Saying goodbye to WAAF

Saying goodbye to WAAF

Another day another heritage radio station goes away. Seeing the news the other day that Boston’s WAAF was sold by Entercom was something that has rocked my Facebook feed. So many of my friendships in Boston were made during my time at Entercom and WAAF was a huge part of that. Because of that many of my friends on Facebook have similar memories about WAAF and had all been sharing them. I too had amazing memories and I learned so many lessons from so many during my time there. I figured now was a good time to share some of them.

WAAF is where I learned about brand. Because brand is such a huge buzzword today, many people disregard it as overvalued. I am passionate about this word and what it means and a lot of those lessons came from WAAF and the people that built that station. I have spent a lot of time during my tenure at teams working on brand. I have been fortunate to work with some of the best and brightest along the way and have learned a lot about the finer skills of shaping and building a brand. All of that is very different from what I learned about brand at WAAF.

At WAAF I learned about brand from the bottom up. I learned from the people that poured their lives into the rock music scene. Careers that started by handing out bumper stickers outside of snowy concerts and then blossomed into nationally recognized on-air talent and programmers. There wasn’t a defined brand for WAAF, you just knew it when you saw it and it when it felt right. There wasn’t a CMO or brand person, the employees were the stewards of the brand and they took incredible care of it.

I was the new kid at the company, joining shortly after WAAF was acquired by Entercom. A few months after I started, I was promoted to oversee the WAAF street team I addition to all of the other street teams. I was tasked with trying to make them more “sales friendly” while on-site. I was told that there a lot of great people at WAAF, but I was going to have to earn their respect and acceptance to make this new opportunity work. I immersed myself in the product. I spent time with key personalities and I listened. I was young, I made plenty of mistakes along the way, but eventually I was proud to call many of them my friends. I learned what they cared about, because it was exactly what their audience cared about too. I have learned through my career that it wasn’t about making the station more “sales friendly” it was about finding the right advertisers that would match up with the amazing relationships that the on-air talent had developed with their audience. Celebrate the brand and the relationships that it allows you to have, don’t change it for the sake of short term revenue.

I should note that I did not ever dream of working in rock radio. I was a pop and hip hop fan, so rock wasn’t really my thing. My friends from home were horrified that I was working at WAAF and they were later blown away when I earned the opportunity to start doing overnights on the air. I later started doing bits on the afternoon drive show and had the opportunity to to interview rockstars and fly all over the world and party in amazing locations. When you work in an immersive industry, you either LOVE IT and LIVE IT or you HATE IT and LEAVE IT. There is no middle ground. I chose to love WAAF and live WAAF during my time there.

I have always pushed myself for more, so after a great run at Entercom it was time for me to take on some new challenges and I moved on. I took with me many skills and lessons from my time there. I formed incredible lifelong friendships and I will forever be grateful for all of it.

There are major changes happening throughout the radio business. I am sad about the stations going away. I am devastated for the people that LOVED it and LIVED it for much longer than me. I am thinking of all of them. With that said, this is still business and business decisions are not always popular but necessary. I know the people that had to make this decision to sell this station love radio and it could not have been an easy decision. I have had to make some tough decisions that in the moment were heavily scrutinized and criticized. It was tough, but I believed those decisions were best for the business. Some of them have worked out and others have not. I celebrate the decisions that work, but I never forget the decisions that didn’t. The good news is I have learned from both outcomes.

I share content like this on a mission to share happiness. This wasn’t the happiest of posts. I want to finish with some happiness.

To the many talented folks at WAAF, with change comes opportunity. I hope your next opportunity is something that makes you as happy as we all were when we were handing out bumper stickers in the snow for minimum wage. That kind of happiness is special and it can be had again. Good luck to all of you!

#radio #Marketing #Brand #WAAF #Boston #BostonRadio #Metallica #RockRadio