The Hidden Risk: When Traffic Breaks and What That Means for Revenue

It’s not the flashiest part of a media business, but when it breaks, everything breaks. In this episode of BIA’s Leading Local Insights Podcast, Rick Ducey sits down with Marketron CEO Jimshade Chaudhari to break down why “traffic” is one of the most critical and overlooked functions in revenue operations, and how rethinking it can unlock efficiency, scalability, and growth.

From the loss of institutional knowledge and a growing talent gap to traffic’s role as a “critical but not strategic” function, Rick and Jimshade examine how that mindset is evolving and what it means for staffing, efficiency, and revenue delivery. They also cover how stations are adapting to leaner teams, navigating more complex cross-platform campaigns, and where Traffic as a Service (TaaS) is emerging as a scalable, modern solution.

Listen now to understand where the real risk sits and how to get ahead of it.

Transcript

Welcome And What Marketron Does

Rick Ducey 0:34

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to BIA Advisory Services Leading Local Insights Podcast. My name is Rick Ducy. I'm the managing director here at BIA. Today we're going to be diving into the world of radio and talking to one of the leading companies that continues to innovate in this space. And we'll find out more about that innovation in just a second. We're thrilled to have Jim shade Chaudhari here, who is CEO of Marketron, to talk with us about what Marketron is doing and providing traffic as a service, a really important concept. And as we'll find out, I think sometimes taken for granted or overlooked in some cases at a station's inner client's risk, frankly. So we'll we'll see how to deal with that. But uh traffic as a service for many clients is uh meant to manage uh revenue, scale revenue, create some efficiencies by automating workflows within a cloud-based platform to manage sales, inventory, and billing data, which is kind of the engine room of um the radio station business. So we want to make sure that's working smoothly and well. So we'll learn more about that in just a moment. Uh but first, Jim shade, let me just give you a chance to say hello and say a bit about yourself and about Marktron.

Why Traffic Is Mission Critical

Jimshade Chaudhari 1:43

Yeah, thanks, Rick. Thanks for having me, first of all. It's a pleasure to be on the podcast. And uh as Rick said, I'm CEO of Marketron. You know, Marketron's been around for over 55 years servicing the the radio industry. And uh, you know, we continue to focus on products and services that just help radio broadcasters be more successful, uh especially as uh the space is evolving, right? And uh lots of challenges for radio broadcasters. And as we talk to customers kind of on a daily-weekly basis, we're just figuring out ways to continue to produce products and services that help uh radio groups be more successful.

Rick Ducey 2:22

So definitely want to get into the products and services and um the theme of innovations that you've you know focused the company on uh for providing your clients uh and their clients. Um but I want I wanted to um think about something. Um there's a lot of change in the industry now. I guess we say that every year, uh, but for sure it's true this year. Um with you know, um workforce realignment, reductions, um creating new positions around um AI and so on. Uh so you know, headcounts are down, um the staff makeup is different, different skill sets and so on. And uh I mentioned, you know, kind of liken trafficking as uh the the engine room, it's not necessarily the most exciting part of the cruise liner, but you don't go anywhere without it. And as you as people in in management are looking at workforce realignment, uh rationalization, whatever, um, is that a place the trafficking kind of center that workflow where it's not top of mind? So you make some personnel staffing adjustments, and then all of a sudden, oh we broke something here.

Jimshade Chaudhari 3:32

Yeah, it's it's interesting, right? Because it's it's definitely not the sexy part of an organization for a radio group. But um, the way when we talk to people, we say it's it's critical, right? It's a critical function, like you said. Um, you know, a radio broadcaster can't function without a traffic team. Um, you know, you can have the best sales team, but if you can't deliver on the advertising that they're selling, uh make sure it runs properly, make sure it gets billed properly, um, then you're not gonna be successful. And traffic is one of those things where it's, you know, it's it's kind of humming on the background and it's working and until it isn't. And and and usually when people uh focus on traffic is when they have a problem. And it's usually when a traffic manager decides that they're either going to retire or leave for one reason or another.

The Risk Of One-Person Knowledge

Rick Ducey 4:23

Yeah, I was thinking about this. It's it's um I'm not sure that many companies, you know, they they probably yeah, in theory we should do this and we'll do it tomorrow. But some sort of succession planning or cross-training, so you don't get left with just uh one person that knows everything. And when that institutional memory goes out the front door, you know, so does your traffic system.

Jimshade Chaudhari 4:44

Yeah, it's it's really interesting, right? Some sometimes when we think about traffic and we're discussing it with folks, we're saying traffic is it's a critical function, but it's not a strategic function. Yeah. And what we mean by that is, like I said, you can't run a radio station without a traffic function, but it doesn't differentiate your station from another station. You know, advertisers, if they're picking between station A and B, they're gonna assume whatever advertising they get sold is going to run properly, um, on time, and it's gonna be built. And so they're not making their decision based on who has the best traffic department, they're making their decision based on the content, the audience that can be reached, the sales strategy of the broadcaster, etc. But from a traffic perspective, because it's not strategic and most people aren't thinking about it, they're not investing in traffic to really optimize it and make it as uh efficient as it can be. And since it's not strategic, it's underinvested in. And what that means is there's a better way to do traffic for most radio broadcasters. They just haven't thought about it because it hasn't been a problem right now.

Rick Ducey 5:56

And that, I mean, kind of problem-driven solutions versus um, you know, forward-thinking um solutions um is is a challenge and an issue, I think, for a lot of companies. And uh I'll um do a sports analogy here, which will make my friends and colleagues howl, since I'm not a sports person. Um, but you know, um the idea that it's critical but not strategic to use a sports metaphor, torturing it, though I will be doing um, you need to work the foundations. I mean, so you you get out there, you know, and the coach has you just you know run sprints and and do basic, you know, basic, basic maneuvers, and that's what you build on. And that's sort of trafficking's role. I mean, you it is competitive to the extent that your customers expect things to work, and then you can shine where you have clear, you know, modes or differentiators in the market. But if you don't deliver, that's that's you know, it doesn't work. And so clients have a certain level of expectation for what's going to happen, and they may not think about it either. And then when it doesn't happen, that's bad news for everybody.

Jimshade Chaudhari 6:57

Yeah, it's kind of one of those, it's it's a table stakes function, right? Everyone just assumes it works. And it's fine when it's working. The problem is, since it's not considered a kind of a strategic function within a broadcaster, they're not investing in optimizing it or creating systems. And so that means a lot of the knowledge is sitting in those traffic managers' heads. And so when one of those traffic managers leaves, it's it's not just the fact that you gotta backfill that person, you gotta go recruit someone, you gotta hire them, you gotta train them. But that institutional knowledge that's sitting in that traffic manager's head because it hasn't been systematized, is gone.

Rick Ducey 7:36

So some of that is on the station. Then you need to be aware of this and you know, have plans to mitigate it, or you know, cross-training, something like that. Um, but some of that you help provide some solution in there. I mean, it's a system, so people need to do everything themselves.

Outsourcing Traffic Becomes A Strategy

Jimshade Chaudhari 7:52

Yeah, honestly, in in conversation that we've been having with our customers, there's a lot on their minds and there's a lot on their plates. And as you mentioned, I think at the beginning, people are operating with big leaner teams, so they can't do everything. And so, you know, we are the people who have created the traffic system. We built the software. We've actually had people outsourcing traffic to us for over a decade. And it started out on in emergency situations, right? A traffic manager had some medical leave and they were gonna be gone for a couple months, and people used to come to us and say, Can you help out? And we'd help out where possible. What we've seen over, I'd say, last six six to twelve months is those uh frequencies of or the the frequency of people asking for that kind of help has just increased. So maybe we used to get one of those one once every three, four months. We're seeing it monthly now, right? Especially at some of the bigger groups where you know it's almost like whack-able. They have a traffic manager of in one market or for one station, and then they go replace that one, and then all of a sudden it happens again. And I think it's that even another market. And I think it's this trend as we've been, you know, once again talking to the customers, a lot of traffic managers have been in their roles for a really long time. So they have a lot of that institutional knowledge, but they're getting closer to retirement or just moving out of the workforce. And there really isn't a strong bunch of traffic managers sitting anywhere within an organization within a broadcaster to kind of pick up that slack. And so it's yeah, that's just a trend that we've noticed is that we're getting more and more of these requests where it's like, hey, this traffic manager's left, or this traffic manager is really close to you know, retirement is probably going to move on. And if you treat those kind of as one-offs, we're talking about like traffic is critical, so you have to have that function. But I think the decision on what you do with traffic is actually a strategic decision, whether you keep doing what you're doing in-house or you decide to move to a different model.

Rick Ducey 9:55

Yeah, I definitely bought by that. And it's um is think about um staff positions and support um models like we're we're doing now. I mean, if I'm running a radio station and you know, I got the word from corporate, um, I have you know, X number less positions. Um one way to do that is just put you know X next to the positions and they're gone. Another way is we need to rethink how we're staffing these positions and who's in those positions. We can't just have the same roles and job descriptions we've had for the past X number of years. You know, we need somebody who has this skill set, this knowledge set, the ability to learn, you know, these several new things and a new job. And one of the new jobs is to work with something like your traffic as a system. And uh it's probably a different role than stations used to have. And these staff members with all institutional knowledge, that's great. But one of the things from a platform perspective is you can move some of that on, you know, there's AI and everything else. But you know, a lot of that knowledge properly belongs probably in a in a you know, um IT platform, uh, and people learn to operate it. But that should be something where it's more transferable than if somebody all of a sudden was I used to work with somebody who would say, uh, you know, somebody leaves and got hit by a bus. And uh she would say, well, let's be a little bit more pleasant. Let's say somebody wins the lottery. You know, how are we gonna replace them? So I mean, so stations that come to you in an emergency sounds like a growth area. So I guess two thoughts there. One, is that something that you're welcoming? Or it's like, well, we're really a software company, but we'll become a service company to help our clients out. Um, but if it's a growth company, how how are you planning to approach that going forward? Is that gonna be like a um leading offer uh in addition to the platform offer?

Jimshade Chaudhari 11:45

Yeah, so so some some good questions there, right? I I think from our standpoint, we're always just looking at ways when we talk to our customers on on how we can help them. And you know, we've provided traffic systems for you know multiple decades at this point. Right. Um we've we've built uh you know a digital system that integrates in with our traffic system. We built a modern way to uh deal with payments and electronic payments. And we just look at you know, traffic as a service or task as as we like to call it, really as a modern way for to for traffic operations. Right. And I think it's a it's it's really it's not just the actual function itself, it's the mind share that it takes at a radio group, right? This is something they shouldn't think about. The same way an advertiser, when they're buying advertising at a station, just assumes that their advertising is going to run, they're gonna be built properly. Of course, stations should just, I mean, we are the experts in the space, we can help them out. And, you know, we have moved it away from an emergency service because the problem has become for us, I mean, it's a combination of technology and people that provide this service, right? We have expert traffic managers, so they're they're more efficient than probably most traffic managers at stations. Um, and then we're giving them technology tools to become even more efficient. And so we don't offer a service anymore that's an emergency service at this point. So we're getting having these conversations with our customers to say, look, this is a strategic decision. Here are all the reasons you should make this move. And first, you know, for some uh groups, they want to test the water's dip thier toe in and give us one or two stations. Others have given us all their stations. Um, but that's a big decision for groups, right? So they don't make that within a week or two weeks. They really need to plan that out. And uh we've seen really strong demand, right? I think a lot of folks are trying to figure out how to become much more efficient with the teams that they have, um, the teams that they're forced to work with. And so those folks are coming to us. And you know, we we've seen really, really strong demand for the service. I mean, uh, you know, we have a list out until I think the end of August at this point of customers that want to come on board.

Rick Ducey 14:03

That's all good news. So you I mean you work you're deep and deeply embedded in the radio industry, you're all different kinds of um operators, sizes, groups, standalones. Um is it and it can't be one size fits all. How is this evolving across the industry and the different variabilities for the situations of radio stations and groups?

Who Traffic As A Service Fits

Jimshade Chaudhari 14:23

Yeah, you know, you know, one of the so I mentioned we've had this service around for about 10 years as an emergency service. And the reason it's really come to the forefront is I think just a bunch of trends that are converging. One, we talked about, you know, the uh traffic managers kind of getting to a retirement age or moving on from their roles. Um, the second is we've seen some of the largest customers outsource, right? iHeart's outsourced all their traffic, Cumulus has outsourced all their traffic, but those big groups, they have the scale to go and do that on their own. The majority of customers don't. And that's where kind of our service comes in, right? We help make that a possibility for them because most of our customers couldn't go and outsource it. They don't have the number of stations to do it. Um, and they don't have the relationships and the know-how on the technology side, right? When when I look at Marketron and our role for the radio industry, we really want to be a technology partner for the radio industry. Right. Right. We've we've been, like I mentioned, we have you know digital products, modern payment product. Now we've got a modern way to, you know, uh provide traffic, and then we have you know the actual traffic systems that we offer. And so this solution works for you know somebody who owns one to two stations, and it works for somebody who owns over 100 stations, right? The complexity of those stations varies, and there isn't a single price, right? We look at each of those stations on an individual basis and look at how much work it's gonna take. And so we have dynamic pricing around um the service that we offer it. But it it can work for almost anybody in our customer base that's on uh our visual traffic or Marketron traffic systems.

Omnichannel Orders And One Invoice

Rick Ducey 16:05

So the focus now, of course, is cross-platform um audio, you know, in the case of radio, um, so much is exciting on the buy side, uh happily for things like streaming, podcasting, and linear broadcast audio. Um there's been some, there's always some recent study showing uh how viable and important broadcast radio is uh is sort of the foundation for an audio first campaign. Um but even radio stations are into streaming video, um, CTV and other forms of streaming video. I I talked to one small medium market operator about a year or so ago and just saying, hey, you know, how's the market? Um, which uh in those days we thought it was crazy. These days we think it's even crazier. I'm sure in six months we'll think it's even crazier yet. Um but it but it's uh but he would he said, you know, actually CTV is our biggest growth category, um, and not just in percent, you know, it's becoming the biggest growth category in dollars. I was like, wow, that's really interesting. So that I mean, that's a new product set. It's a new, you know, sell, it's new people, new expertise. Uh and obviously you got to book that inventory, traffic it, invoice it, and you don't want to send the customer 15 different invoices for one campaign. No. Is that where you see the industry headed? And is that how your traffic systems are evolving to support that kind of um execution, the workplace, uh workflow efficiency?

Jimshade Chaudhari 17:24

Yeah, I mean, I I think you know, the the radio industry has made a bet on digital, right, to offset the decline and kind of the traditional radio advertising. And we built a product almost five years ago now called Next Digital, which allows broadcasters, um, sales reps to basically create a proposal that's omni-channel, right? Includes the digital, includes uh the traditional radio, and it actually takes that proposal, converts it into an order, pushes the radio part into our traffic system for execution, pushes the digital part into various DSPs for execution, brings all that stuff together, single uh bill, a single invoice you can send to your customer and then they can pay electronically, right? So, you know, our our uh kind of mantra has really just support the radio industry, right, and this evolution that they're going through. And so digital is is the bet, right? That that that the industry has made. And so we're trying to make it easier and easier for people to execute on it because the conversation I've been having about digital with our customers hasn't been about should we do digital anymore? And or is digital gonna grow? Yeah, or is digital gonna grow? I think we're seeing you know, everyone leaning into digital, they're seeing revenue growth. The conversation has really switched into margin and profitability. How do you do digital at scale in a way that's efficient? And that's kind of for like traffic as a service for us again. Once again, it's that efficiency theme that we hear over and over again, right? Is doing these things are important. You have to do it to be competitive, to stay relevant. But how do you do it at scale? How do you do it systematically? And that's where we've really put a lot of effort into creating systems and specifically for radio, right? We are the only digital platform that connects into our traffic system, right? So that when you have a uh proposal that's omni-channel across uh traditional radio and digital, we can push that down into the traffic system. We can push all the billing lines down into traffic systems so you're not having to duplicate data entry from one system to another, which you know causes errors and obviously takes time. But we're trying to we've created an end-to-end system for radio groups that want to sell digital.

Efficiency Margins And The Road Ahead

Rick Ducey 19:39

Well, you've been doing this for a long time, and you know, um I I don't often um hear broadcast, radio or TV um spoken of as like the leading innovation industry in the in the business. Uh, but he's done a lot of innovation uh for industries that's probably reluctant to innovate, uh, you know, frankly, in many in many ways. So that's great. And you know, a lot locked together and definitely at the leading edge of where the business needs to be, and providing those inputs and insights and platforms so that they can start to focus on margin growth and you know, revenue growth and and um going into the digital products that's where where they really need to be. So that's all that's um good to hear. We've covered a lot, Jim shade. Is there anything else that we should touch base on before we close up for today?

Jimshade Chaudhari 20:25

You know, I I think it's a uh where we kind of started from, right? Radio is going through a major evolution. There's a lot on kind of the executives' minds and the leaders on where they should focus their efforts. And I think, you know, we've been a partner to the industry, we're gonna continue to be a partner to the industry. We don't focus on any other verticals other than radio, right? And so we really dive in deep with our customers to try to understand their pain points. And I think, you know, tasks is just, you know, the the latest thing that we focused effort on. And it's really from customer demand, right? We see the trends that are emerging behind the scenes, and we, you know, we try to educate people on, hey, we're seeing this with other groups. Have you thought about something like this, right? Have you thought about what would happen if this happens to you and how do you get in front of it? And so I think for us as Marketron, you know, we believe in radio, we believe in kind of the evolution, and we want to be a partner that helps people, you know, get to that next level, whether it's you know becoming uh, you know, being able to more easily sell omni-channel campaigns, whether it's being more efficient with their traffic, whether it's collecting their payments faster through electronic payments. And so, you know, you'll see Marketron continue to focus on radio kind of moving forward. And uh, you know, if if anyone out there is listening and then knows of a problem that's happening uh from a radio perspective that you're not seeing a solution for, you know, feel free to reach out to us at Marketron. Feel free to reach out to me at Marketron. We're always open to ideas. And like I said, uh really trying to make sure that the solutions that we produce are not just great technology solutions, but they're actually helping solve real problems for our customers.

Listener Outreach And Closing

Rick Ducey 22:05

Yeah, I'm hopeful that um people who listen to this will come back and have a different perspective on what traffic means. It's like, you know, I need to change my lens on what traffic is. It really is uh an important area that we shouldn't take for granted. Make sure it's staffed well, make sure we're using uh you know platforms that are efficient for workflow and um keep us in the game. You know, it's it's probably the um the best news is um you it's you don't want you don't want to hear about traffic because you just assume it's gonna work uh and you Want to be in that position. And how do you make sure you you stay in that position? Because you'd want to be out competing on uh areas where you can really show some differentiation. It's like, well, you should hire us because you know our stuff works. It's like that's pretty exciting. Thank you. Uh, what else do you do? Uh and you you helped them you helped them lead that strategic dialogue to really stay in the game and look at some growth, which is great. And integrating the linear business with the traditional business and kind of um one campaign, cross-platform, one invoice, and it just works, is a really great place to be. Um well, thank you so much for being with us um today and all of the insights and data uh and advice you shared. I hope people take that to heart. There's there's a lot of um good information and and perspective there. And uh boy, it's um coming into the second half of 2026. So good luck, good luck with the uh second half of the year. Um, appreciate your being here as always, and it's always fun to talk with you. I really enjoy it. Um and for everybody else, thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining us. If you have any questions or ideas for things you'd like us to cover, people you like us to speak with, uh to bring to you, don't hesitate to reach out to us. You can reach us at podcast@ BIA.com. And we look forward to bringing you more insightful conversations like this one on local media throughout the year ahead. Jim shade, thanks again. Thanks, Thank you, everyone.