Jim Goss: Okay. Are there any other changes in the programming you envision within Westwood One that might be notable?
Mary Berner: Not at this time.
Jim Goss: Nothing?
Mary Berner: No.
Jim Goss: Okay. You mentioned financial was one of the softer advertising areas. I was wondering since there are a number of subcategories within financial, are there some that are holding up better than others? Or are you seeing any potential for rebound in that particular category?
Frank Lopez-Balboa: You’re right. In financial, there are a whole bunch of subcategories. With regard to the first quarter, the insurance categories actually become fairly robust compared to last year. And if you remember last year, that’s a category which was challenging as auto insurance companies, in particular, had underwriting issues vis-à-vis their revenue base, and that’s bounced back nicely, and we’re seeing advertisers increase their spending and looking to acquire customers. Within the other financial categories, anything related to mortgages, as you can imagine, is weak, given the high interest rates, although to the extent that the fed lowers rates later this year and those companies look to acquire customers that could be something we’ll benefit from.
However, having said that, the excitement of short-term interest rate cuts that we saw in the fourth quarter has been muted so far in terms of fed comment this year. And then the other financial category, which is a little bit weaker, but it tends to – it tends to be pretty lumpy are from the large commercial banks, and that’s more lumpy and that can come back pretty quickly as well.
Jim Goss: Okay. And the last question, in terms of the debt exchange, I was wondering what response is required from the debt holders? And what if you – if you don’t secure that desired response, what are the options that you might have in order to affect the exchange or your plan?
Frank Lopez-Balboa: Jim, as you can imagine, we just launched the exchange offer this morning. It’s a process which will be open for 20 business days. And we’re looking forward to a successful execution of that. I’ll refer – have you refer to the 8-K, and obviously, we’ll be able to talk more about that at the conclusion of that offer and then the next earnings call.
Jim Goss: Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Operator: Our next question comes from Dan Day with B. Riley. Please go ahead.
Dan Day: Yes, morning guys. Appreciate your questions. Maybe if you can just talk about local advertising, especially in digital, like radio streaming and podcasting. I think we’ve talked about this largely being national. Just any success you’ve had in getting more cross-selling between broadcast radio and podcast and streaming among local advertisers?
Mary Berner: Dan, thanks for the question. Local has – throughout this challenging time has remained more robust in general for us. And it’s made up of, as you know, many categories, different dynamics. And it’s hard to paint them all in the same brush, but we’ve generally done better. In terms of podcasting, that was kind of a nascent effort, local podcasting. But as of Friday, we now have 11 local podcasts on the Apple Charts. So this area of emphasis is starting to pay off, and we are monetizing them quite well. With regard to packaging and selling local with national or with digital, as we said in the prepared remarks, the digital effort is really, really doing quite well locally. But as importantly, it is helping to propel our radio business.
50% of our Boost advertisers, for example, are new to the company, and then half of those in turn then will buy radio after they started campaigns. So the strategy there with having our sales organization sell a full suite of podcast, digital marketing services and streaming and broadcast altogether as an integrated buy is serving us well because it ties our advertisers closer to us and gives us a lot of stickiness and kind of longevity. So local, I’d say the punchline is local – has generally, whether it’s podcast, digital marketing services, streaming has held up quite well for us.
Dan Day: Okay. Great. Thanks Mary. And then it feels like the digital marketing services space is just getting a lot more crowded, a lot of legacy media companies like you trying to build this out or white labeling these businesses. So if you could just talk about – a little more about what separates your digital marketing services product from the others that are out there, whether there might be opportunities to do anything on the M&A front to maybe try and roll this space up a little bit?
Mary Berner: Yes. I mean there’s still – it’s still a pretty fragmented marketplace. There’s no – it’s an enormous TAM and nobody even close to having a large market share there. And I think our approach is different. We sell it as an integrated part of a solution as opposed to a separate product that we go to advertisers with and so I think in terms of the special – what we do with the product, we package it, I think, quite effectively with broadcast radio, so there’s some pricing advantages that work well for us. And recently, we’ve successfully – we’ve expanded both the range of customers we serve. So a lot of very, very, very small businesses that can’t yet afford radio. So we go in very, very small. There doesn’t – don’t seem to be a lot of companies target those very small advertisers.
But very quickly, we’re able to upsell them into broadcast radio and other products that we have. We’ve also put a big focus on focusing on companies who operate across multiple markets. So they start in a local market, and then we’ve been able to substantially increase the number of multi-market packages. So our approach is a very integrated approach. We start very small, and we build and then upsell them to integrated packages with radio and our other products.
