Howard Stern: Biting The Hand That Fed You

Despite online growth trends, traditional media still has ubiquitous reach to a huge audience and is largely unimpeded by the technology adoption curve that affects new media channels. A story in Forbes about Howard Stern illustrates the dangers of completely forsaking the established media audience for new media possibilities.

When Howard Stern was the FCC’s perennial bad boy on traditional radio, the shock jock had a daily audience of 12 million. Now, after leaving broadcast radio behind, and his lucrative and exclusive deal with Sirius Satellite Radio, his daily audience has fallen to a fraction of that number. Sirius has 5.1 million subscribers and certainly not all those subscribers listen to Stern.

Stern’s deal made him a very rich man, but a celebrity’s image equity is the ultimate asset. When the audience that feeds that image equity diminishes, so does a celebrity’s star power. It will be interesting to see if Stern can rebuild his notoriety on Sirius’s limited, but growing, subscription audience. Also, part of Stern’s rise to fame was assisted by sensational headlines for his flaunting of FCC decency standards for broadcast radio. Now that he is on a private satellite radio subscription network and much removed from FCC scrutiny, his media mentions have declined considerably. When you are a shock jock, it would be hard to argue with the old adage, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” For a media personality such as Howard Stern, the worst thing is no publicity.

The celebrities that are really cashing in on their image equity are the ones who are working both the online and the traditional media channels. Oprah is a classic example. She has built a traditional media empire in television, film, books and magazines. But, in addition, she has a popular website and recently moved onto XM Satellite Radio with a $55 million three-year deal. By leveraging both the old and new media channels, Oprah has worked her way on the Forbes’ list of billionaires, and her star power is growing almost everywhere.