Curiosity: the EIB Business Model

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: And, you know, we’re starting customers and putting them on your show locally and I’m actually gonna have a couple customers launching on national, Rush, in September. So it’s amazing, you know, what the right advertising can do.

RUSH: Well, there are secrets to why this works. The business model of this program has never really been fully explored, which is fine with us. Of all the curiosity there has been about this radio program, the business aspect of it has really never been looked at. People are quite understandably fascinated by the content side, and they assume that the content side explains the revenue side. And while it does, in a way, that doesn’t quite cover it all. There is a precise business model. There are different kinds of advertising strategies.

When we started on this program, the most common network radio advertising strategy was called CPM, which is translated “cost per thousand,” which meant that Campbell’s soup would go out and buy as many syndicated radio programs as possible just trying to make sure as many people as possible heard the commercial, just get the brand name out there. And so the advertising rate was based on how large the audience being assembled was by combining a whole bunch of programs. Campbell’s soup and General Motors, whoever, they wouldn’t touch us because of the so-called controversial nature of the program, and they didn’t want complaint letters, which are always fake anyway, from activist listeners trying to have a negative impact on the business side of our program. It didn’t matter. Every letter they assumed was real and they didn’t want to deal with it.

So, of course, we had to sit here and devise a different strategy if we were to make it, because while the content, of course, is crucial, without business side success, any content’s academic. Without business side success, nobody’s gonna hear the content, not gonna be there. So we had to devise a strategy. We had to find a way to get sponsors and advertisers who had never used radio before, national radio. We went out and we found people who were in the same situation we were, startups, who were willing to take risks and go outside the conventional wisdom and the bounds of how it was always done, ’cause this radio show blew those boundaries away anyway, why not do it on the advertising side, and it did.

And he gave it away here. He used the phrase here that has made the difference. If you missed it I’m not going to tell you because it’s still a trade secret. But basically he’s an agency, he’s advertising agency, he’s calling here to essentially thank me, the host, for the profound success that advertisers on the program have, and I appreciate that because if that doesn’t happen, folks, all the rest of this really is academic. So thanks for the call.

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