Howard Robertson is CEO/founder and his son Ryan Robertson is president of Spotset Media Network, a national audio media company reaching more than 12.5 million weekly listeners.

The face is covered by a sheet, but the eyes are wide open. The pulse is strong. The heart beats steadily. And that pathway to the soul we call hearing? Completely intact.

There is loud noise in the room, deafening yet clearly heard: about new directions, about who is in and who is out. But radio can hear every word of it.

Because radio is very much alive. Those who have written radio’s obituary and left it for dead need to stop, collaborate and listen.

This is how many in the radio industry feel right now. Maybe this is what happens when something gets labeled “seasoned.”

Ageism is foolish in any industry, but it is particularly absurd when the numbers refuse to cooperate. And before anyone mistakes this for a nostalgia argument, let’s be clear: Radio is not just AM/FM towers and dashboard dials.

Radio is streaming. Radio is apps. Radio is the audio companion people carry in their pockets and play through their earbuds, their smart speakers and their connected cars. Radio is digital, and it has been for years.

Nielsen tells us that radio reaches 93% of adults 18+ every single month, making it the top-reaching media platform in the United States. Not one of the top. The top.

If radio were a person, it would not be the one being eulogized. It would be the one running the room.

And yet, too many marketers rank radio near the bottom when assessing media effectiveness. The 2025 Nielsen Global Annual Marketing Report makes this gap almost impossible to explain with a straight face: Radio ranks last in perceived effectiveness among all major media vehicles, but simultaneously delivers some of the highest ROI of any medium globally.

Radio’s ROI outperforms video, display, podcasts, television, print, search and CTV. The medium that media buyers and marketers are least confident in is outperforming everything they are most confident in.

That is not a minor discrepancy … it’s a multi-billion-dollar blind spot sitting in plain sight.

There is a phrase that resurfaces every election cycle, attributed to the legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill: “All politics is local.” The same principle applies here. All radio is local. And that matters enormously.

Broad awareness is easy to buy. What is genuinely difficult, and what actually moves people from exposure to action, is local relevance. Radio has always been built on exactly that.

That local action might be tapping a screen to place an order, walking into a quick-service restaurant or choosing one retail store over another on a Saturday afternoon. Local radio advertising is the most direct, human and immediate call-to-action available to marketers who want to influence what people actually do in their own communities. Not what they might do.

If music is the key to the soul, radio is the key to the community. Radio works, and the proof is well documented.

There is a meaningful difference between reach and connection, and smart media buyers know it. Impressive impression counts are easy to generate. What is far harder to manufacture is the moment when an audience actually trusts the voice delivering the message.

Radio has that. A listener who tunes in to the same station every morning on their commute has a relationship with that station. They know the hosts. They trust their recommendations. Algorithms can’t create years of earned loyalty, built one market and one community at a time.

The research is consistent: advertising that reaches but does not resonate becomes white noise. It registers without connecting. Major brands that chase scale at the expense of relevance often find their investment absorbed by audiences who have quietly learned to tune it out.

Radio’s intimacy, or the fact that it is local, live, and hosted by familiar human voices, is precisely what prevents that from happening. When a trusted local personality tells you about a restaurant, a deal or an event, it does not feel like advertising. It feels like a tip from someone you know.

For a media buyer building a case for investment, the question is never just “How many people will this reach?” The question that drives actual return is “How many people will this move?”

On that measure, radio’s combination of trusted local voices, habitual daily listening, and market-level precision is practically impossible.

Radio personalities were the original influencers long before that term ever existed. No other medium provides the marketing arsenal of local radio: live announcer reads with genuine personality, personal appearances, on-location remotes, promotional tie-ins and fully customized audio creative built around a specific market and community.

These are not features that can be templated or automated. They are fresh every day, never frozen, and the product of real relationships between real people, in real places.

So, radio is not just holding on. It is not just surviving. It is reaching nearly every adult in this country every month, speaking their language, in their market, through long-trusted voices.

The reports of its death are not just premature … they are just wrong. So, the next time someone tells you radio is dead, turn up the volume and drown them out, like the rest of the 93%.

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