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SHERMAN OAKS, Calif.- Mar 27th, 2001 - In a foam padded broadcast booth, host Marc Holland grills NetZero CEO Mark Goldston on the future of the Internet.
How will the free Internet access provider fare with its new fee-based service?
What about the meltdown of Yahoo's stock price?
Holland poses each question in a distinctive mellow baritone as an engineer and producer listen and twiddle dials from behind the glass.
This isn't just another talk radio show. It's the Sky Radio Network - which, strangely, isn't radio at all.
Sky Radio is a pre-recorded program heard on the in-fight audio entertainment systems of United, American, Northwest, Trans World and America West airlines.
It consists of taped interviews with CEOs who pay to get on the air and of well known business leaders and celebrities who get on for free.
Holland's producer will take a 15-minute interview such as the one with Goldston, pare it to a pithy 5 minutes and package it with others. The Finished product might become something like Hoover's Business Channel on American or The Career Channel by Vault.com on America West or just plain Sky Radio.
The idea is catching on. Holland expects Sky Radio to reach $7.5 million in revenue this year, up from $4.8 million last year.
It comes from:
• Publicity-hungry CEOs pay $5,000 to $100,000 for an interview segment on Sky Radio. For instance, $10,000 buys a package that will air on both American and Northwest with a potential audience of 6.8 million, Holland says.
• Commercials, which are sandwiched between interviews or at the end of shows. A package of commercials on all five airlines to be aired over several months begins at $10,000.
• Corporate sponsors, such as Yahoo, CNET and Hoover's Online pay to attach their name to an entire program.
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| In the sky: Marc Holland says coaching some CEOs can be difficult. |
Sky Radio isn't always the most compelling listening.
Holland says coaching some CEOs to talk to the point is the "hardest part of my job." One guest had so much trouble that he insisted the entire interview be scripted.
But that's partly because Holland says he won't allow the interview subjects to simply hype their companies. Rather, they need to dish out advice or discuss issues.
To spice things up, Holland includes interviews with bigger-name CEOs such as Goldston, sports stars and celebrities who get on the air free.
The company's "Big Name List" includes discount brokerage founder Charles Schwab, skier Picabo Street, basketball great Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams.
Sky Radio pays airlines to run its programming. The finished interviews are sent to AEI, in Orange, Calif., which bundles them with music channels to give airlines a complete audio package.
Sky Radio has never conducted a formal survey to find out how many listeners it has. Holland says that if only 10% of the fliers on United alone tuned in at one point during a two-month period, he would reach 1.6 million listeners.
More significantly, many air travelers - especially those who would tune into business programming - are the kind of high income customers that advertisers covet.
NetZero's Goldston says he was surprised by the response to his first interview on Sky Radio.
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| CEOs speak: Mark Goldston, left, CEO of NetZero, is interviewed by Marc Holland, CEO of Sky Radio, about the future of the Internet. Goldston says his first interview on Sky Radio resulted in "tons of e-mails." |
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Anne Rice, novelist:
"I don't read for pleasure really. I
have to be getting something out it at every moment. Pleasure isn't enough. I'll read things just to increase my vocabulary — or not so much increase it, but to bathe myself in the luxury of language." |
Vince McMahon, XFL founder:
"lf I had my way, I'd probably yank
most CEOs right out of their office and Wall Street or Madison Avenue or wherever they are, and pull them down to street level, stick their nose in the sewer right there on the street and hold it there for about a day and half just so they understand what life is truly about on the street" |
Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg:
"When I first started, I wrote a check to the firm's checking account for $300,000 thinking that that would be enough to get us going for a while. It is laughable by how much I missed that." |
"We have tons of e-mails from people who have heard this. People know what it is," he says. "The thing that's really neat is that the audience is captive. If they like the product, they're going to listen."
Sky Radio grew out of Holland's previous business. The 41-year-old, born on Long Island and raised in Hollywood, was in the so-called "talking annual report" business.
Magazine readers could dial a special phone number listed in an advertisement to hear a description or other information about a promising company.
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Holland says he took that formula and borrowed the concept of an in-flight audio program he heard 20 years ago that talked about developments in the advertising industry. The result was Sky Radio.
Next is TV. As airlines show more television reruns in addition to movies, Holland has expanded his business show idea to in-flight video. That show is called CEOLive, a name that is also lending itself to the license plates of Holland's Mercedes-Benz CLK 430 convertible.
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He refers to the show's format as "CNBC meets MTV" because of the emphasis on hard business information packaged with flashy camera work and graphics that give it the look of a rock music video. The company's rates begin at $26,500.
Holland says he hasn't attracted many competitors so far. His rivals are in passengers bags. "My biggest competition is books and laptops," he says.
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