In an unusual — even odd — video shared with company employees in January, Cumulus Media president/CEO Mary Berner introduced a cartoon featuring a new company mascot — a wolf named Sulu — and spoke candidly about Cumulus’ fortunes. The video ends with a wacky photo montage of Berner posing with a life-size Sulu statue, showing she’s not afraid to get goofy in the interest of motivating her team.
In one of the video’s more straightforward segments, Berner admits the company “did underperform [in 2016] versus other radio companies,” and says, “While we came very close, we didn’t make our 2016 budget.” She then laid out her goals for 2017, calling it “the year where the rubber meets the road in our turnaround.”
Immediately after taking the helm of the then-badly struggling Cumulus in late 2015, Berner signaled that she planned to run a leaner operation by selling the company jet, following that up with a popular move to decentralize programming and return music decisions to the hands of local programmers. But while many Cumulus stations enjoyed ratings increases in 2016 over the prior year, there is still plenty of work to be done to make Cumulus robust. With a total of 447 stations in 90 markets (Berner has visited 84 of them since taking the job), Cumulus is the second-largest radio company in the United States. Its syndication arm, Westwood One, serves more than 8,200 affiliates.
Berner arrived at Cumulus with a strong background in print publishing, including executive stints at Glamour, TV Guide, Fairchild Publications and the Association of Magazine Media. She was the only radio executive to make The Hollywood Reporter’s 2016 list of most powerful female execs in entertainment, and in February she doubled down by landing a spot on Billboard’s Power 100 list. She jokes that nobody who knows her would call her “cool.” But everyone who has watched her start turning around Cumulus’ fortunes would call her “savvy.”
What has been the biggest surprise for you about the radio industry?
What’s surprising was how little difference there is [to magazine publishing. Both have] pretty straightforward principles. You serve your listener or reader ... Focus there, and everything else follows from that.
Why did you decide to decentralize programming?
Four days before I started [the job], I sent a survey to all the employees. They’d never been asked what they thought before. We have 6,000 employees, and almost two-thirds of them responded within three days. I sat there and read them all, and they, essentially, gave me the answer. What everyone said was, “You’ve got to put the authority back into the local markets. They know their listener stats” ... It was literally like the road map was in front of me. So we did it.
What did you do, exactly?
We focused in on three strategies: one was culture, one was ratings and one was what we called “operational blocking and tackling”: just fixing all the roadblocks that get in your way of getting stuff done. On the culture part of it, I went to [company headquarters in] Atlanta, pulled all the people that reported to me into a room and [strategized]. We came up with four [core values]: focused, collaborative, responsible and empowered. They all looked at me like, “This is the biggest waste of time.”
Like, “Here’s the lady with the acronyms,” right?
Seriously. I think they’ll tell you that now. They were like, “Oh, dear God.”
But things started to change after that.
If we’re going to be focused, collaborative, engaged and responsible, then [we] have to [also] be responsive and respectful. So, I committed to a 48-hour turnaround response time to all employees, and then I did it. You can’t talk about it; you’ve got to live it. So [when] they email me and say, “It takes 15 phone calls and 40 emails to get a response from this department,” you fix that pretty quickly. [It’s] one call from me saying, “That’s not OK.”
You groaned a little when I said the industry was watching your turnaround with great interest.
I did, because ... it’s very, very difficult to turn a company around. Often, it’s just better to fly under the radar. However, one of the biggest material changes that I’ve seen is that we can not only recruit people [now], but people are coming to us. We’ve lost a lot of employees that we didn’t want to lose over the years, I’m told. We hired a lot of people back. They want to come back.
Looking back on your first year-plus on the job, what are the professional accomplishments you’re most proud of?
There’s probably two. One is our ratings performance. [After] four straight years’ decline, we posted in our PPM markets an almost 17 percent increase [in 2016]. I’m enormously proud of that. Do I take credit for it? Absolutely not. What I take credit for is our structure, where the local markets can make decisions with support from the center, not dictating from the center. We gave them the authority and the accountability. We set up a centralized resource, called the office of programming, where they can get all sorts of support. Those that don’t want it don’t have to take it. Along with that, we put a ton of rigor around tracking what the results were, too. So with authority comes accountability.
What is the other thing you’re proud of?
The culture changes.
The national NASH country brand, implemented before you arrived, was controversial because some stations with strong local brands were forced to adopt it. Under your watch, we’ve seen a few stations quietly returning to their previous brands. Will there be more of that?
We’re very committed to the national brand. [On] a handful — I mean literally a handful — of heritage, iconic stations, we dialed that back.
Despite your publishing background, you very quickly flipped Cumulus’ NASH Country Weekly from print to web only. Why?
We took a back step and said, “What is its purpose?” Its purpose was to provide timely, up-to-date, interesting, insightful news to the industry and to country music enthusiasts. Doing that in a print vehicle is kind of an oxymoron. Frankly, it was too much work for too little payoff. We could do it online and reach more people [as Nash Country Daily]. So, that’s what we did.
What are the things that keep you up at night?
We have to turn this around really quickly. It’s “will we have enough time?” That worries me.
How do you relieve the stress of the job?
I run, and run ... I play — and sing — [the Hamilton soundtrack] when I run. As much as my running partners also love and admire this masterpiece, I suspect they are growing weary of my “cover.”