In flush times, television stations are accustomed to 30 to 40 percent profit margins. But the recession is goring even these cash cows with a 14 percent drop in advertising revenue in the first quarter of this year compared to last at Bay Area TV stations, analysts say.
Ad revenue took an even bigger tumble at Bay Area radio stations, with a 27 percent decline during the same period.
The main culprit is the imploding auto industry, which provides from 20 percent to one-third of the advertising revenue for broadcasters. With General Motors and Chrysler announcing plans last week to close 1,900 dealerships during the next year, it will take years for advertising levels to recover at TV and radio outlets. “And when it does return, it will be different,” said Robin Flynn, senior analyst at SNL Kagan, who recently conducted a nationwide study of advertising on radio and TV stations and projected the 14 percent TV decline.
“All advertising-driven media have been hit hard by the recession, not just newspapers,” Flynn said. “So companies are really trying to get creative to make up for that revenue.”
Spot TV ads drop
Broadcasters in top-10 markets like San Francisco are generally still profitable, Flynn said. Outlets in large markets are more dependent on national advertisers, so they’ve taken a bigger hit than broadcasters in smaller markets. In the first quarter of 2009, spot TV advertising by the top 200 Bay Area retailers dropped to an estimated $58 million from $62 million the year before, according to regional TV estimates by TNS Media Intelligence. And Bay Area radio stations – which collectively reach 5.5 million listeners a week – saw advertising revenue decline 27 percent in the first part of the year, according to a regional study by Miller Kaplan Arase Co.
“Never seen it this bad. Never,” said Mickey Luckoff, president and general manager of KGO-AM, who has been at the station more than three decades, much of that time with the news-talk broadcaster on top of the ratings chart. “It’s as close to a depression that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
The downturn is even hitting new-media sites, with advertising down at some political blogs nearly 50 percent in this post-election year, and 10 to 20 percent at entertainment blogs, analysts said.
Thanks for staying past the first song,” says TV on the Radio singer Tunde Adebimpe from the stage of the Institute for Contemporary Art in London. Adebimpe has reason to be a little nervous: Not only are TV on the Radio playing their first gig in four months, they’re also debuting songs from their new album, Return to Cookie Mountain, a collection of hypnotic, shape-shifting tunes that has already earned raves from their buddy David Bowie.
Despite some rough edges, the new songs take flight with Adebimpe’s supple, soulful croon soaring over guitar fuzz, synth washes and stutter-stepping grooves. On a gorgeous version of “Ambulance” (from their first LP), David Sitek, the band’s thirty-three-year-old producer-guitarist, lays down a lung-taxing beatbox routine; the crowd clamors for a second encore.
The London gig is another tiny triumph for these unlikely heroes, a group of erstwhile visual artists with a far-out sound that Smiths fans can love. Cookie Mountain alternately evokes My Bloody Valentine’s noisy dream pop and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, with songs that effuse pastoral beauty as they take off into uncharted territory. “It’s not often I hear other bands that are from the same planet as us,” says Kyp Malone, 31, the band’s hirsute singer-guitarist.
Formed in Brooklyn in 2001 as a sort of dadaist recording project for Sitek and Adebimpe, TV on the Radio didn’t release their full-length debut, the even more sprawling Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, until 2004. But the album won the ’04 Shortlist Music Prize, and the band earned praise from artists as diverse as Morrissey, Mos Def and Trent Reznor. In February, they announced a deal with Interscope Records, which will release Cookie Mountain in June. The band also got some crucial help from Bowie, who appears on the shimmering slow-burner “Province.”
Bowie had been following TV on the Radio since 2003, when Sitek sold Bowie’s doorman a painting and passed along some of the band’s recordings. After surprising the group with an adulatory phone call, Bowie kept in touch with the band members, advising them on everything from how to deal with record executives to what to do with “Dry Drunk Emperor,” a Bush-bashing single that they recorded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (They released the track online, per Bowie’s suggestion.) “They have a strong link with the great body of American poetry, especially Beat poetry,” Bowie says. “The sampling, multitracking and mashing identifies them as the spawn of a techno-industrial society. I love the new record. I play it about three times a week, which is, like, saturation level for me.”
Adebimpe, 31, spent his childhood in a Pittsburgh suburb and in Lagos, Nigeria, the son of a pharmacist mom and a psychiatrist dad (who died unexpectedly last November). A student of stop-motion animation at New York University’s film school, he moved into a large Brooklyn loft in 1997; it was there that he met Sitek, an aspiring producer and painter who specializes in what he calls “children’s art with adult themes — like matadors falling in love with bulls.” While Adebimpe worked as an illustrator for MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch, the pair collaborated with their buddies in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Sitek produced the band’s Machine EP, and Adebimpe directed a creepy stop-motion video — complete with a gratuitously abused Karen O doll — for the single “Pin.”
Around the same time, Adebimpe and Sitek made a series of messy four-track recordings and began playing shambolic live shows that regularly featured a doo-wop cover of Hall and Oates’ “Maneater.” In 2003, they enlisted Malone, and later added bassist Gerard Smith and drummer Jaleel Bunton, a lanky Kentuckian who had played in hip-hop bands. “It’s amazing how many people ask us if it feels weird to be black people playing rock music,” says Malone. “That’s the most absurd cultural amnesia you could imagine.”
When they’re not on the road, the members of TV on the Radio don’t exactly take it easy: Sitek is producing the new Massive Attack record, Malone takes portrait photographs, and Adebimpe has been discussing collaboration with indie rapper El-P and directing a series of short “commercials” for the band’s Web site that feature comedian David Cross.
Despite all this activity, the band seems genuinely unclear about where its recording career is leading — despite the fact that it is now part of the biggest record company in the world. “We’re constantly surprised,” Sitek says. “That’s the beautiful thing about this band: We can sustain our sense of wonder.”
