand, your guide to rebooting radio.
The businesses that we do partner with they are getting great success from the radio station. That's it. I mean, the thing is the advertisers do get results from the station and people are all the time going into our advertisers and saying, I heard this on KGAY.
BRANDwidth On Demand, rebooting radio with a different take on all radio can be now your guides through the media morphosis. David Martin. And author of the book, BRANDwidth, media branding coach, Kipper McGee.
Today, in a special celebration of LGBTQ plus pride month, BRANDwidth On Demand is honored to feature two key figures behind a station whose name says it all. KGAY. K G A Y. a station who embodies pride and inclusivity. Brad Fuhr, the visionary owner of KGAY, began his illustrious career at just 15. Significant roles at various radio stations and broadcast companies led to MS Interactive. Brad has consistently championed LGBTQ plus media.
In 2013, he founded BRANDwidth On Demand, further integrating and uplifting community voices. Chris Shebel, KGAY's Program Director, brings extensive experience from top markets including Chicago, Phoenix, and Portland. He pioneered dance hits format nationwide. Together, they're transforming KGAY into a vibrant, inclusive community hub for the Coachella Valley and beyond. From KGAY Radio in Palm Springs, BRANDwidth On Demand proudly welcomes Brad Fuhr and Chris Shebel.
So I got to ask, and I think I'll throw this to Brad first, but Chris, chime in what inspired you guys to integrate radio with digital content through the BRANDwidth On Demand and how has this impacted your audience engagement?
Well, I'll take that question first because I had BRANDwidth On Demand for a number of years. I was a little sidelined from radio. I was teaching radio out here at College of the Desert, but I was not doing anything actively in radio and I was missing it. And I got wind of a new nonprofit starting up in the community where they were going to take a commercial radio frequency and start a Nonprofit organization with an LGBTQ plus radio station.
Unfortunately this coincided almost exactly with when odyssey launched channel Q, which was their LGBTQ offering. They, I believe that the airwaves just prior to when KGAY launched. Is that correct? About three weeks, three weeks or so. Yeah. Yeah. And uh, I started getting all of the great people that I know together and Chris Shebel was here and I think you were here in Palm Springs at that time, were you not? I was.
Yeah. So we got you involved in the board and we started architecting the programming for KGAY. And the nonprofit piece of it. Unfortunately, did not survive. And after about a year of running this as a kind of a hybrid for profit nonprofit with Chris at the helm and programming, and I was managing the station the owners that were funding this decided they wanted to go into a different direction. And so at that point, after a year of.
and really a great integration between BRANDwidth On Demand and KGAY Radio. They decided that they would take it a different direction, and Chris and I and the whole team basically left the station. But in that time, we had a chance to experiment with this integration of radio and Gay Desert Guide from a sales standpoint, and of course we know that radio is a great driver of website traffic, so it was a no brainer to have KGAY radio driving traffic over to Gay Desert Guide.
What we did in a sales effort was try to package everything together so that an advertiser who was already on Gay Desert Guide could add a certain number of spots per week in packages and integrate those two things together. And it worked. I thought fairly well. I don't think they thought it was moving fast enough. That's when they pulled the plug. We sat out COVID, which ended up being a blessing in disguise that we had these two years off.
And then I came back and purchased the station from one of the two owners who was very friendly to us. And that's when we were able to kind of reenvision this and and get it to where we really wanted it to be. Chris, I'll let you take it from there.
Uh, you know, anytime that you launch a radio format, you, the old rule used to be one year in a book market, and then we got PPM. It's like, Oh, now you can tell in six months. No, now you can tell in five weeks. But it's not true. It, it takes a long time to build a brand. Uh, the idea of a gay radio station was. Pretty revolutionary, when we were like, okay, we're going to do KGAY when KGAY went on the air, you'd walk around town. If you go, have you heard this?
You, what are they doing on the radio? I think it brought people back into radio as a destination. And then the combination with BRANDwidth On Demand, of course, because that was already an established brand. It gave us the opportunity to just take both of those platforms and make them grow. But like Brad was saying, the growth didn't happen the way they wanted or whatever. And, so we were just like, okay, I'm old, I'm semi retired. I don't know. I'll be happy to just like lay by the pool.
And so we set it out for a little bit. And. The good news is one of the owners became a very good friend and even when I left, he's like, I wish you hadn't left, you know, he's very nice and one of his dreams was that he wanted to sell the radio station. That's why they started the nonprofit. He wanted to turn the radio station into a gay radio station and run by members of the gay community because he really felt. It may be part of a legacy thing. I don't know.
But he felt that, in this particular community that would be the right thing to do. And so here we are.
And his name is Greg Smith. He would not mind us, of course, using his name. And he sold me the radio station at a very, I thought, a very fair price. He did. AM station with an FM translator and the translator at a, what, 175 Watts is probably the most successful translator in the United States in terms of ratings and revenue.
We're very fortunate. Palm Springs is very, very unique. It's extremely over radioed also because of this, but we're in this valley surrounded by mountains. And so the LA signals, the San Diego signals, all of the big ones. I can't get over the mountains. So we basically have a full spectrum here. But because we're also enclosed and we don't have tall buildings, I think our tallest building is what four stories now, or is it four stories?
Yeah.
We don't have multi path, so a translator it, it worked. We weren't sure, frankly, what was going to happen, but when we saw the first ratings, when we subscribed, it's like, We're doing this with a hundred seventy five watts and now we have another signal too. So we're even in a better situation now.
Well, can you guys share your vision for the future of KGAY and its role in the LGBTQ plus community in Palm Springs and beyond? I mean, how might that differ from a mass market station? What elements are the same? Which ones are different?
I think from the radio standpoint, a lot of the elements are the same. We're primarily a music radio station. Our format is hard for some people to figure out because we play disco to death. We're talking 50, 60 years worth of music now that we integrate every hour. Because the radio station is not designed, you know, most of my programming experience has been, all right, we want to go to get a 25, 54 women. Okay. What do you really want?
And then they break it down from there and you get narrower and narrower to try and own a cell. KGAY is just the opposite. KGAY is a lifestyle, and it doesn't matter if you're 18 or 80, KGAY is the gay radio station and it's playing... hopefully the music that you like a lot of the music that you remember. And then from that basic thing, this is what the structure is, then comes the magic and that's the, I believe the, the people in the the commitment to the community. Our morning show.
If I was going to be doing it in LA, I probably would do a lot of different things. than, Hey, we're going to talk to so and so today about, the theater production" or whatever. But here we do that here. KGAY is a local radio station geared to the gay community, but. Not even just the gay community anymore.
Especially since we put on the second signal, things on Facebook and stuff like, so from women in particular, in the area that we never conserved, like I found this great radio station and they don't care that it's gay.
Yeah they kind of like to get in on what we're doing. They're listening in right on the party line. You know, And, your question about, a national brand or what else would we do with this? I would love to have a second, literally streaming only channel of KGAY that we could send across the world. Now we do have people listening all over the world. We've opened up our streaming. I have extremely high costs for streaming.
But that is, actually underwritten by the Bureau of Tourism, which is fantastic. But, I think if we had our druthers, we would have a second brand that could be more music focused and more, probably more limited in our commercials. And something that could still be a brand extension of, I think,
uh, yeah. KGAY is it's important to keep in mind that. KGAY really is now like a national brand. You go anywhere there's gay people in the U. S., people know about KGAY. We have people who listen every day. They stream more than listen to any of their local radio. And that's because it's for their community. And when you go from, Being like the editorial people, the content people, we do see now that part of our job is to talk to the, to people.
We reach people that, live in these states where, they're starting to feel afraid to leave their house. And we are a lifeline. And so part of our duty is, and it's, some consulting guys go, Oh, that's bad radio. They're talking for a minute we talk for a minute because it's part of our job is not just to play songs, but to tell the people listening what's going on in this world, because we may be the only place that's going to tell them what's happening for our community. Right.
So, Chris, you have worked a lot of formats, a lot of markets tru dat!.
And you talked a little bit about, how that fits in with the community. Can you walk us through just a basic formatic hour? Or is there no such thing? Well, I'm sure there is, cause I scheduled the music, you know, we, but I, every hour is a balanced out an hour of all the different genres. And it's also based on a little bit on how we live.
Like you'll hear more of the disco classics, for example, or earlier in the day than you will at 10 o'clock at night, cause we know that the audience for that, like most people, my age are in bed. But we also from day one wanted KGAY to always reflect current stuff too. We play current songs and now that we're a Mediabase reporter, everybody wants to get their songs on, but you know, we can't do them all, not every week, but so the music is all structured out.
And it's, you know, everything is balanced based on era and the usual stuff. What kind of, is it a pop song? Is it an alt song? You know, cause even in dance there are those, those subcategories and then we've got Harry Legg does our imaging and, Harry has got the perfect sound for this format. And when we can write some more edgy ones, Harry can even make them sound edgier, which we like. And then we have a staff of mixers that do a retro show every day at noon, which does real well for us.
John Taylor, who does mornings is the Gayborhood is what we call it. Call it his Gayborhood, because I say he's the mayor of arenas, which is the big street here where all the bars are and stuff, because everybody knows John and, uh, we we don't tell him to shut up. We tell him to when you talk to people, get to the main points and keep it entertaining and that's his job.
And so basically it's a radio station, but it's a radio station designed for a specific group of people, welcoming people from outside of the group, but we're never. Not going to be who we primarily are.
You folks have certainly embraced and part of your magic here is embracing your community. Like the arts community has to love you guys, right? I mean, uh, that's got to be an amazing relationship. There has the community embraced you back. Are you being financially supported by the community?
Oh, yes. I mean, I can speak to that the revenue has literally doubled year over year. The last couple of years, we came out of covid and, had some, then we basically doubled that first year that we owned it. We took it over in August and 2022 was a pretty good year. And then 2023, we doubled from there and we're really on track to, to do well. Not only the LGBTQ owned businesses are supporting us, but, there's many that are allies. There are some businesses that I would not take money from.
I know that there are some businesses that are not supportive of us. We try not to look at it in black and white political terms, but there are some businesses that just, we wouldn't want to take their money because we don't believe they would be supportive of us. It would be more of a, they're opportunistic and we don't want that. So the businesses that we do partner with they are getting great success from the radio station. That's it.
I mean, the thing is the advertisers do get results from the station and people are all the time going into our advertisers and saying, I heard this on KGAY. we've got a couple of salespeople that write incredible copy. Paul Saliano, who has been in radio for years. He made the jump from programming to sales, and he has done just a fantastic job in making sure that the spots are as engaging as the programming is.
I think part of the challenge with when you do, especially when you launch a radio station is, uh, where are the revenue streams going to come from? And I think we were very fortunate because Brad was already here, and he's been doing non traditional media for, with Gay Desert Guide a few years. So when we put it on we didn't have to go in and go, hi, we're this brand new radio station that you know nothing about and nothing about the people behind us. And we hope you like us. We already had.
People that knew the product of Gay Desert Guide so then it came teaching them the value of radio and. An active audience. It's so much easier. Well, you guys know, I remember back in the old days of top 40, when everybody would listen to the radio and you would go and go, you'd do a bit and a hundred people would show up and the advertiser, even if they didn't, if they were like only looking at ratings, might go like, Oh, geez. I may have to rethink that.
And we got away from that in radio in general, because we don't have people to go out there and do that anymore. And, we also philosophically, some think that none of that matters, but we still think it does. And it certainly helps our sales effort,
So speaking of sales, can you share with us without having to kill us, uh, any recent initiatives or partnerships or anything that really contributed to KGAY's growth and success?
Well, I, mentioned briefly the fact that Visit Palm Springs has been a great supporter of ours and even to the point where they funded the streaming costs because the those costs for streaming are just incredible when you're doing, well north of a million streams per per month you have to pay thousands and thousands of dollars. So that's been helpful. We work with Palm Springs International Airport.
We're doing a big promotion with one of the LGBT travel companies right now with the Chris's, song of the day contest, which is a tried and true radio winner, and we tied that back to the airport providing airfare and this great cruise in Europe this summer. The response to those kinds of things has been very good. We've got a great sales team and you know, I package sell. We make this very simple. There are three packages that an advertiser can buy.
It's a kind of a saturation package, a medium package of about 25 spots per week, and then a branding plan, which is like three spots a day, one prime, one evening, one overnight. And you know, the, the. It's easy for an advertiser to understand that. I think we've made radio way too complicated to buy, and I really discovered this when we first put KGAY on the air, but now that formula works very well, tried and true, an agency is going to buy differently, slightly differently.
We don't get a lot of agency business, but in this case, an advertiser gets it and they get. Results from it
and it doesn't hurt that many of them. Love the radio station person.
We're with the KGAY guys, Brad Fuhr and Chris Shebel. Is there a guest or topic you'd love for us to feature? Well, let us know. Email your suggestions to show@brandwithondemand.com or connect with us on social Brad with Plus on Instagram, Facebook, and X. That's brand with plus PLUS brand with. Plus,
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Coming up, we asked Brad Fuhr, and Chris Shiebel for their tips on creating niche programming, including some things they've learned.
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Guys, what advice would you give to other radio managers and owners looking to create a successful niche station that serves a really specific community like you've done so well?
Well, Chris and I are both looking at each other on that one.
You guys made a rather bold move here. you have to admit, mean, take, take credit for this bold move. I mean, it really is.
It is bold, but it is not something that was untested. I did similar formats to this in the suburbs of Chicago, where, you'd be lucky to get a one share. And all of a sudden we're getting one fives and people are like, Oh, this is a really cool radio station we did it, we did it in San Francisco and a few other markets. So there is some variation was on KTU for years.
So I think the advice that MusicmasterI guess I would give is the first thing you've got to understand if you want to do this kind of a format or some other variation for different groups is even if you're a subscriber to the ratings screw it. Because the ratings is not designed for creativity. It's not designed for passion.
It's designed, especially in PPM markets for, those people that are carrying the thing that they don't even know what it's for, except that they maybe are going to get a gift card You have to go in and you have to make the emotional commitment to the format.
And then you have to be sure to hire people that believe in the mission, because a lot of people in radio, not so much anymore because there's not many left, but you know, back in the day, there was like the whole class of people that would jump from station to station. The station wasn't the mission, their performance was the mission. Here, it's your performance is great, but you know, the radio station is what matters to this community and you're part of it becomes your performance.
And, it's hard to replicate something like this for other niches. I was thinking about this question earlier. Yeah. And I have trouble under, maybe Spanish language, I think probably has some of this, certainly some of the religious stations, Chris, to your point about passion and things like that and belief. I think they can do that, but I think that the issue really. For radio as a whole, we've just gotten boring and we've gotten formulaic with our radio programming.
There's really nothing terribly new and exciting on the radio. And so when something like KGAY comes along, it makes a big impact because it is so different and so unique. And, I bought another station from Audacy in fact, we bought the station that had channel Q and took it to the MeTV FM format, and that's a, Very broad format tied back to the TV channel. there are some parallels between the two radio stations and the two do compliment each other from a sales standpoint.
Yeah. I mean, it's all about passion. I learned that in Chicago when we put the Kiss station on out in Arlington Heights and we're doing top 40 comes back to Chicago and most of the city. You couldn't hear it, but man, where you could people love that radio station. And I and that was the, yeah, I mean, it was a lesson in, you can be the big guy and you can follow the formula. And you can be successful. Or you can take some risks and maybe you're going to have just as much success.
And then when Clear Channel made their Kiss and took our Kiss away, that's when we put on Energy, which was just was actually a 10 minute conversation. It was me and Steve Davis, who was working with Guy and Steve as our consultants and, uh, we're in the market manager's office with the head of our company in LA, and Then we're like, what are we going to do? Because they're going to, they told us they're taking the format. They're also taking our name because they have it copyrighted.
So, you know, do we really want to be top 40? And so we're like, Oh, what are you doing? And I just said, we could try dance.
Oh yeah. No, I remember that. No, they did.
And a couple of people are gonna be like, what? And the head of the company, and this is where it's important that leaders understand when to take risks. The head of the company said what dance you mean? Like I said, you know, kind of like club music, but not what people think it is of the thumper, thumper, thumper, eight minute songs. These are hit records that all have this dancy rhythmic feel. He's like, Oh, that sounds like fun. Why did you do that? And that was the end.
Boom. We changed our format because, because he said, do it. So take risks. Our thanks to Brad Fuhr and Chris Shebel. Links to their website and more all in the show notes. Just scroll down on your phone or find it at brandwithondemand. com.
As always, special thanks to our exec producer, Cindy Huber, who put this all together. And to Hannah B,, our associate producer for booking. Speaking of which coming up next
Hello boys and girls. It's Mike McVay here Inviting you to discover the secrets of innovative marketing We're going to show you how to leverage all your media platforms and make your media brands stand out in a crowded mediascape It's all next time on BRANDwidth on Demand.
That's a wrap. Kipper. It's time to reinvent your content or is it? That's the topic of this week's one minute Martinizing. Find it in the show notes at BRANDwidth On Demand.com. I'm Dave Martin.
And I'm Kipper McGee. Oh, youBRANDwidthst. Be Wide!.