In the RadioDays Europe CEO Session this year, five CEOs discussed the big issues that ‘keep CEOs up at night.’

In preparation for this session radioinfo’s Steve Ahern asked the CEOs to keep a note book by their beds and when they woke up at night thinking about a big issue that was on their mind, they should write it down.

Each CEO sent Steve their top 5 or 6 issues, some exciting  and positive, such as creating new shows, and some challenging, such as revenue and competition. The other CEOs in the 45 minute session were:

Konstantinos Fotopoulos, the CEO of Audiomax in Greece

Baiba Zuzena, Chair of Latvia’s public broadcaster

Vivian Mohr, President of Audio at Bauer Media UK

Charles-Emmanuel Bon, Secretary General of Radio France

Kostas’ top issues were:

1. Developing new radio shows  – exciting
2. Financial problems –  find money, avoid pay cuts
3. How to manage strong personalities – relationships
4. How to face the competition – finding creative solutions
5. Reporting to shareholders
6. … meeting Steve’s deadline for the five points 

Baiba’s issues were:

1. The role of radio in the future digital media ecosystem – identify strengths, maximize impact
2. Visual radio – genre fusion or threat
3. Developing new local music stars via radio
4. Sustaining youth engagement with content in native language
5. Stable long term funding for public service broadcasters
6. Attracting and retaining young talent

Vivian’s top five were:

1. The product proposition for audio in the AI world
2. Advocating for audio to commercial partners and agencies – a generational change in buyers
3. How to maximize inventory
4. Evolving measurement in relevant yet responsible ways
5. The role of media in preserving transparency and democratic values

Charles-Emmanuel’s issues were:

1. The relevance of radio today in the face of converged audio and video platforms.
2. The impact of podcasters on election campaigns
3. How to keep audio and radio attractive to the audience
4. Challenges of social media – algorithms and editorial control
5. The importance of public service media to democracy

Steve grouped them all into 6 main themes:

• The role of radio in the modern media and AI world
• Money – ad revenue, public funding
• Supporting culture, society, democracy, local language, local music
• Talent – finding talent that appeal to young audiences, maximizing performance
• Growing and attracting new audiences/ audience segments
• Competition from Social Media and Search

Kostas is excited about developing new radio shows. “In radio the story is always the people, that is the exciting part. You’re talking about how to build a new show that will not only be a successful show in itself but also to serve the brand values of the radio station… we have an amazing privilege to talk to our audience and unite our society.”

Vivian said, “radio is much more than music, if you look at the stats over 50% of the use cases of radio don’t necessarily entail only listening to music. There’s mood management, there’s learning, there’s so much more… it is a very positive thing and if you look at the history of radio over time it has always been a force for good.”

He sees three major priorities over the coming year. “Number one, we’re going to have an onslaught of content like we’ve never seen before, there will be hyper-personalization of content and a hyper-personalization of channels. Secondly, we will get down to the echo chamber of one… content is going to get much more polarizing. Third, I am an optimist, one of the superpowers of this medium is the creativity, the flexibility and the trust, that is how radio is going to stand out in this future.”

Baiba is pondering the question, “how can public media be instrumental in really giving the  context, the fuller picture, so that people can better understand what is the world that they live in today. I think about how we can be instrumental really in supporting our native language. All around the world maybe two million maximum speak Latvian, today they are more global citizens so they use the English language, so the role of media here is very important and if we speak about younger audiences then we must identify those local talents who can be the messengers of the language as well as promoting local musicians.”

Charles is thinking about the role of public service broadcasting. “Radio is one of the most trusted media, probably because voice and music is without artificial things. Radio is the media of trust and that’s what is very important today. For the last few weeks it was more like we were awake and the nightmare was happening around us. Democracy is about shared values and more importantly about shared reality.”

Steve consluded by saying if staff see their bosses loooking worries, spare a though for some of the things that are on their minds.

The full discussion is on the video below and a shorter version is on our podcast.