Friends, consumers, countrymen, lend Carter Brokaw ’94 your ears. As president of digital revenue strategy for iHeartMedia, Brokaw connects advertisers with listeners across his company’s vast audio landscape. 

People listen to an average of 17.2 hours of audio entertainment each week, divided between broadcast radio, streaming services, podcasts, and more, according to a 2019 iHeartMedia study. 

Because the company’s portfolio comprises all of those domains — including 850 radio stations in 160 U.S. markets — its app serves as a one-stop listening shop for consumers with different musical tastes and platform preferences. “Think of all the choices we make every day about where we can go to consume content,” Brokaw says. “That’s our competitive advantage: We roll all of those outlets into one audio ecosystem.” 

He knows a thing or two about building media ecosystems. Soon after graduating from Colgate with an English degree, Brokaw joined CNET.com. The tech-focused website, originally called the Computer Network, debuted just two years earlier. “It was the early stages of what was going on in the internet,” he says. “We were essentially writing the first playbook around the internet as a marketing platform for clients and agencies who didn’t understand that dynamic.” 

 Over his decade with the company, Brokaw contributed to CNET.com’s evolution from an interactive tech news and reviews portal into a marketplace where readers could seamlessly glide from product reviews to price comparisons linked to retailer websites and navigate content by product type or brand. “That transactional flow was unheard of at that time,” he says.  

His first foray into the music industry came in 2007, when he joined Warner Music Group to explore how to create and monetize direct connections between artists and their fan base. “My timing couldn’t have been worse,” he laments. “Within a couple of months, Tower Records and Virgin Records went kaput, which wreaked havoc on the music industry.”   

By the time he rejoined the music industry four years later — after a tenure at Silicon Valley instant messaging firm Meebo — those connections were at last being forged. He signed on as chief revenue officer for Slacker, one of the streaming services competing for primacy in an increasingly crowded field. “The accessibility of music was seeing this massive expansion and diversification,” Brokaw says. “It really opened my aperture to the wide variety of artists and musicians out there.” 

Since joining iHeartMedia in 2015, Brokaw has witnessed both the boom of podcasts and the enduring appeal of broadcast radio — especially during the pandemic. “We’ve seen a growth across all platforms due to COVID-19 because people want to connect to the world,” he says. “In terms of radio, it’s all about companionship. A lot of listeners are reliant on their local DJs and radio personalities, especially during these challenging times. We’ve added an hour of programming across 65 morning shows because people are tuning in for relief.”  

Many of those listeners also tuned in to the star-studded iHeart Living Room Concert for America on Fox that aired on April 6 and raised nearly $15 million for coronavirus relief. “Because we have this symbiotic relationship with the artist community, we could pull that off,” Brokaw says. “We reach 275 million Americans a month. That’s a big megaphone.”