Reviewed by Peter Berk, President and Chief Media Strategist, Berk Marketing · Last updated 19 September 2026
San Diego
Berk Marketing is a San Diego based media buying agency that represents advertisers, not radio stations. We buy San Diego, and we buy every other market in the country.
Free San Diego media plan
Tell us what you offer, what makes it different, and why radio or TV now. If you have a compelling story, our job is to tell it in 60 seconds and work to make you famous.
You get back real ideas to consider, and a written plan if broadcast is right for you. No cost, no obligation. Or call (866) 747-4707 and tell Peter Berk directly. Want to see what your competitors are running first? Ask for a free competitive report.
Short answer. San Diego radio works for a business that serves the region and for a national advertiser using San Diego as one market among several. The practical entry point is around five thousand dollars a week. What decides whether a schedule works is less which station you pick than which format, because format decides how much attention the listener is paying, and that decides how many spots it takes to be heard at all.
Who you would be working with
Berk Marketing has been independent since 1999. We hold no station inventory and we represent no station, which means there is no buy we are quietly obliged to recommend.
Peter Berk has been in radio since 1978, first on air and then in station sales, before moving to the advertiser side of the desk in 1999.
Certified Radio Marketing Consultant, issued by the Radio Advertising Bureau, certificate number 589, awarded after an industry examination.
San Diego is home, but the work is national. Most of it happens by phone and on Zoom, which is how clients prefer to work anyway.
Why it matters who you ask
He was General Sales Manager at 91X, the alternative station in San Diego. Before that he sold for stations across nine formats and a dozen call letters, from a small market in Wyoming to Los Angeles, and before that he was on the air.
That matters here for one practical reason. A station proposal is a well built document, and it is built to sell the inventory the station most needs to move. Knowing how those documents are assembled, because you used to assemble them, is what lets you read one quickly and say which parts are the offer and which parts are the padding.
Since 1999 he has not represented a station. The full career, station by station and format by format, is worth a look if you want to know who is answering the phone.
The idea that changes a schedule
This is the single most useful thing we can tell an advertiser looking at San Diego, and it is the opposite of how most schedules get built. What follows is our own buying judgment, formed over four decades on both sides of the desk, rather than a published research finding.
The listener is engrossed. It is closer to story time than to background noise, and they are following a topic or a conversation. Because they are actually listening, fewer commercials a day will do the job, and a commercial written to keep that same conversational delivery gets more information across.
The listener is tuned in but only half attending. Nothing is wrong with that, it is how music radio is used. It does mean you have to run more frequency before the message starts to penetrate, and a schedule built for a talk station will simply disappear on a music station.
Two San Diego schedules at the same weekly spend, on two stations with similar audiences, are not comparable if the formats differ. That is the comparison most proposals invite you to make anyway.
A San Diego campaign that kept running
XTermite is a San Diego natural termite control company, the orange oil treatment, serving San Diego, Orange and Riverside counties. They have been a Berk Marketing client since January 2000, which makes them Berk Marketing’s longest-running client.
We publish no performance figures without the client’s approval and documentation, so take the run itself as the evidence. A regional service business does not keep buying radio for twenty six years out of loyalty. It keeps buying because the phone keeps ringing.
This is one of their sixty second spots.
Note how the offer is introduced, developed, then repeated, with the number given slowly at the end. That structure is deliberate and it is covered below.
What actually has to be right
The incentive decides response more than the rate does. Better offers get better results, and no amount of negotiation on the buy will rescue a weak one.
See above. Work out the frequency the format demands before you work out what you can afford, not the other way round.
A plain toll free number beats a vanity number, because everyone listening has a phone in their hand and entering digits while driving is far easier than entering letters. If you use a web address, make it short and easy to spell.
One number across the whole buy tells you the campaign worked. A number per station tells you which station worked, which is the only version of that information you can act on.
Money
How a radio rate is set, and what moves it, is the same in San Diego as in any other market, and it is covered in full on the radio advertising costs page. What is specific to this market is its size and who you negotiate with.
Market size sets the floor under all of it. San Diego is a large regional market rather than one of the biggest metros, so the same weekly budget generally buys more frequency here than it does in Los Angeles. The radio market rankings explain how markets are ranked and why rank on its own is a poor guide to where to advertise.
The negotiation itself runs through Hybrid Media Services in New York, who hold pre negotiated pricing with national sales managers and general managers across the major station groups. Peter Berk stays your point of contact throughout. Senior person in front, national negotiating desk behind, and no trainee learning on your budget. The radio advertising agency page explains how that arrangement works and what to ask any agency before you sign.
Remnant airtime is unsold inventory at a discount, and it is one hundred percent preemptible. That is disclosed before anything is booked. You pay in advance, and anything that gets preempted is either refunded or carried to your next campaign, so the exposure is timing uncertainty rather than financial loss. How remnant actually works covers it properly.
The practical minimum for a terrestrial radio campaign is about five thousand dollars a week. Below that there is not enough frequency in a schedule for it to be worth either of our time. What sets a radio rate and how it gets negotiated goes into the rest.
Fit
Worth knowing first
We work with advertisers who have not already been in contact with a radio station’s sales rep. That is not a technicality and it is not precious. We are not in the business of taking clients away from stations, and once an advertiser has been quoted directly, our ability to bring remnant pricing on that station is compromised.
The practical consequence sits with you rather than with us. Contact the seller first and you may lose the option of being represented at all. If you are considering San Diego radio and you have not spoken to anyone yet, that is the moment when we are most useful.
We will run a competitive monitoring report for you at no charge and with no obligation. It shows which stations your competitors are running on, at what times of day, how many spots, and it includes the actual audio of their commercials.
In many cases nothing shows up at all, and that is worth knowing too. You have to start by knowing what others are doing.
Get the ReportQuestions
No. We are based in San Diego and we buy every market in the country. Most of the work happens by phone and on Zoom, which is what clients prefer, so where you are makes very little difference to how we work together.
No. The practical minimum for a terrestrial campaign is about five thousand dollars a week here, as it is elsewhere. What changes in San Diego is what that budget buys: a large regional market rather than one of the biggest metros, so the same weekly spend generally buys more frequency than it would in Los Angeles. How the rate itself is set and negotiated is covered on the radio advertising costs page.
That is the wrong first question, which is why most proposals lead with it. Start with who you need to reach and how much attention that format gets from its listeners, because that decides how many spots your budget has to buy before anything happens. The station list falls out of that, and it is usually not the station the advertiser already had in mind.
You can, and plenty of advertisers do. Two things follow. You will be quoted rate card pricing, which is the opening position rather than the price. And because we do not take clients away from station reps, contacting one first can remove the option of working with us on that station later.
Yes, and that is a common shape. Local radio bought market by market, major markets where the stations are large enough to matter on their own, or national and network radio when the map is wider than a handful of cities.
Yes. Scripts are written in house and professional voice talent is arranged as needed. Radio commercial production explains the structure we use and why the call to action goes at the end, slowly, two or three times.
By setting the measurement up before launch rather than after. A separate toll free tracking number for each station, a plain number rather than a vanity one, and a way of asking every caller how they found you. Direct response radio covers the full setup.
Our view is yes, and it is a view rather than a statistic. Despite streaming, FM music stations still rank at or near the top in most markets and they continue to do well for our clients. The point is not that music beats talk, it is that they need different schedules to work.
We ask what you sell, who buys it, where they are, and what you can spend. If radio is not the right buy we will say so. If it is, you get a written plan showing the stations, the dayparts, the weight and the reasoning, at no cost and with no obligation. Start here or call (866) 747-4707.
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Berk Marketing represents advertisers, not radio stations or media companies.
