Radio Has an Agency Problem. We May Have Helped Create It.

There was a time when a local business owner might make the advertising decision across the desk from the radio salesperson. The owner knew the station. The salesperson knew the business. They talked about an idea, somebody wrote a commercial, somebody produced it, and if everyone did their jobs well, the advertiser wound up with something that sounded like them. That world hasn’t disappeared, but in a lot of smaller markets it is changing. Increasingly, advertising decisions that once lived with the dealer principal, restaurant owner, local manager or family business are being handed to agencies, marketing firms and outside consultants. Those companies come to the table with sophisticated targeting tools, dashboards, paid social, search, streaming, connected television, retargeting, audience segmentation and a polished ability to show a client where the money went.

Radio often walks into that conversation carrying reach and frequency. And sometimes, unfortunately, a thirty-second commercial that sounds like six other commercials in the same break. That should concern us.

The agency tilt is real

Radio people talk all the time about agencies moving money away from AM/FM, and the data suggests there is something real behind that feeling. BIA says digital overtook traditional media as the larger share of local advertising in 2025, and its current forecasts continue to show growth being driven by mobile, social, streaming and connected television. BIA’s 2026 outlook specifically describes a local marketplace in which platforms are multiplying and advertisers are shifting money faster than ever. [Source]

Borrell’s research shows the same change from the buyer side. In its survey of more than 1,100 direct advertisers and local agencies, only 38% of agencies rated AM/FM radio as highly effective, while 48% gave that rating to streaming audio. Radio salespeople still received strong marks for local-market knowledge and marketing expertise, but significantly weaker scores for innovative ideas and digital expertise. [Source] That does not mean agencies have declared war on radio. It means radio is competing inside a very different planning environment than it did twenty years ago.

Digital presents beautifully. An agency can show impressions, clicks, conversions, audience segments, search behavior, website traffic and cost per acquisition. A local advertiser who once received an affidavit showing that thirty-six radio commercials ran may now be looking at a dashboard full of charts and numbers. That is useful. It is also persuasive. But there is a danger in assuming that because something is easier to measure, it must therefore be more responsible for the result.

We may be overvaluing targeting and undervaluing the ad

This may be one of the most important parts of the whole discussion. For years, Advertiser Perceptions has asked marketers and media agencies how much various factors contribute to advertising sales results. In the 2026 study, marketers and agencies estimated creative at about 23% of sales effect. Circana’s analysis of nearly 450 campaigns puts creative at 49%, while targeting accounted for only 11%. [Source] Think about what that means for radio.

We are competing in an advertising environment increasingly obsessed with precision targeting while potentially undervaluing the importance of what happens once we actually reach the person. My shorthand for it is simple: Targeting determines who gets the message. Creative determines whether the message gets them. You can build the most sophisticated audience segment in the world. You can find homeowners between 35 and 54 within seven miles of an HVAC contractor who have recently demonstrated purchase intent. But if the ad they hear is forgettable, what exactly have we accomplished?

We have efficiently targeted someone with something they will not remember.

Radio has to own part of this

It would be easy for broadcasters to make this another complaint about agencies. That would be a mistake. If agencies have developed a bias away from radio, we should at least ask whether radio has sometimes given them reasons to. In too many operations, commercial production has gradually moved from being treated as a creative discipline toward being treated as a production task. The spot has to be written, voiced, produced, trafficked and on the air Monday, so the copy gets written, a familiar voice reads it, a music bed goes underneath it, the phone number gets repeated and everybody checks the box.

Technically, the commercial is complete. But did we create advertising? That is a much harder question. Radio has spent years consolidating responsibilities and asking fewer people to do more. The people remaining in those buildings are often enormously talented. The issue is not that they stopped caring. The issue is that creativity needs time, and time is exactly what many radio operations have taken out of the system.

When one person is producing commercials, imaging multiple stations, recording promos, revising client copy, assisting sales and solving whatever emergency appeared five minutes ago, “make it great” can gradually become “get it done.” That is not a criticism of the producer. It is the consequence of the operating model. And the market notices.

Major agency creatives are saying radio needs more

This concern is not confined to radio people. Chris Graves, chief creative officer at Team One, recently discussed audio advertising and said his agency looks for opportunities in every medium to create something that stands out. His assessment of radio was refreshingly direct: “I think radio needs a little jolt.”[Source] Adam Ferrier, co-founder of Thinkerbell, goes even further. He argues that advertisers have underused audio’s ability to create emotional response, pointing specifically to strong jingles and distinctive brand assets. Ferrier believes agencies could eventually begin using radio as “the main event rather than the sidekick.”[Source]

That is exactly the opportunity we sometimes waste when we reduce audio creative to a voiceover and a bed. The research agrees. System1 and Radiocentre studied 131 radio commercials and responses from more than 50,000 listeners and non-listeners. Better-performing emotional creative produced stronger action and longer-lasting brand effects, with above-average campaigns producing an 8.2% uplift in listeners taking action compared with weaker creative. The study also found that well-branded ads build stronger trust and that story, character, sense of place and other more imaginative audio techniques create stronger memories. [Source]

Those are precisely the elements most likely to disappear when production becomes a rush job. The recurring character. The memorable voice. The musical hook. The sonic logo. The line you can remember tomorrow. The thing that lets the listener know whose commercial it is before the announcer finally says the business name.

Frequency cannot rescue anonymity

Radio has spent decades teaching advertisers about frequency, and frequency absolutely matters. But frequency multiplies whatever you put into it. Repeat a distinctive idea forty times and you may build a brand. Repeat an anonymous commercial forty times and you have simply purchased forty opportunities to be ignored. Anyone who has sold radio for very long has heard some version of this: “We tried radio. It didn’t work.”

Maybe that is where the conversation should begin instead of end. What exactly did we try? Was there an idea? Did the advertiser sound different from everybody else in the break? Was there continuity from one commercial to the next? Did we give the listener something recognizable, ownable and memorable, or did we take 125 words of information, put them over production music and call that a campaign?

Those are uncomfortable questions because sometimes the answer is not flattering. When that advertiser eventually hires an agency, the agency may inherit a client who already believes radio failed. Maybe it did. But maybe what failed was a particular execution of radio. There is an enormous difference between those two conclusions.

Measurement can make the problem worse

Radio also has to get smarter about the argument that digital is measurable while radio is not. Digital absolutely has advantages in attribution and optimization. Nobody should minimize that. But attribution is not always as neat as the dashboard makes it look. A 2026 Radiocentre study analyzing 7.2 billion multimedia impressions and 195 million website sessions found that radio increased daily web sessions by an average of 16%. More importantly, only 8% of the eventual web response attributable to a radio spot occurred in the first twenty minutes. The full effect played out over roughly twenty-one hours. [Source]

Imagine someone hears an advertiser on the way to work. At lunch, they search the company. That evening, they click a paid-search result. The search campaign gets the conversion. But what created the search? Quite possibly, the radio commercial. That is where attribution can quietly become misleading. Search may be harvesting demand another medium created, while the dashboard gives the final click all the credit.

Radio should not use that as an excuse to avoid accountability. It should use it as a reason to demand better accountability.

The biggest mistake may be treating radio and digital as opponents

This is where I think radio has a much better story to tell. Radio does not need to defeat digital. Radio can make digital work better. That same performance research found that radio increased not only direct web traffic but also paid-search activity, conversion from paid search, organic search volume and response to paid social. [Source] Now imagine what happens when the creative identity travels with it.

A consumer hears a memorable musical hook in the car. Later that afternoon, they see a Facebook video. The same melody plays, the same voice appears and the same phrase closes the video. Now the digital impression is not introducing a stranger. It is reminding that consumer of something they already know. That is a much more powerful way to think about the media mix. Radio creates familiarity, search captures intent, social adds interaction, video demonstrates the product, and distinctive creative connects all of it.

The advertiser does not need separate disconnected campaigns for radio and digital. The advertiser needs one idea that works everywhere.

So how does radio get back into the conversation?

This is where the article cannot stop at criticism. The answer is probably not another presentation showing how many people radio reaches. Agencies already know radio has reach. What they need is a reason to recommend it. At Radiodays Ireland, agency leaders from Dentsu, Mindshare/GroupM, Core and OMG were asked what audio needs to do to win more advertising. Their answer was not to cut rates. They said audio should “inspire the planners to think differently about the old rules about radio” and create new opportunities that meet changing client expectations. They also warned radio not to undersell production simply because audio has traditionally been inexpensive to make. [Source]

That is a very different conversation from sending an agency a ranker and a CPP. It means bringing an idea. Bring the sonic identity. Bring the campaign concept. Show how the radio execution can become the sound of the social video. Show how an air personality can become part of the advertiser’s content. Show how a promotion can create something paid search cannot. Show how audio can build familiarity before a consumer ever types the company name into Google.

Former RAB president and CEO Erica Farber has made essentially the same argument from the radio side. She said the disconnect begins when stations treat agency relationships as transactions and noted that agencies are looking for “ideas, education, and ROI success stories.” Her advice was to become an advocate, educator and trusted adviser rather than appearing only when there is a buy on the table. [Source]

That is not just sales advice. It is product strategy. If the only thing we bring into an agency meeting is inventory, then inventory is all we have given them to evaluate. Inventory is easy to replace. An idea is harder to replace.

Radio already has something agencies value

There is good news in the Borrell research. Advertisers rated radio sellers highest among traditional media for marketing expertise. Sixty percent said radio salespeople had superior local-market knowledge, while 53% of agencies cited access to local audiences as a strength. At the same time, radio scored considerably lower for innovative ideas and digital expertise. [Source] That is not a death sentence. That is a roadmap.

The relationships are there. The local knowledge is there. The audience connection is there. What the marketplace is asking us to add is innovation and a better understanding of how radio fits into everything else the advertiser is doing. Gordon Borrell has put that very simply: “Your real product is results. It ain’t just radio.”[Source] That may be the most important sentence in this entire discussion.

Because getting radio back onto the media plan may begin with radio being willing to stop insisting that the media plan revolve around radio.

Stop asking agencies to buy spots. Give them something they can use.

If a campaign starts with a strong audio idea, suddenly radio becomes more than a line item. The jingle can live in video. The sonic logo can live in social. The voice can become recognizable across platforms. The promotion can create content. The copy platform can carry into search, streaming and display. Now the agency does not have to choose between radio and digital. Radio has helped build the campaign.

And if that sounds like radio doing more work than it used to, that is because the competition is doing more work too. The industry also has to invest in innovation rather than assuming innovation means reselling someone else’s digital product. Borrell recently noted that none of the 18 local media companies his firm reviewed reported any research-and-development spending, even as technology companies continue building new advertising tools and products at an extraordinary pace. [Source]

That should bother us. Innovation cannot simply mean putting geofencing or OTT on the rate card. The radio product itself has to evolve: the creative, the measurement, the integration, the use of personality, the promotional ideas and the ability to create audio that can live beyond the transmitter. Otherwise, radio risks becoming a digital reseller that happens to own towers.

AI changes what is possible, but not what is good

There is good news for resource-strapped operations. At exactly the moment radio has fewer creative resources, technology has dramatically expanded what one talented person can execute. Strategic use of AI-assisted production can provide access to custom music, additional voice textures, character treatments, campaign variations, sonic branding, multilingual executions and platform-specific adaptations that once required far more time and money. That does not mean AI creates the idea.

AI can generate music, but it cannot decide whether the melody is memorable. It can generate a voice, but it cannot decide whether the voice is right for the advertiser. It can produce twenty variations, but it cannot tell you whether the original concept deserved one. Human creativity still establishes the idea. Human taste decides what survives. That is where cost-efficient creative tools and specialized services can help smaller and understaffed radio operations compete. SonicAttention is one example of an emerging approach that gives stations access to stronger sonic branding, custom musical identity and more ambitious audio execution without rebuilding the production departments of another era.

The point is not the tool. The point is what radio chooses to make with it.

Maybe the agency problem is partly our problem

Agencies are not going away. Digital is not going away. Dashboards are not going away, and nor should they. The question for radio is what we bring into that environment. If we walk into the agency conversation selling only reach and frequency while the creative remains interchangeable, we are asking buyers to defend radio without giving them its strongest argument. Radio’s advantage has never been that we can read 120 words in thirty seconds.

It is sound, emotion, personality, familiarity, music, imagination and theater of the mind. It is the ability to place an idea in someone’s head when no screen is competing for their eyes. That is still a remarkably powerful advertising tool. But only if we actually use it. We do not need to win an argument proving digital is overrated. We need to create advertising so memorable, so integrated and so useful that an agency looking at the media plan has a reason to keep radio in it.

Because targeting determines who gets the message. Creative determines whether the message gets them.