Driven to succeed

ASIDE from brush and billboards, there isn’t a whole lot to see on the 270-mile drive from L.A. to Las Vegas. There’s even less to listen to, at least on the FM dial. It’s as much of a wasteland as the desert once you’re out on the I-15 heading into Sin City. Listeners can press their scan button as often as they like, but it will only stop on a handful of stations.

Chances are those stations are run by Highway Radio. Thanks to a complex system of transmitters, repeater signals and remote-uplink arrays, the tiny Las Vegas radio group broadcasts most of the consistent FM signals between Nevada’s gambling paradise and the Cajon Pass -- the adult contemporary Highway Stations on 98.1, 98.9 and 99.7 FM, Highway Country on 100.1, 101.5 and 107.3 FM and, starting Friday, 94.9 and 96.9 FM the Drive, a rock station targeting the growing market of 25- to 34-year-olds now traveling to Vegas.

That’s a lot of frequencies, but Highway Radio has a lot of space to cover.

Unlike regular stations, which broadcast to specific metropolitan markets, Highway Radio broadcasts only to the road -- specifically, the 1,100 highway miles forming the “golden triangle” of visitors to Vegas: those traveling along Interstate 15 from Southern California, Interstate 40 from Laughlin, Nev., and Interstates 93 and 95 out of Arizona.

“We have to have a number of frequencies simultaneously simulcasting the programs so we can reach the target market as it’s coming into town,” said Highway Radio President Kirk Anderson. “It’s a numbers game. The more frequencies I can get out there, the more geography I can reach, the more ears I can pick up.”

Right now, that’s about 100,000 listeners a day. With the addition of the Drive, Highway Radio hopes to pick up 50,000 more.

“About 40% of our target market isn’t listening to radio,” Anderson said. “Our surveys are showing that’s young male, young female.”

And those young males and females don’t want to listen to the Simply Red/Mariah Carey adult contemporary of the Highway stations, the Travis Tritt/Shania Twain mix on Highway Country or the religious talk, Mexican ranchero music or oldies that come through on the scant handful of other stations that can be heard in the desert.

Most young males and females want to rock, and the Drive will give them that chance.

Going against the grain of what have become ever more tightly segmented rock radio formats -- alternative, modern, heritage, classic -- the Drive will fuse them. In addition to current acts like Creed, 311 and Hoobastank, the station will also play AC/DC and Aerosmith.

“We’ve had to create our own Highway rock format that was broad enough to appeal to everybody that was interested in rock without offending anybody,” said Anderson.

Whether this new format will win the listeners Highway Radio wants remains to be seen. Unappealing programming isn’t the only reason people stay away from the radio. Many listeners simply prefer listening to their own CDs, MP3s or tapes.

“It’s the Walkman phenomenon -- 20 years of conditioning by consumer products for people to find other sources of music entertainment,” said Tony Sanders, senior analyst with Inside Radio magazine. “People are using radio in a different way than they used to, more for entertainment than for the companionship you would get from listening to music with a close friend.”

What Highway Radio is gambling on, and what has worked with its adult contemporary and country formats, is that people tune in for the information as much as they do for the music.

“So many radio stations are just a jukebox. They play music and put commercials in and deposit the checks. We have to give listeners what gives Vegas life,” said Anderson. “What makes us unique is the information about Las Vegas. What we’ve done out on the highway is educate, inform and entertain.”

All three of Highway Radio’s stations are formatted similarly, playing two to four songs before cutting to commercials, then traffic, weather, news and entertainment updates.

“First [listeners] want to hear everything’s OK, that there’s no accident ahead of them,” said Anderson. Beyond that, they want to know where they should stay and what to do once they get to town. Part of that information is provided by advertisers, many of which are hotels and casinos advertising their room rates and live shows. A lot of it is also provided by the radio station, which employs a couple of scouts in Vegas to report on “all the really current things about what’s cool.”

Highway Radio is unusual in that its stations have a captive audience for an average of three hours, whereas most stations average 22 to 25 minutes. During that time, many of its listeners are making critical decisions.

“One hundred percent of my market is going to eat out tonight. Almost 100% of my market is looking for a show or something to do right now; 50% are either looking for a room or willing to change their reservation for a better offer,” Anderson said. “Within the next 45 or 60 minutes, they’re going to make a decision.”

The sound of Highway Radio isn’t that of some rinky-dink operation broadcasting from the middle of the desert, though it is an odd hybrid of the professional and the provincial. While the music selections and announcers sound like any you’d hear in a major market such as L.A., the advertisements are entirely local. Instead of Burger King and auto insurance, the commercials are for hotels such as the Luxor and Circus Circus.

At Barstow Station, a mini-mall off the I-15, most of the people wandering in the aisles of sunglasses, trinkets and key chains are oblivious to the radio station upstairs. Right there in plain view, hovering above them in a glass-encased room on the second floor, is the on-air studio where a DJ selects pre-programmed songs, gives live entertainment information and fields phone calls along with traffic and weather updates.

Mobbed with tour buses and other travelers taking a break on their way to or from Vegas, the cluster of used train cars that forms Barstow Station seems an unlikely location for such an operation, but Highway Radio is perfectly poised to reach the 1.6 million people who drive through its target market every week. And therein lies its success.

Highway Radio is the brainchild of Kirk Anderson’s father, Howard, who was vice president of marketing and communications for Howard Hughes in the 1970s.

When Hughes asked him to find a cost-efficient means of advertising to Southern Californians, he pitched the idea of a drive-in radio market with stations along the I-15 that would reach inbound customers. Hughes loved the idea but died before it got off the ground.

Anderson ran with it, putting Highway Stations on the air in 1980. The U.S. was in the midst of a gas embargo, but the concept was strong enough to survive.

These days, Highway Radio is not only surviving but thriving, a backhanded beneficiary of Sept. 11, which prompted those within a few hours of Vegas to drive instead of fly.

“Our air traffic is down about 5% from where it was pre-Sept. 11,” said Rob Powers, vice president of public relations for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “It’s rebounded, but our drive-in traffic has increased 11% to 12% since [then]. That would be predominantly from Southern California.”

Of the 35 million people who visit Vegas each year, about 10 million of them are from Southern California. Of those, 90% choose to drive.

Catering to a listenership that exists in transit between major metropolitan areas separated by endless miles of nothing has been an enormous success, but it is an anomaly.

“There are very few stretches of highway in the U.S. that are so heavily traveled that lend themselves to this kind of setup,” said Sanders of Inside Radio.

So while Anderson would love to replicate Highway Radio elsewhere in the country, he said, “This is too unique an entity. We’ve looked and looked and looked, and you can’t find it.”

*

Highway Radio

Adult contemporary: 98.1, 98.9 and 99.7 FM

Country: 100.1, 101.5 and 107.3 FM

Rock: 94.9 and 96.9 FM