Detroit Radio: Marketing Paying-Off For WFDF

Detroit's new talk radio station aimed at African-American listeners has built enough of an audience that it has crept for the first time into the radio listenership rankings. according to Crain's Detroit.

WFDF 910 AM generated a 0.1 rating for June in the ratings released recently by Nielsen Audio. The station is averaging about 25,200 unique listeners per week, and of those, 15,600 are black, said David Bangura, vice president and general manager at 910 AM.

WFDF ranks 41st out of the market's 53 stations, and is on par with Taylor-based WCHB 1200 AM, a black-oriented talk station of local and syndicated content owned by Silver Spring, Md.-based Radio One Inc.

WFDF 910 AM (50KwD, 25KwN)

"It's a low number, but it's a start. It had no numbers before. It was ground zero," said station owner Kevin Adell.

The 49-year-old Adell bought 50,000-watt WFDF for $3 million in late 2014 from The Walt Disney Co.'s Burbank, Calif.-based Disney Radio Group LLC. In January 2015, he began using the station to simulcast audio from his Southfield-based The Word Network global Christian television programming that's mainly aimed at an African-American audience — and is highly lucrative while giving him cachet and legitimacy within the black media community.

While ramping up WFDF's signal and working out technical kinks, Adell simulcast The Word until launching the all-talk format in March.

Adell's strategy has been to saturate the metro area with more than 100 billboards to brand "910 AM Superstation" visually (he also has a couple of buses wrapped in the station's logo), and to populate the station's airwaves with notable names, including controversial figures, to build listenership.