Dan Mason, president and CEO of CBS Radio, and his crew rolled into San Francisco this week to talk about radio in the digital age. Mason told the crowd of mainly media buyers, radio personalities and sales executives that radio is still very much relevant in this new digital age. Mason also pointed out that the prediction of the demise of radio has a long history dating pack to the advent of the launch of TV. More recent forecasters have continued on with this theme, saying that 8-track tapes, cassettes, CD’s, satellite radio and iPod’s would kill radio. However, in this round of innovation, it seems that CBS plans on embracing the change as demonstrated in its launch of the new play.it media player. The objective seems to be to target the 9-5 at work listening audience, who may not be able to receive a radio signal or bring a radio into their work space.

The player which will be marketed jointly with AOL seems to be ahead of the pack in web based media players. Now listeners will be able to listen to radio stations from around the country from a single radio station’s website. So if you are a music fan and you enjoy listening to Alice Radio in San Francisco, and you hear news of Elliott Sptizer, you can click over to CBS’s NYC news station, WCBS to get the low down.

But this is only one interesting feature of the player, which soon will have a Pandora-like feel to it. Listeners will be able to create their own radio station by typing in an artist and getting suggestions of other similar artists. The listener will then be able to easily rank the artists by dragging them closer to the start of the play list. If for instance, you are a big Springsteen fan, but hate the Eagles — you can ban the Eagles from ever playing on your station.

There are multiple benefits to advertisers with this new platform, as banner ads can now be contextually placed in the media player and synced with the content of the audio feed. For instance, if a music station is promoting a concert, a graphic could appear on the player during the ad or even when the talent talks about the concert.

I asked Mason about allowing advertiser generated content to be integrated in the player, and he said it’s open for discussion. I wondered if I could place some of the financial programs that I syndicate into the player, so a listener could create their own business talk radio station. All I can report right now is, stay tuned…

Matthew

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