Hubbard Radio is amping up its podcast portfolio under John Goforth, a veteran of podcast and radio, who joined as VP/GM of Podcasts in August. Digital accounts for 30% of revenue at Hubbard, which owns 54 radio stations in nine markets, as well as the digital marketing agency 2060 Digital and 14 television stations. It is a return to work at a broadcaster for Goforth, who most recently served as Chief Revenue Officer for Magellan AI.
Podcast News Daily caught up with Goforth to talk about his new role at Hubbard. Calling it the third leg of Hubbard’s three-legged stool, Goforth reveals the company’s ambitious podcast plans, spanning both local and national shows. He also discusses getting radio talent to produce more audio content, video strategies, AI, and how Skor North became more profitable as a podcast network than it ever was as a radio station.
PND: Why return to a traditional media company?
Goforth: I don’t know that I would have returned to any traditional media company. I also really enjoy building things, and we’ve got something to build over here. Hubbard has already proven a track record of being innovative and trying to, for lack of a better euphemism, skate to where the puck is going in the form of 2060 Digital. Ten years ago, that didn’t exist, and now it makes up a nice portion of revenue for the company and that shows they’re willing to be innovative, rather than being stuck in old-guard ways that I think a lot of traditional media companies are. That willingness to evolve was really important to me.
PND: Hubbard is 100 years old, but maybe they’re not so ‘traditional’ after all.
Goforth: If you look at Hubbard, there’s a long history of being forward-thinking and being ahead of the game, from an evolution perspective. The first remote broadcast in the U.S. was our founderStanley E. Hubbard at a golf course. It looks like the broadcast equipment was in a baby carriage, but it was the first remote broadcast in radio. And fast forward, and the company launched the satellite for what eventually wound up becoming DirecTV. My point is, there are milestones throughout the course of its 101 years that have just shown me that it’s a forward-thinking company that’s always trying to evolve.
PND: Your decision to join Hubbard must mean podcasting is going to be a bigger part of the plan.
Goforth: I like the analogy of a three-legged bar stool. The first leg is terrestrial radio and everything that goes with that. The second leg is 2060 Digital. And the third leg will be podcasts. Just like 2060 Digital operates as its own entity under the Hubbard umbrella, now so do podcasts. We obviously work a lot more closely with the radio group from a content perspective, but it is the third leg of the stool.
PND: How have you spent your first few months?
Goforth: I’ve spent a majority of my time visiting the markets and understanding what we’re doing in each market. Hubbard has traditionally been a market-led company, and so unlike other broadcasters, where everything is top down, that means that markets are doing amazing things. And so I’ve visited these markets and understand the idiosyncrasies of each.
PND: Where are you on building out your team?
Goforth: We’re building the team right now at the corporate level. We’ve got a handful of folks. And, of course, in each market we have, hosts and program directors that all have their fingers on it. I interact with all of them every day. So you might say we’ve got a team of hundreds across the country. And then we’re building out further the national team as this becomes more of a concerted effort.
PND: Hubbard owns 14 television stations. Will that help with podcast video?
Goforth: It’s too early to speak to that. But what I can tell you is that we certainly do believe in video and already have a video strategy for many of our shows. Our Minnesota Vikings podcast Purple Daily does a great show and its views are astronomical. So we see the blurring of the lines between video and podcast, and we’re trying to embrace that. I believe every podcast should have a video strategy.
PND: Does that mean all shows will also be on YouTube?
Goforth: It just depends on what that strategy should be, based on the content. Not every podcast should just take the full episode and just throw it on YouTube. It might just be a promotional vehicle trying to get them to your RSS feed. For others, it might make sense to put the whole show on YouTube. Every podcast is a snowflake, as it goes for its video strategy. But overall, every podcast should have a video strategy.
PND: With all that radio content, is Hubbard’s bigger opportunity with time-shifted content or original shows?
Goforth: It’s all the above. Time-shifted content can’t be talked about enough. The podcast industry has done a bad job of talking about it. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard salespeople talking to advertisers and agencies and go, ‘Oh, that’s just time-shifted content. Oh, that’s just a radio rebroadcast.’ The reality is that some of these hosts have the most fervent fans in the world, and they’re going to go find that content. They’re platform agnostic. If I’m a fan of [rock KUPD Phoenix morning host] John Holmberg, and he’s telling me about a mattress or a nutritional supplement, it’s just like if I were a fan of Joe Rogan and he were telling me about them. There is no difference. That is the person I am choosing to dedicate my time to.
PND: That can be tough for some music formatted stations.
Goforth: It doesn’t fit every time. There are certainly music-heavy shows that don’t do a ton of chatter and trying to piece together two-minute clips into a coherent podcast is, needless to say, challenging. But I encourage all of our stations to think about it in a different way. We’re an audio company. We have the most amazing audio talent in the world, and they should be creating more audio. It may be easier to just sit in the studio for an extra half hour and talk a little bit more about a topic of the day or take one of your favorite segments and turn it from a three-minute segment to a 30-minute segment. And the other advantage you have to that is you don’t necessarily have to keep it local to the market. If it’s a funny topic, it could be a national type of podcast. It depends on the talent, topic, and the genre. I’m also a big believer in using folks that are inside our four walls to do other things. And we are actively pursuing podcasts that already exist, that aren’t part of our stable shows.
PND: With originals, will Hubbard focus more on local shows or podcasts that have global appeal?
Goforth: Both are necessary. Local and regional advertisers want to geotarget, but there aren’t enough impressions there. The answer to that is local content for local advertisers and regional advertisers. The future of podcast is unlocking that and combining it with national. Look at radio. There’s wonderful national radio shows. There are more wonderful local radio shows. Taking that same approach in the podcast space, where you’re servicing both local and national, and it’s sold both locally and nationally, is the right way to go. So our ambitions are to do both, and we’re currently doing both and proving out that model.
PND: Minneapolis sports station “Skor North” KSTP is essentially a radio station built in podcast form.
Goforth: It was born out of necessity, but it turned out to be a really good business model, and a vast majority of the revenue that goes to that podcast network comes from amazing advertisers on the local and regional level that are sold locally and regionally. If we can duplicate that and perhaps do that in other verticals, you’re really talking about something worthwhile while also building great national content.
PND: That’s going to take more education for advertisers.
Goforth: No question education will have to happen. But we need to have products that service these advertisers before we go try to sell them all. And as an example, advertisers are flocking to Skor North because they understand the value. Skor North is a tremendous success. It’s more profitable as a podcast network than it ever was as a radio station.
PND: Technology is helping make that possible.
Goforth: I’m glad it’s evolving too. The podcast industry has not done ourselves much of a service by ad campaigns that are not targeted the right way. There’s been a lack of understanding by the people selling it, much less the people buying it. Oftentimes people say podcasts don’t work, or podcasts are only top of funnel, and those things just aren’t true. I absolutely believe that their campaign didn’t work, because there are certain truths to advertising that have to be observed no matter what channel you’re advertising. And so as technology evolves, it allows advertisers to be more savvy about what content they’re choosing, how they’re choosing it, how they’re placing the order, how they’re monitoring things like frequency and reach, and how they’re measuring results. These tools that are now finally live in the podcast space are only going to help grow the pie for podcasts.
PND: Speaking of technology, where do you see AI fitting in at Hubbard?
Goforth: AI is already permeating every aspect of what we do. I’m not part of it, but Hubbard has formed an AI Council examining every aspect of our business and asking where it should be used. I don’t have any definitive answers on where we will or won’t use it. My suspicion is that it’ll be less in content creation, more in tools that help expediate people’s jobs. That’s how I believe AI will be utilized by forward-thinking companies.
PND: So you don’t see a role for AI in what people hear?
Goforth: This fear that companies are just going to start producing all this AI podcast content, and real content creators are just going to go away, is a little bit overblown. The early AI experiments in audio where AI wrote it and voiced it — every version of a podcast to date that I’ve heard, to me, it’s the same thing. I can just tell that it’s not right. But Hubbard is absolutely analyzing the different uses of AI where it can make us more efficient and make us better. I just don’t think it’ll be replacing talent.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.