I have no idea of how many people Rusty Walker influenced during his lifetime.   Directly or indirectly it no doubt was well into the thousands – probably more likely the tens-of-thousands.  I consider myself fortunate to be among them. Smart, passionate, funny (sometimes unintentionally), pioneering, and always generous in sharing what he knew, I had

Scotty McCreery didn’t win Top New Artist at last night’s Billboard Music Awards (Wiz Khalifa did), but his nomination was appropriate enough (Scotty of course was the ACM Best New Artist winner this past April while The Band Perry was the CMA’s New Artist winner in November).   One of the questions we ask in

When someone’s marketing captures my attention, I often ask myself, ‘Why?” I snapped these Oakland A’s transit ads on the BART because I was instantly engaged. I loved the combination of humor and competiveness, as well as the way they made me feel about the team.  While the A’s are 20+ years removed from their

If you’ve been on the receiving end of emails and phone calls threatening protests and boycotts of your station because of allegedly controversial spots, it’s easy to envision the worst and want to respond on air with a disclaimer or something similar. But assuming we’re talking about spots and not something grossly offensive your talent

If you could ask Google’s Johanna Wright for some business advice, she might suggest, “Constantly seek new ways to delight your users.” According to Ms. Wright, Google adds “about 100 quality upgrades to the search engine each quarter” and notes that any time the company could be running between 50 and 200 experiments. Here are

Today was the day to dissect the newly commissioned CRS Research Study and I have to say that I felt like I was hearing the same song I have heard over and over again.   So I got to thinking, how can we apply David Houle’s futurist mentality and attempt to write some new lyrics and

If you are a leader of a company or a brand manager with employees and you don’t know what a futurist is, you need to learn and become one quickly.   That was just one of many profound takeaways from futurist David Houle’s presentation at the Country Radio Seminar.  His favorite definition comes from a colleague

“What is important to a radio station in 2012?” That was the key question we used for building Albright& O’Malley’s annual pre-CRS seminar which happens Tuesday, February 21 from 12:30-4:30 at the Country Radio Hall of Fame’s Ford Theater in Nashville (get a last minute invitation below). This year’s conference is called “Winning Tactics and

Yesterday my partner Jaye Albright wrote a timely piece about the M.I.A. “Super Gesture” on Sunday and the number of country songs with PG13 lyrics (20+ according to her Google search). A number of readers weighted in (accurately) on “the way it used to be” in country. But Country’s cume composition is dramatically different than

“What did you learn?”That’s one of the questions most frequently asked of Country Radio Seminar attendees. One of the more frequently-asked questions that Jaye, Becky and I get leading up to CRS is, “Are you doing your pre-CRS session again this year?”Once again, that answer is “yes!” And of course you’re invited – Tuesday, February 21st,