Detavio Samuels

Detavio Samuels has his work cut out for him: Optimize the digital prowess of Radio One via its iOne Digital and One Solution divisions, to spread its influential Black music/culture niche to the mainstream consumer market without betraying its Urban lifestyle roots. Easier said than done? Here he says how he gets it done.

What were you doing before Radio One and what made you decide to join?

Prior to this, I was at GlobalHue, the #1 multicultural agency in the country, where I oversaw all the accounts, including Chrysler, Walmart, NBA, US Bank, US Navy and more. While I was there, I saw a major shift of creative work to the media companies and begun to see media as the next creative frontier. As an example, when I started, we would get huge production budgets and be asked to produce as much as 10-15 TV commercials at a time. By the time I left, the production dollars and the work were half the size and coupled with an ask to oversee media partners who had been tasked with developing branded content videos of their own. I saw more and more clients shifting the branded content work to the media side and although the media companies did an okay job, it was not fantastic. Consequently, I saw a huge opportunity to come to the media side as a trailblazer in terms of the future of branded content and entertainment. Radio One Inc. made sense to me, because it was one of the few multiplatform companies that existed in the market and I didn’t want to be limited by the channels I had available to me.

What are the goals for iOne Digital and have they changed once you came on board?

Prior to me, iOne Digital was focused on being the premier player in the “Black people” space.  We’ve shifted that slightly and now we want to be the dominant player in the “Black culture,” or some would say urban space. We see Black culture as one of most amazing things out there right now, because Black culture drives mainstream culture. Despite the fact that Blacks comprise only 15% of the population, the truth is they are driving the trends and what’s happening with the rest of U.S. and the world. Therefore, we want to be the “go-to” player for brands that want to reach cross-cultural audiences through a Black culture lens. 

The hope is that this small shift will create a huge opportunity in terms of utilizing what we know -- Black culture -- to attract audiences of various backgrounds without giving up our stronghold with our Black audience, who we know and love.  We’ve seen others do it on television from a one-off content standpoint, such as what we’ve seen with Empire, Atlanta and Insecure, but we’ve yet to see a brand program their entire business with that lens and we think we are best primed to do it. 

How do you make your brands cross-cultural?

All of our brands will not be cross-cultural. While we want to be able to go broader, it’s important that we never turn our back on our Black consumer who has supported us through the years; consequently, all of our individual media properties have their own content strategy. For example, NewsOne.com is very much about Black news and social justice. Hellobeautiful.com is where Black women go to talk about themselves shamelessly. Globalgrind.com is our first cross-cultural brand and it lives at the intersection of hip-hop and pop culture. And very soon, people will see a new project we’ve been in the labs working on that is designed to be cross-cultural from the start.

What differentiates iOne Digital from One Solution?

While all of our businesses at Radio One have a strong digital presence, iOne Digital is our “digital-first” media division. On the other hand, One Solution is our cross-platform sales and marketing entity, as well as the home to OneX, our best-in-class branded content studio. So One Solution exists to provide solutions for clients that want to leverage multiple divisions here at Radio One, whether it be TV One, Radio One, Reach Media and/or iOne Digital.

What are the major challenges facing iOne Digital and One Solution?

Our major challenge in the media space is, right now, media companies are looking for growth and they look at the numbers and see that Black people consume more media than anyone else. The power of Black culture is no longer a secret, so we’re seeing a lot of people, who didn’t necessarily cater to Black audiences in the past, who are now all in our space. Similar to us, they want to leverage Black culture in the content to pull in people from diverse backgrounds. So our biggest challenge today is that everybody wants to play in our lane. So many are creating shows that cater to our audience; so we have media companies with more resources coming after the audience we owned for so long. It’s a big threat.  On the other hand, most media companies don’t know the culture and the people like we do, so we have a big advantage.

The other thing we’re wrestling with is the fragmentation of audience. People are consuming content in various formats in all different types of places – everything from podcasts and Internet radio to all forms of digital and social media. Consequently, we have to think about how we distribute content using a model that reaches the audience where they live and breathe. So the challenge for us is getting advertisers to not focus on one channel, but to recognize that we are reaching people across all platforms -- TV, radio, digital, social, events, etc. -- and then aggregating the numbers to show the scale, and the breadth and depth of our reach.

What separates your digital platforms from those of other radio groups?

From a purely digital standpoint, other radio groups aren’t the biggest threat; I respect any radio company that’s realized that, in today’s market, we all have to be multiplatform. From a digital standpoint, our biggest challenge is Facebook and Google, who are taking a huge percentage of the digital revenue out of the marketplace before the rest of us get to compete. We can’t beat them on scale, especially with our focus on a niche audience, so we will beat them with our brands and the distinct point of view each one of them has that is present in our original content.

I will say that we are different from other radio groups in the sense that we are not just focused on extending audio content. We see the need to be great in all different content formats -- audio, written and video -- as it relates to the digital platform we are building. This is probably driven by the fact that Radio One, Inc. is a multiplatform company, which pushes us to see things differently and perhaps not as isolated as others. This is the driving reason why Radio One is changing its name to Urban One, Inc. so it’s clear that we are so much more than radio. We are the largest African-American-owned multi-media company in the country and we view the world through that lens.

What are your goals going forward— … and how will you know you were successful?

The first measure for our success is audience growth. We want to be one of the few brands that are actually scaling our audience engagement. When you can generate a larger audience tomorrow than you have today, you hope the revenue will follow the increases in audience and engagement. Of course, that increase in ad sales revenue is also a critical success metric. We have to prove that we can do what the most-talked-about digital publishers in our industry are doing, and that’s scale sales. 

In 2017, we’re also focusing on cultural impact. We, ourselves, have to be drivers of the culture, and we can do that when our content goes viral and more people take notice. We’re making sure that, at the end of year, we can look back and see that we had a positive impact on the culture.

Another important metric is client success. We want all of our clients to be happy with the audience engagement, branded content and customer service they receive on any program they work on with us. We’re very sensitive to client satisfaction because we know that goes a long way.

At this point, are you interested in generating more clients, or just getting your clients more involved in your platforms?

Historically, the answer would be to get clients more involved. Our team is doing a good job of that, which has been a successful strategy for us. Now we’re starting to focus on getting new clients. In the same way general market media companies have come after our audience, it’s time for us to go after more general market money. A big piece of our future success will be how much new general-market business we get. We are specifically targeting advertisers who understand the power of our culture; those are the people we want to bring to the table because we think they are a good fit. 

So ultimately, we are going after both: bigger share of the wallet with existing customers as well as getting new clients to help us grow our business.

Is it still a challenge to get recalcitrant stations to be more aggressive with their digital strategy?

For me, that stuff always starts at the top. If the leadership isn’t driving radio stations to have a robust digital strategy, then it will never happen. Here at Radio One Inc., senior leaders are committed to paving our way forward in the digital arena. From the board and the CEO to the Presidents of each business, all of us believe in the power of digital and are betting on it. In fact, on the radio side, we are so committed that we are creating a sub-division called R1 Digital, which will signal our commitment internally and externally as well as allows us to hold ourselves accountable for the digital specific revenue and investment on the radio side.

How do you best optimize ROI on digital platforms?

In digital, maximizing ROI happens on both the front and back ends. On the front end, it’s about creating smart content. That’s about knowing your audience and what they love and utilizing data to determine the types of content you create.  That said, for us, there is always a ton of heart that goes along with the science in terms of living and breathing the culture and trusting your instincts to lead you.  A lot of the latter depends on the type of people you hire; we pay a tremendous amount of attention to the “taste profile” of the people we bring on board. You can train people to read the data, but you can’t train people to elevate their “taste profile” as it relates to what will and will not work for the culture. 

On the back end, it’s about being smart about the distribution of content. Since we all have to create for multiple formats, it’s all about doing the smart thinking upfront so that we can create once, but chop the content into as many formats as possible in order to maximize distribution. This way, we ensure that each piece of original content, regardless of the platform it was originally created for, works as hard for us as possible.

What’s your take on the potential for podcasting ... and streaming?

I see potential in both.  Streaming continues to grow and will only get bigger. Currently, all of our stations and syndicated radio shows provide streaming as a way for our audiences to engage with us.  There are some limitations in terms of music licenses and the associated costs, which have to validate their costs through the revenue.

From the revenue side, it seems as if the jury is still out on podcasting. Nevertheless, at iOne Digital, we will experiment with podcasting because we believe we have to be where our audience is, and several people in our space have proven that you can build an audience in the podcast space.

Are there new areas of interactivity you see your companies venturing into? If so, what are they?

For our iOne Digital side, we are working on a project code named “Scratch,” which we believe is the key to helping us maintain dominance in the Urban space, especially with Urban millennials. We’re real excited about the energy -- internally as well as with celebs, influencers, advertisers and agency partners -- around “Scratch” and we can’t wait to launch it in Q2.

We also just recently announced a new capability in virtual reality. While we know this is a budding space, we do believe it could be a big thing in the future and we wanted to get into virtual reality early so we could start climbing the learning curve. 

Across the board at Radio One, we have big plans for digital in all of our businesses. It’s honestly really exciting to see all of our leaders see digital as a way to push our company to the next level. Radio One has always been innovative and willing to experiment and our journey in the digital space will be no different.

And what of your future goals – are you planning five or 10 years ahead, or is the interactive platform so fluid you pretty much have to stay in the moment?

I’m a strategist and future-focused thinker at heart. Therefore we will always have a point of view and a few strategic bets against our predicted future. As one of my favorite quotes says, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” That said, the combination of being a public company that has to delivery quarterly, as well as the ridiculous amount of change you see happening in digital every day, we are also very focused on the present moment. For us it’s not either/or, it’s and. We have to concentrate our efforts on winning now, while ensuring we’ve got projects going that will help us win tomorrow.