Chapter I
The TOMA Campaign:
Make Radio Top of Mind Again
Top-of-mind awareness is the holy grail of advertising — and radio has been criminally neglectful about marketing itself. The medium that sells everything else has forgotten to sell itself.
Let's start with a number that should be plastered on billboards in every advertising agency in America: radio reaches about 225 million American adults every single week — 87% of U.S. adults, the broadest weekly reach of any medium Nielsen measures.1 And yet advertisers consistently undervalue it. Why? Because radio hasn't told its own story loudly enough. That ends now.
The data from Nielsen's 2025 Global Marketing Survey delivers a gut-punch to conventional wisdom: less than half of marketers rated radio as effective — yet when Nielsen ranked actual return on investment, radio came in second only to social media.2 That gap between perception and performance is not a radio problem. It is a marketing problem — and it is 100% fixable.
A coordinated Top-of-Mind Awareness campaign — industry-wide, formats united, markets aligned — would remind advertisers, agencies, and community leaders of something they've quietly forgotten: radio is not a relic. It is infrastructure. It connects a city's morning commute, a farmer's workday, a retiree's kitchen table, a first-generation immigrant's only English-language lifeline. No algorithm curates that. No paywall blocks it.
The campaign concept is clean: "Radio Works Where You Are." Run it on-air. Run it outdoor. Run it on the social platforms radio keeps losing budget to. Let local personalities be the faces, because trust lives in the voice — always has. Let community moments be the proof: the missing child found, the weather warning heeded in time, the neighborhood restaurant discovered by 40,000 morning commuters. Radio doesn't need imported celebrities. It is the celebrity of the community.
Radio hasn't gone quiet because audiences stopped listening. It's gone quiet because too few people in positions of influence have been willing to make the case out loud. Jason Coplan, Media Advisor with Monadnock Media Group (Saga Communications) in Keene, NH, brings that perspective to every conversation — not simply on how to market, but on how to understand the marketplace itself. That understanding doesn't start with a channel. It starts with the question of what actually moves people — and radio, understood correctly, is still one of the most powerful answers to that question.
Partner with the RAB (Radio Advertising Bureau) and NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) to fund a national umbrella campaign that individual stations can localize. Think franchise model for public awareness — the national brand lifts every local signal simultaneously. Every dollar spent on "Radio Works" marketing compounds as local ad revenue climbs and the conversation in agency media-planning rooms begins to shift.
The TOMA campaign must also show up where radio is absent: trade show floors at CES and the NAB Show, pitch decks inside ad agencies, school programs that bring radio into classrooms as a career track and a media literacy subject. A nationally coordinated "Radio Day" with cross-platform amplification that forces digital-first audiences to notice the medium. The goal is ruthlessly simple: when someone asks "where should I advertise?" — radio is the first word out of their mouth, not the afterthought at the end.
Radio has sold cars, furniture, mattresses, and mayoral campaigns for a century. It's time radio sold itself — loudly, proudly, and without apology.
Signal Strong: The Radio Revival PlaybookChapter II
Bring Back the Box:
Hardware as a Cultural Movement
The boom-box wasn't just a speaker — it was a declaration. You carried it on your shoulder and the message was unmistakable: I am here, and I have sound. That energy belongs back in the market.
The slow disappearance of the standalone radio receiver is not a story about consumer preferences changing. It is a distribution and design failure — and distribution failures are fixable. When you can't buy an interesting, well-built radio at Target, Best Buy, or Amazon's front page, consumers don't stop wanting audio. They reach for whatever's in front of them. What's in front of them is a streaming speaker. That doesn't have to be the permanent outcome.
The industry needs to engineer a hardware comeback with the same urgency it applied to digital audio. Not the dusty AM/FM clock radio of 1987 — but beautifully designed, modern, personality-forward radio receivers that belong on a kitchen counter, a workshop shelf, a back porch, a college dorm room. Think of what Sonos did for internet audio, what Crosley did for vinyl. Someone needs to make broadcast radio the object people are proud to own again. That's not nostalgia — that's product strategy.
Retro-Modern Design Revival
Partner with design-forward manufacturers to launch boom-box and tabletop HD Radio receivers that are objects of desire — not utility afterthoughts.
Student Radio Restoration
Place student-run stations back in high schools and community colleges. A generation that makes radio becomes a generation that listens to it and defends it.
Retail Re-Entry Strategy
Negotiate prominent shelf placement for curated HD Radio receivers at major retail chains — not buried, but featured with signage and demo capability.
Limited Edition Drops
Station-branded, artist-designed radio units as collectibles. Limited runs. Local art. Scarcity creates desire — and desire creates listeners who own the thing.
Live Broadcast Culture
Bring live radio back to community events, county fairs, local sports. Let people experience radio as a living, present force — not background wallpaper.
Audio Brand Partnerships
Strike co-marketing deals with Bose, JBL, and premium audio brands to feature broadcast radio reception as a selling point — not a footnote in the spec sheet.
Community stations should lead local hardware initiatives — partnering with retailers to subsidize receivers for low-income households, senior centers, and community organizations. A radio in a listener's home creates a bond no podcast app can match. The station that gives someone their first real radio receiver creates listener relationship for life. That's a marketing insight Jason Coplan lives by, guiding and implementing it directly for on-air clients: access equals audience, and audience equals revenue.
The best radio receiver is the one already in someone's home. Our job — as an industry — is to make sure it keeps getting there, in every form factor, at every price point.
Signal Strong: The Radio Revival PlaybookChapter III
Radio in the Road Ahead:
The Fight for the Dashboard — and the Win
The car has been radio's living room for ninety years. Autonomous vehicles threaten to redecorate. The industry will not let that happen without a strategic fight — and a deal worth making.
Automobile manufacturers are quietly engineering broadcast radio out of the dashboard. Tesla, BMW, and others have dropped AM reception from some models — and Ford reversed a similar plan in 2023 only after public and congressional pushback. The talking point is always the same: streaming is the future. But streaming requires cell signal. Streaming requires a subscription. Streaming requires infrastructure — and none of that is guaranteed in a flood zone, a rural county, or a mountainside after an ice storm.
Radio's legislative response is already in motion. The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act would require AM broadcast reception as standard equipment in all new passenger vehicles. On September 15, 2026, the House passed its version, H.R. 979, by voice vote.8 The Senate companion, S.315, cleared the Senate Commerce Committee in February 2025 with more than 60 bipartisan co-sponsors and now awaits a floor vote.6,7 This is not a partisan issue. Emergency communications do not care which party you voted for.
OEM Integration Deals
Walk into Ford, GM, Toyota, and Stellantis with partnership proposals — not just lobbying pressure. Make radio a feature OEMs want to brag about, not reluctantly include.
The Autonomous Opportunity
In a self-driving vehicle, the driver becomes a passenger with full attention available. A well-programmed local station becomes premium, appointment entertainment for a captive audience.
Real-Time Local Data Layer
Offer automakers real-time local traffic, weather, and emergency data via broadcast — a zero-cost, always-on intelligence layer that streaming cannot replicate without cellular connectivity.
EV Alignment Strategy
Position broadcast radio as the sustainability-aligned, zero-data-cost entertainment option in EVs — aligning with their green brand narrative while locking in the receiver.
The autonomous vehicle era is not radio's enemy. Reframe it: when the car drives itself, every passenger becomes a full-attention listener. The backseat becomes a living room with cup holders. A gripping local morning show, a community call-in, a breaking local story — these become genuine destination content for a relaxed audience with nowhere else to direct their attention. Radio stations that are programming for that future today will own that audience tomorrow.
Strategically, stations should begin developing longer-form content designed for autonomous journey formats — narrative arcs, serialized local storytelling, deep community conversations that reward a 45-minute uninterrupted listen. The future dashboard is a gift. Radio just needs to be ready to receive it. That kind of forward vision — recognizing what's shifting before the shift is obvious — is what Jason Coplan brings to the businesses and brands he works with. Not just identifying where the market is going, but positioning businesses to already be there when it arrives. Finding the opening that everyone else walked past, and helping businesses walk through it first — and in some cases, again, for the first time.
When the car drives itself, every commuter becomes a listener with nowhere else to look. Radio should be the first call automakers make — and the last one they'd ever want to miss.
Signal Strong: The Radio Revival PlaybookChapter IV
The Last Signal Standing:
When Everything Else Goes Dark
Every technology built on the internet assumes the internet will always be there. Broadcast radio makes no such assumption — and that is its most powerful, most underutilized competitive advantage.
Let's be precise about what broadcast radio actually is: it is the only mass communication medium that functions entirely without the internet, without cellular infrastructure, without cloud servers, and without grid power on the receiving end. A battery-powered or hand-crank radio receiver is, in the most literal engineering sense, the most resilient public communications technology ever deployed at civilizational scale.
We've collectively grown comfortable forgetting this because the grid has been mostly reliable and the internet mostly available. But the lesson of Hurricane Katrina is stark and documented: the storm destroyed communications infrastructure across the Gulf Coast, taking down 911 centers, collapsing phone service for nearly three million customers, and knocking out 50% of area radio stations and 44% of television stations.9 The stations that survived — including WQRZ-LP in Hancock County, Mississippi, one of only 4 of 41 broadcast stations left standing at ground zero — became the literal lifeline for thousands of survivors.10 FEMA distributed 3,500 FM radios specifically so survivors could tune in. The internet was not there. Radio was.
The Argument No One Is Making Loudly Enough
Imagine a coordinated infrastructure cyberattack — or a cascading grid failure of the kind the U.S. has experienced before — that takes down internet access for 72 hours across a major metro area. No streaming. No social media alerts. No push notifications to phones running out of charge with no way to recharge them.
What tells people where the shelters are? What coordinates emergency response? What keeps 4 million panicking people informed and calm?
Broadcast radio. The signal that transmitted before your grandparents were born and will transmit long after every server farm we've ever built has gone cold. This is not fear-mongering. This is infrastructure reality — and it is the single most powerful, most underused argument in radio's entire strategic arsenal.
FEMA's own Integrated Public Alerts and Warning System (IPAWS) was created in direct response to Katrina's communications failures.11 The Emergency Alert System exists on broadcast radio for a reason. Weakening that infrastructure in the name of digital modernization is not progress. It is removal of the last net under the tightrope.
Radio's resilience argument belongs in front of FEMA, state emergency management agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, municipal emergency coordinators, and every city council with a disaster preparedness budget. It belongs in public school curricula alongside fire drills. It belongs in smart city planning conversations — because a smart city that cannot communicate when the internet fails is not smart. It is brittle.
The industry should also be the loudest voice in the room against replacing broadcast EAS infrastructure with internet-only alert systems. Several proposals in recent years have suggested migrating emergency alerts entirely to cell-based Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). WEA requires a functioning cellular network. The cellular network is among the first things to fail in a major disaster. Broadcast radio does not share that vulnerability. That's not sentiment — that's physics.
Federal & State Advocacy
Radio's resilience case belongs in infrastructure hearings, emergency management budgets, and homeland security briefings — not just FCC dockets and broadcasting committee rooms.
Emergency Kit Standard
Partner with Red Cross, FEMA, and preparedness retailers to make a battery or hand-crank radio a required line item in every emergency preparedness kit sold or distributed in America.
Transmitter Infrastructure
Advocate for sustained capital investment in high-power transmitter infrastructure. The resilience argument is only as strong as the towers that make it real.
Media Resilience Education
Campaign with schools and emergency preparedness organizations to teach citizens why owning a battery-powered radio is a household necessity — before, not during, the emergency.
The digital industry has spent two decades telling the world that everything should move to the cloud. That is a business model dressed up as a philosophy. Radio's reply is calm, technical, and devastating: the cloud has an off switch. The airwaves do not.
Signal Strong. Signal Always. That is a promise no streaming service, no social platform, no satellite system can match — and it is the promise radio must start broadcasting from its own towers, louder than everything else.
The radio industry's best days are ahead — the signal is strong, the data backs it up, and the only thing left is the will to say so loudly.
The internet is a miracle. But a miracle that requires a power cord, a cell tower, and a monthly subscription is still just a service. Radio is the signal that answers when everything else has gone dark — and has been doing it for over a century.
Signal Strong: The Radio Revival Playbook