I’ve been the Director of Digital Content at CMG for over a year and have enjoyed the new challenges in a medium that is one of my first loves, radio.

As a kid I fell in love with radio and that led me to fall in love with podcasting but it’s not the means of distribution I like, it’s the audio content. With radio it’s not transmitters and modulation people like, it’s listening to their favorite music, news, and personalities. With podcasting, people aren’t super fans of media enclosures on an XML feed, they are fans of the entertainment and information they get from their favorite shows.

As Director of Digital Content I have been immersed in not just audio, but websites, streaming, apps, social media, video and photos, any kind of content on any digital platform we have. When you think about it, that’s a lot It can be overwhelming. It’s lead me back to a presentation I saw from Scot Safon while working at CNN. At the time I saw Scot’s presentation I was working at CNN Radio and trying to get divisions outside of radio to produce content for us, and I felt like he was delivering the exact message I needed people to hear.

Scot talked about understanding what your brand is, what your audience comes to you for and adapting your unique value to the different platforms where you will publish or distribute. He used the Harry Potter empire as an example. The Harry Potter world includes books, movies, merchandise, theme park rides, video games and more. The first thing to be a hit were the books. When Hollywood came calling and wanted to make a movie out of the book, what did they do?

They didn’t point a camera at a book and flip the pages for people to sit in theaters and read, they made a movie. When they wanted to make Harry Potter t-shirts, they didn’t just put a picture of a book on a shirt, someone created logos and graphics and all the things that go into making cool merchandise for people to wear.

Scot’s point at CNN at the time was for all of us to understand the medium and platform that we were creating content for and to adapt the CNN brand to that platform. Could TV scripts be posted to the website and be considered a good reading experience? No of course not, we needed to write actual articles. Were screen shots captured from TV screens good enough for images on our website? Maybe in some instances, but we needed to have high resolution and good photography. Is the audio from TV good enough to be considered a good listening experience? Maybe it is to some, but it doesn’t compare to content made specifically for listening.

It’s a simple message; if you’re making a movie, make a good movie and if you’re making live TV make good live TV, etc. But when you are adapting an existing brand in one type of content to something else, you have to be aware of what the essence of the brand is to make it valuable somewhere else.

As I settled into my role at CMG and looked at all the ways we can put our radio brands into the digital world, I believed that we had to respect each platform for the type of experience it delivers to the audience and adapt the core value of our brands as best we can to each platform. In order to adapt your brand to different platforms, you have to know what the value of your brand is.

Seinfeld fans will remember the episode when Jerry and George pitch their show. My favorite part is when the executive asks George “Why am I watching it?” and George replies “because it’s on TV.”

Why do people listen to DJ’s? Why do people listen to talk shows? Because they’re on the radio?

Adapting our radio brands for the digital world means knowing why people listen to us and understanding what value we deliver to the audience. Then we can determine what needs to go into the content and experiences we deliver online. It’s not as easy as you might think.

Another person I learned from at CNN was Jay Kernis. When we started to develop our first slate of original podcasts at CNN Radio, Jay helped us develop our voice (almost a mission statement) for what we wanted to become. I specifically remember everyone involved in creating American Sauce telling Jay we wanted the show to be “entertaining.” and he told us that was too vague. Entertaining how? He really pushed us to define what we were going to strive to be.

As someone who has been a part of content production and the tactics of how to capture high quality audio, make good edits, have good story structure etc., I know that just those tactics alone take talent. There are amazing sound designers and editors that can take raw material and craft an excellent sounding show, or videographers that can shoot amazing video for editors to create videos that will captivate audiences. I’m also aware that those tactical skills need to be directed toward brand values and have a purpose that resonates with your audience.

Those are the things I’ve been thinking about as we strive to deliver the value of all our local radio brands to our audiences in the digital world.