iHM's Pittman: 'Our Niche Is...Companionship'

Bob Pittman

Saddled with debt and a bad capital structure, the company filed for bankruptcy in March 2018. But last month, iHM gained court approval for a plan that would cut about $10 billion of debt and allow it to emerge from bankruptcy within the first half of this year.

Leading the charge is iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman, who joined the company as an investor in 2010. According to AdAge, his mandate was simple: completely transform the company.

"At the time it was called Clear Channel, it was a radio company. Let's fix the capital structure," says Pittman on the latest episode of the Ad Lib podcast. "On the transformation side we really took it into a complete multiplatform company. If you look at the other players in audio today they all basically are single platform companies."

A quick glance at a few recent stats suggests how far it's come: iHeartMedia boasts more than 120 million registered users, is the No. one all-in-one digital audio service with more than a billion downloads and is the top commercial podcast producer in the business.

And yet, says Pittman, iHeart's biggest pain points are the public perception of the brand—and silos within the advertising world. Still, in a world where brand safety remains a persistent issue in digital and podcasts are white hot, it's not the worst time to be a radio company.


"Suddenly everybody is interested in audio. When I got here, everybody was interested in online video," says Pittman. "You found every publisher saying, 'I need to get a camera and start doing some online video!' Now suddenly you find, when you walk into a room, everybody goes, 'Tell me about podcasting. Tell me about Alexa.'"

If he were to tell you about Alexa, Pittman would say he loves it. It's the new clock radio. Where some brands struggle with discoverability, he says, iHeart's stations are already differentiated enough that people ask for them by name.

"We know what our niche is," he says. "We're not TV without pictures. We're companionship."