Peter Berk

President and Chief Media Strategist, Berk Marketing

Peter Berk has spent more than 45 years in radio — first selling it, then running the people who sold it, and since 1999 buying it on behalf of the advertisers who pay for it.

That order matters. Peter spent roughly two decades on the station side, learning how airtime is priced, how rate cards are built, how a schedule is assembled, and where the room to negotiate actually sits. Berk Marketing exists to point that knowledge the other way.

Berk Marketing represents advertisers, not radio stations or media companies.

Why the advertiser’s side

A station representative sells that station’s inventory. That is the job, and a good rep does it well. But it draws a hard boundary around the advice available: a seller cannot recommend a different station, a different daypart, or no radio at all for a particular offer.

An independent buyer has no such boundary. When Peter evaluates a campaign, the station list starts from who actually reaches the advertiser’s customer — and “none of these are right for you” is a permitted conclusion.

That single idea is what the agency was built around, and it is why it has never taken on station representation.

Jazz at midnight, Chico, 1978

Peter was born in Hollywood in 1959 and grew up in La Cañada. He got interested in radio in high school and, in 1978, landed the late-night shift at KCHO, the college station in Chico — playing jazz, a genre he knew nothing about when he started. He learned it on the job and came out the other side an admirer of Gillespie, Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Basie and Goodman.

In early 1979, still in college, a call came from a high-school friend, Chris Applegate — “Appy” — who was working as a DJ at KCHS-AM 1400 in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The offer: come and be a paid professional.

Peter dropped out, packed a Plymouth Valiant, and drove to New Mexico. His map took him off the highway, onto a dirt road, and up a rutted hill to a small adobe building with a dilapidated trailer parked beside it. The adobe building was the studio. The trailer was the accommodation.

Appy came out and said: “What are you doing here?”

The phone call, it turned out, had been an enquiry about interest — not a job offer. There was no job. Peter had a conversation with the station owner that afternoon and talked his way into one anyway.

As Peter tells it, that is where his career in sales actually began.

Herb, and the sound of nobody listening

The studio held two turntables, a rack of 45s and a bathroom. That was the whole facility. He and Appy played classic country seven days a week to a retirement town where the average age was around 75.

Reading local announcements on air one day, they mentioned that a Mrs. Johnson had kittens to give away. They took one and named him Herb. Herb answered to his name, rode on the dashboard, and followed them everywhere.

Because the trailer was steps from the studio, Peter would cue up a long Armed Forces Radio programme on LP — roughly fifteen minutes of cover — and go make lunch, always with the radio on to monitor the broadcast. One afternoon, mid-sandwich, the speakers went silent. Dead air, the thing you never want to hear. He ran back to find Herb on the turntable, pawing at the needle.

He reset the needle and waited for the phone to ring — the owner, a listener, an advertiser. Nothing. Nobody called.

It is a funny story, and it is also the first lesson of the business: reach is not the same as being heard. A schedule that technically airs and a schedule that actually lands on a customer are different things. Three decades later that distinction is still the centre of how Peter evaluates a buy.

Twenty-five tapes, 1,800 miles, one job

By December, both of them were ready for a bigger town. They made a pact: an offer for one had to be an offer for both, or neither would take it.

They cut audition tapes, bought a directory of every station in America, packed Herb into the car and drove a route through Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins, Cheyenne, Laramie and Rock Springs — roughly 1,800 miles, about 25 stations, tapes dropped at each. The goal was to be home for Christmas with jobs.

They struck out everywhere, and were nearly out of money by the last stop: KEVA in Evanston, Wyoming. The owner, Gary Crowder, listened to both tapes and offered Appy a job on the spot. He turned to Peter and said he had nothing for him.

Appy held to the pact and declined. Crowder thought about it, then asked Peter a question that redirected the next forty years: would he have any interest in selling advertising instead?

Peter said yes.

Learning the buy from the inside

After the stint at KEVA he returned to California, hired by Gary Owens at KKAL in Arroyo Grande, covering a territory that ran north through San Luis Obispo, Morro Bay, Pismo Beach, Atascadero and Paso Robles. He became one of the group’s top account executives.

From there he moved into Los Angeles as a sales manager at KABC/KMPC, among the largest stations in the country at the time. It was there he began building direct-response approaches for clients — treating a radio buy as something measurable rather than something bought on reputation.

On 2 December 1980, after passing an industry examination, the Radio Advertising Bureau certified him as a Certified Radio Marketing Consultant, certificate No. 589.

His final station-side role was general sales manager at 91X in San Diego. By then he had seen the buy from every angle a station can show you: the microphone, the street, the sales floor and the management office.

1999: changing sides

In 1999 Peter founded Berk Advertising Services, Inc., trading as Berk Marketing — an agency built to represent the people buying airtime rather than the people selling it.

Two decades of station work is what makes that useful. Peter has sat in the chair where the rate card is defended. He knows what a station will accept, what it will never admit it will accept, and which parts of a proposal are structural versus negotiable.

Areas of expertise

SiriusXM. Satellite radio behaves differently from terrestrial — national footprint, subscriber base, channel-level targeting. Peter weighs SiriusXM advertising against terrestrial options rather than treating it as a separate category.

National radio. Networks, syndication, multi-market terrestrial and sponsorships each assemble differently. See national radio advertising.

Major-market local radio. Buying in the largest metros is a different exercise from buying in smaller ones — more stations, more formats, more competition for the same listener. See local radio advertising.

Remnant inventory. Unsold airtime can lower the cost of entry, but it carries real limitations — preemption, unpredictable availability, less control over placement. Peter’s position is that remnant radio advertising is a tool, not a strategy.

How Peter works

One person handles the account start to finish. The person evaluating stations, negotiating rates and reviewing results is the person you talk to. No account handoff, no junior buyer inheriting the file, no layer between the advertiser and the decisions.

There is a practical consequence worth being straight about: it caps how many accounts the agency can carry. Berk Marketing is not built to be the largest radio buyer in the country. It is built so the person who knows your campaign is the person who answers the phone — usually within minutes.

Peter also writes the commercials in house and subcontracts professional voice talent as needed, so the message and the media plan are developed together rather than handed between vendors.

More on radio media buying and what radio advertising costs.

What Peter will tell you that a rep can’t

• When radio is the wrong medium for a particular offer
• When a proposal you have been sent is priced above what the schedule is worth
• When a station’s ratings are strong but its audience is not your customer
• When remnant inventory will not deliver the consistency your campaign needs
• When a smaller schedule, bought better, will outperform a larger one

If a station or another agency has sent you a proposal, Peter will read it and explain what it actually contains, with no obligation to place the buy.

Get in touch

Start with the complete guide to radio advertising, or go straight to a plan.

Call (866) 747-4707
Email peter@berkmarketing.com

The first question Peter asks

When I speak with a prospective client, the first thing I ask is whether they have a solution to a problem. If the answer is yes, we have something to work with.

It is a simple question, and it gets asked before anything about budget, markets or stations. It is also the most reliable early indication of whether radio is the right medium for an advertiser at all.

The reason is structural. A radio commercial has no pictures and about sixty seconds. What works in that space is to name a problem the listener recognises in themselves, and then present the solution. An advertiser who can state the problem they solve has a commercial. An advertiser who cannot has a slogan, and no amount of frequency fixes that.

What that looks like in practice

BIG LOU is the clearest example. Term life insurance companies do not specialise in people aged fifty to sixty who have health issues — that applicant is an exception to the underwriting rather than the point of it. BIG LOU specialises in exactly that person. That is a problem and a solution, and it can be said out loud in ten seconds.

Once the problem is named, the rest of the buy follows from it. The people who have that problem listen to identifiable formats at identifiable hours, which turns station selection into a question with an answer rather than a matter of taste. The commercial has something to say and a reason for the listener to keep listening. And response becomes measurable, because a listener knows whether the problem being described is theirs.

Every client Berk Marketing works with has that same foundation.

When the answer is not yet

Sometimes an advertiser cannot immediately name the problem they solve. That is worth discovering in a first conversation rather than after a schedule has run. A good deal of the work before any media is bought is helping a client find what their solution actually is, and then say it plainly to someone who has never heard of them.

That work costs nothing and it is the part Peter enjoys most. It is also why the first conversation is a conversation rather than a proposal.

See the BIG LOU campaign, how a radio buy is planned, or have an existing proposal reviewed.

The offer does more work than the schedule

The greater the incentive, the better the response.

Peter credits the principle to Stan Rapp and Tom Collins, the direct marketing authors behind MaxiMarketing.

Peter uses that line constantly, and usually before a campaign starts rather than after it disappoints. Two advertisers can buy the same stations, the same dayparts and the same weight and get very different results, because one of them gave the listener a reason to act that was worth acting on.

Radio reaches people who are driving, working or doing something else. Whatever you ask them to do has to survive the gap between hearing it and being able to do it. A weak offer does not survive that gap, and adding spots does not rescue it. A strong offer makes an ordinary schedule look clever.

Incentive does not have to mean cutting price. It can be a free assessment, a trial, a guarantee that removes the risk of being wrong, something bundled in, priority handling, or simply a deadline. What matters is that it lowers the cost of saying yes for a listener who already has the problem you solve.

This is also where expectations get set honestly. If the offer is thin, the right advice is to fix the offer before spending more on media — not to buy more spots and hope.

“I tried radio once and it did not work”

It is the most common thing an advertiser says about the medium, and it is almost never a verdict on the medium. Two things are usually true at the same time.

The schedule never built enough frequency. A short flight spread across several stations is not a test of radio. It is a test of whether someone will act on a message they heard once, and the answer to that is generally no, whatever the medium.

The offer gave nobody a reason to act. A schedule can be well bought and still produce very little if the thing being asked of the listener is not worth their trouble.

Peter makes the second point with a thought experiment. Same station, same daypart, same number of spots — but the commercial gives out your phone number and offers the first fifty callers a hundred dollars in cash. Your phone rings without stopping. Nothing about the medium changed and nothing about the station changed. The only variable that moved was the incentive.

Nobody can run that offer and stay in business, and that is exactly the point of it. It isolates the variable. The useful question after a disappointing campaign is not whether radio works. It is whether the schedule ever put enough weight against one audience, and whether what was offered was worth acting on.

A fair test of radio looks like this: one clearly defined audience, enough weekly weight that the same person hears the message several times, one offer worth responding to, a way to count the response, and long enough on air to judge it. A campaign that fails that description has not tested radio. It has tested a budget.

See what radio advertising costs, how a schedule is planned and checked, or have an existing proposal reviewed.

Who else you are dealing with

Berk Marketing is not a one-man agency, and an advertiser signing a schedule that runs for a year is entitled to know who is behind it.

Jenn Berk

Jenn has been with the company since 2015 and is next in line to run it. She can do everything Peter does, she manages her own clients, and Peter works with her on the back end of those accounts rather than the other way round. Peter carries more weight with the existing client list because he founded the firm and built those relationships, which is a fact about history rather than about capability.

Hybrid Media Services

Berk Marketing partners with Hybrid Media Services, and Kevin Mannix and his team are involved in the buying side of most campaigns. Commissions are split between the two firms. It means a client is not relying on one buyer's availability, and it is part of why a small agency can place national schedules.

Tim Hackett

Tim runs Kings Canyon Marketing and acts as an independent representative for Berk Marketing, handling accounts when volume requires it. He and Peter worked together at 91X. He is an experienced account executive and a strong writer, which matters more on radio than it does in most media.

How enquiries are handled

New enquiries reach Peter or Jenn first. If Jenn is at capacity the account may go to Tim. Whoever picks it up has been trained on the same approach, applies the same ten-point standard to a proposal, and reports the same way. The name on the email changes; the method does not.

Peter has been in radio since 1978 and founded Berk Marketing in 1999. The point of building the firm this way is that a client relationship does not end when one person does.