Reviewed by Peter Berk, President and Chief Media Strategist, Berk Marketing · Last updated 5 September 2026
Peter Berk
He spent the first half of his career on the station side, setting rates and writing proposals. He has spent the second half taking proposals like them apart for advertisers.
No cost, no obligation. Or call (866) 747-4707 and speak with Peter Berk or one of his Berk-trained partners.
Peter Berk is President and Chief Media Strategist of Berk Marketing, an independent radio and television media buying agency that represents advertisers rather than media companies. He has worked in radio since 1978, spending roughly the first two decades on the station side: on air at KCHO, the Cal State Chico campus station, then in sales and sales management across nine formats and a dozen stations, finishing as general sales manager at 91X in San Diego. The full list is below. The Radio Advertising Bureau certified him a Certified Radio Marketing Consultant, certificate no. 589, on December 2, 1980, after an industry examination under the auspices of the Radio Advertising Bureau. The certificate is reproduced below.
In 1999 he founded Berk Advertising Services, Inc., trading as Berk Marketing, to work the other side of the desk. The agency holds no inventory and represents no station, so the recommendation can be a different station, a different medium, or no broadcast buy at all. He plans, negotiates and places national radio, SiriusXM, local radio and television, writes the commercials in house, and handles his accounts personally.
The station years
Peter Berk did not arrive at media buying through an agency training scheme. He arrived through twenty years of selling airtime for other people, in almost every format American radio has.
| Station | Market | Format | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| KCHO | Chico, California | Jazz | On air |
| KCHS | Truth or Consequences, New Mexico | Country | On air |
| KEVA | Evanston, Wyoming | Country | Account executive |
| KKAL | San Luis Obispo, California | Country | Account executive |
| KZOZ, Z93 | San Luis Obispo, California | Rock | Account executive |
| KIK-FM | Orange, California | Country | Account executive |
| KFAC | Los Angeles | Classical | Account executive |
| Power 106 | Los Angeles | Hip hop | Account executive |
| KZLA | Los Angeles | Country | Account executive |
| KABC and KMPC | Los Angeles | Talk | Local sales manager |
| 91X | San Diego | Alternative | General sales manager |
In his own words: he worked and learned from some incredible people, and being involved in a variety of formats broadened his skill set.
That range is the reason Berk Marketing treats format as a frequency question rather than a taste question. A classical audience and a hip hop audience do not listen the same way, and neither listens the way a talk audience does. You learn that by selling all three, not by reading about it. It is the practical basis for how we plan weight on major market schedules and why we lean toward news, talk and sports for direct response.
Career
Each stop taught something specific about how airtime is priced, positioned and sold. Those lessons now get used for the advertiser.
| Stage | Where | What it left behind |
|---|---|---|
| First time on air, 1978 | KCHO, the Cal State Chico campus station | A jazz program on college radio, where the habit of talking to one listener rather than to an audience was formed. |
| First professional job | KCHS-AM 1400, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico | On air in a small market, the job negotiated across the desk from the owner. The lesson that stuck: a spot that aired is not the same as a spot heard. |
| The switch to sales | KEVA, Evanston, Wyoming | Went looking for another on-air shift and was offered sales instead. Selling teaches what a station will agree to faster than buying does. |
| Account executive | KKAL, California central coast | Covering San Luis Obispo, Morro Bay, Pismo Beach, Atascadero and Paso Robles, where the advertiser is the owner and a wasted schedule gets felt. |
| Certification, December 2, 1980 | Radio Advertising Bureau, certificate no. 589 | Certified Radio Marketing Consultant, awarded after an industry examination. |
| Major-market sales management | KABC and KMPC, Los Angeles | Managing sales at two large Los Angeles stations, heavily in direct response. If the phone did not ring, the schedule failed, whatever the ratings said. |
| General sales manager | 91X, San Diego | The last station-side role: setting rates, approving deals, deciding what a proposal could promise. |
| Founded Berk Marketing, 1999 | Berk Advertising Services, Inc. | No inventory, no station contracts, no quota. The only obligation is to the advertiser paying for the schedule. |
| Longest-running client, since 2000 | Xtermite, San Diego termite control | Orange oil instead of tenting, positioned over twenty-six years across local radio, local TV, direct mail, billboards and online. |
| Client since 2010 | Power Sales University, SiriusXM | Jason Evans voices his own spots. Satellite radio is his best source for growing the business. |
| Client since 2011 | Big Lou Insurance, national radio and SiriusXM | Term life insurance for people aged 50 to 60 with health issues, bought continuously rather than in bursts. |
| Client since 2016 | Westminster Mint, national television | Gold and silver coins, with Fox Business carrying most of the weight. |
Roughly two decades on the station side, and the same again buying for advertisers. The second half only works because of the first.
What it means for you
He approved deals as a general sales manager, so he knows which asks get signed off before the quarter closes, which get refused, and which only work when inventory is soft.
Rate is one lever. Break position, daypart mix, preemption protection, makegoods and added value all have give in them, and each has to be asked for in order.
He wrote and approved hundreds, which makes padding easy to spot: bonus weight in hours nobody buys, added value counted at rate card, a reach figure with little to do with your customer.
The Los Angeles years were direct response, where a schedule either produces calls or it does not. A buy built to be measured is better anyway.
A station rep can only recommend the station that employs him. Berk Marketing holds no inventory, so the honest answer stays available.
Whoever takes the brief negotiates, writes and places it. Nothing is handed to a junior buyer once the contract is signed, which limits how many clients the agency carries.
Not sure who else is advertising in your category? We will run a competitive monitoring report for you at no charge, through our strategic partner Hybrid Media Services, and show you where your competitors are running before you commit a dollar. In many cases nothing shows up at all, and that is worth knowing too.
Get the ReportThe ten-point standard
Every plan gets marked against the same ten points: ours, the station’s, the other agency’s. If somebody else’s scores higher, we say so.
Does the station’s composition resemble your customer, or just a large population?
Does the weekly weight give the same listener enough exposures to act, or reach many people once?
Where the spots actually fall, and how much sits in hours that are cheap because demand is low.
Position within the break, and whether it is specified at all or left to the station’s discretion.
Whether the schedule can be displaced by a higher-paying advertiser, and what you get back.
How the price sits against what comparable inventory actually transacts at, not the rate card.
What the extras are genuinely worth, priced honestly rather than counted at full value and called a discount.
Continuity versus burst, and whether that matches how your offer and buying cycle behave.
Cancellation rights, notice periods, makegood policy, payment terms. The parts nobody reads until they matter.
Whether the schedule is built so response can be attributed at all, or only admired afterwards.
A proposal can score well on price and still fail the standard. Cheap airtime against the wrong audience is no saving.
Who he works with
Turning down business is not a posture. An advertiser who fails at radio for obvious reasons tells everyone radio does not work.
The question he puts to every schedule before it goes out is whether he would spend the money if it were his own. Not whether it is defensible, or whether the client would approve it, but whether he would sign the cheque himself. It rules out buys that look reasonable on paper: the padded flight, the bonus weight nobody will hear, the station added because the package price improved rather than the audience fitting.
Two other principles do most of the work. Reach is not the same as being heard: a spot can air as contracted and land on nobody paying attention, which is why frequency against a narrow group beats one pass across a wide one. And the stronger the offer, the cheaper it is to get a customer to act. A weak offer does not survive the gap between hearing a message while driving and acting on it later, and adding spots will not fix that.
When an advertiser says radio failed before, the cause is usually one of those two rather than the medium. That is why the first conversation is about your business, not airtime. If you cannot say what problem you solve and for whom, there is nothing to build a schedule around. Big Lou is the example he reaches for: term life insurance for people aged 50 to 60 with health issues, on national radio and SiriusXM since 2011.
How he works
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 recognizes 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.
BIG LOU is the clearest example. Term life insurance companies do not specialize 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 specializes 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.
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 see what your competitors are running.
On offers
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.
A common objection
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 see what your competitors are running.
The team
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 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.
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 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.
New inquiries 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.
FAQs
Peter Berk is President and Chief Media Strategist of Berk Marketing, an independent radio and television media buying agency representing advertisers rather than media companies. He has been in radio since 1978, spent roughly two decades on the station side, and founded the agency in 1999.
He started on air in 1978 with a jazz program on KCHO, the Cal State Chico campus station, turned professional at KCHS-AM 1400 in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, moved into sales at KEVA in Wyoming, was an account executive at KKAL in California, managed sales at KABC and KMPC in Los Angeles, and finished as general sales manager at 91X in San Diego.
It is a professional certification issued by the Radio Advertising Bureau covering radio marketing, audience analysis and campaign construction. Peter Berk holds certificate no. 589, issued December 2, 1980.
One senior buyer handles each account from the first conversation through negotiation, production, placement and tracking. There is no handoff to a junior buyer after the contract is signed. That may be Peter Berk or a partner he trained on the same methodology. Jenn Berk, who joined in 2015, runs her own accounts this way.
Because a station rep can only recommend the station that employs him. Berk Marketing holds no inventory and represents no media company, so it can recommend a different station, a different medium, or no broadcast buy at all.
Compensation is standard media commission built into the buy, split with Hybrid Media Services on most campaigns. There is no separate retainer, no planning fee, and no charge for a competitive report.
Yes, when that is the honest answer. He declines campaigns where radio is the wrong medium, where the price exceeds what the airtime is worth, where the audience does not match the customer, or where the only affordable inventory is remnant and the campaign needs consistency.
Off the clock
Forty-five years around broadcast leaves you with opinions about jingles. These three are not sales pages and nothing on them is for sale.
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