Paul Cramer

Paul Cramer currently serves as Veritone’s Managing Director of Broadcast Solutions. His tenure with Radio spans over 25 years, most of which include working with radio broadcasters and audio publishers to grow revenue and engagement using established and emerging digital tools and strategies. During his career, Cramer has had firsthand experience leveraging almost every digital asset available to Radio including artificial intelligence, content management systems, loyalty marketing programs, online contesting, online research, email marketing, SMS, format-specific web content, daily-deal commerce programs, podcasting, live streaming, online audio ad platforms, programmatic ad exchanges, streaming metrics, crowd-sourced radio, mobile applications, and more. Before joining Veritone, Cramer spent 10 years with Triton Digital, as Executive VP/Publisher Development for North America. Prior to Triton, Cramer was VP/Sales for MJI Interactive, one of the pioneering companies founded during the dot-com boom to provide SaaS media convergence solutions to the Radio industry. He has also held a number of positions in local radio including on-air work, sales, and management. He built his first radio station website in 1995.

What was your first job in radio and when was the last time you were on the air on a regular basis?

I hosted a weekend “open house party” style show on my college station, WSBU-FM, in 1995, under the moniker of DJ Cramer. This was during the height of the popularity of the sitcom Seinfeld and listeners thought it was funny to envision a guy named Cramer as a DJ. I went on to become the Station Manager and we were recognized as one of the Top 5 College Stations in America. In 1996, I joined Country WPIG-FM in Olean, NY, as a weekend personality with the on-air name of Dave Kelly and continued to work there throughout college.

The pandemic has certainly changed the way people consume audio. What’s your take on this as we’re closing in on one year working from home, etc.?

Certainly, there’s a continued appetite for unique and compelling content whether that’s delivered over-the-air, or via IP. With more folks working from home, streaming consumption has risen, with spoken-word programming seeing great gains due to the newsworthy events of 2020. Smart speakers are also becoming an increasingly popular way to access station streams and podcasts. It’s clear that listeners want to consume their content via the most convenient means, which is why audio must be ubiquitous.

You were VP/Sales for MJI Interactive, which was literally one of the pioneering companies founded during the dot-com boom. What was that time and place like and how was radio able to benefit from your efforts there?

It may be hard for some to imagine, but 20 years ago many radio stations had no online presence whatsoever. No one was sure of what to make of the Internet. Was it complimentary to radio, competitive, maybe even a fad? Therefore, many radio groups did not have in-house digital resources and fully outsourced these needs. MJI was on the bleeding edge of developing Radio industry-specific solutions. We designed and deployed thousands of radio station websites that required no-code to update, which was groundbreaking at the time. I worked with groups to help them build their first databases, email marketing strategies, and, later, listener-affinity programs. We deployed display-ad management tools, online contesting tools, and in 2005, launched a podcast CMS which stitched a pre-roll ad to the podcast and published it to an RSS feed. This was 2 years before the first iPhones hit the market! It was an exciting time and these early innovations helped pave the way for Radio to discover the symbiotic relationship between how on-air and online could complement each other to drive more engagement and revenue.

You spent 10 years with Triton Digital as EVP/Publisher Development for North America. What were some of the highlights of that part of your career?

Triton was and still is the leader in digital audio delivery, measurement, and monetization. So much of what we did helped the industry to extend their programming to new audiences and new devices. Bringing dynamic ad insertion and programmatic buying to the industry helped radio tap into new digital dollars and turned streaming into a real business.

In your current role as Veritone’s Managing Director of Broadcast Solutions, you continue to be a force in digital involvement. What’s working for radio right now and what’s available that you wish broadcasters would take more advantage of?

Audio in general is going through a renaissance. Radio is one of the few remaining mediums that creates live and local original programming, however so much of it vaporizes once it goes over the transmitter. At Veritone, we’re capturing that content, transcribing it, and making it searchable and quantifiable. While that pays huge dividends to the Sales side of the house, programmers and producers can take greater advantage of this too. Air-checks are just a few keystrokes away. Sound bites, archived interviews, caller audio, news reports, bits, you name it…can instantly be found, re-aired, or pushed online as podcasts, web content, or social media posts. PDs can get instant alerts when certain topics are mentioned on-air, and it’s great for talent coaching as well. Additionally, with more teams working remotely, the station’s on-air content is available, searchable, and shareable to every team member at the radio station, regardless of where they sit.

Forbes recently placed Veritone on their list of the top 100 high-performing small-cap companies. What’s it like to be part of an operation that’s thriving in these continually uncertain times? 

It’s extremely exciting and rewarding to be part of such a high-performing team. Veritone has done an amazing job of recruiting the biggest and brightest minds in big-tech and building a culture around innovation and entrepreneurship. Not only do we deliver AI technology to radio, but to television, networks, film studios, government agencies, law enforcement, public safety, energy, and numerous other industries. Prior to the pandemic, many industries were already in the process of using AI to optimize their workflows, automate manual processes, and add actionable intelligence to their businesses. COVID-19 has just accelerated that as companies search to find new ways to optimize their remote workforces and streamline operations in the current environment.

In the early part of the new year, are you seeing an uptick in digital and performance marketing?

Absolutely. The pandemic is causing advertisers to place greater scrutiny on ROI. To measure ROI, you need data-driven analytics. This results in a shift to data-driven mediums, like digital. That said, radio has tremendous reach and is very efficient at generating results. At Veritone, we’re very focused on using our platform to bring enhanced analytics to broadcasting, enabling station groups to have the similar proof-of-performance and ad-intelligence metrics that digital can deliver.

Radio is always looking to refine and redefine placement of spot breaks, length of spot breaks and even the length of spots. What would help broadcasters maintain listening through these breaks?

Certainly, many of us are familiar with the Clear Channel “Less is More” initiative from 15+ years go. None of us are ignorant to the fact that longer breaks lead to more tune-out, especially in a world where the listener has numerous alternatives that offer more choice with less commercial interruption. To combat this, broadcasters can start to weave more “organic” advertising into the programming that’s less intrusive, yet still highly effective. Increasingly, on-air features can have presenting sponsors attached to them, and jock breaks/shows can include short live-billboards, live-reads, and other non-intrusive sponsor integrations. This trend is apparent in YouTube videos where influencers mention sponsors, in print, in podcasts, and on social media. Veritone’s technology can automatically detect these sponsor integrations, capture an air-check, and create a recap report to show proof-of-performance of all the integrations. What’s best, research shows they work! Sometimes response is twice as high as traditional spots AND they are less interruptive to the audience, which is a win-win.

What are your thoughts on the role of Artificial Intelligence for broadcasters and its place in our businesses in 2021 and beyond?

We are really just starting to scratch the surface. While AI is helping streamline workflows in broadcasting today, soon it will help us better understand the content contextually. When that happens, a whole new host of use cases will be enabled, including better content recommendations, content discovery, and even delivering contextually relevant advertising to the audience. We’ll also see greater business intelligence to enable better decision making; knowing which programming and topics are resonating with the audience and which are leading to burn out, what topics will maximize engagement and ratings, and so on.

You can find any number of new podcasts any day of any week. Are there ways for podcasters to monetize these efforts or will the top tier podcasters continue to be the only folks who see real profit?

In some ways, podcasts are the ultimate user-generated content (UGC) of audio. If you look at video, YouTube is arguably the biggest platform for UGC video content. Anyone can create a channel, post a vlog, and start earning money once subscriber and watch-hour thresholds are met. There are many independent producers who are now making meaningful income and many who have become wealthy. Similarly, in podcasting, we are seeing more and more platforms where creators can publish their podcast and share in a monetization network. Therefore, even small, independent, podcasters can tap into the scale and discoverability of a larger network. At Veritone, we’ve also made it easy for podcasters of any size to integrate sponsors into their podcasts, through our Influencer Bridge network.

What are a couple of trends/innovations to watch for this year?

Contextual intelligence in podcasting and digital audio is a hot topic. For instance, the ability for an advertiser like Peloton to buy audio at scale and have their ad appear within podcast episodes that are discussing health, wellness, or fitness, is of great value. Secondly, contextual intelligence enables brand safety. One of the impediments for advertisers buying thousands of podcasts episodes on a platform or network is not knowing if the podcast your ad was served into contains content and topics that don’t adhere to your brand standards. We’ve launched the technology, enabled by AI, that analyzes the prevalence and confidence of what topics are being discussed in a podcast so the advertiser can buy at scale and programmatically avoid non-brand-safe episodes. This will bring new dollars to the industry. Secondly, I believe we’ll see more platform consolidation in the podcast space. Podcasting is still very much a cottage industry, as the industry is expected to break $1 billion in total revenues this year. Consolidation will create more synergies in terms of technology, discoverability, and monetization.