Throughout a 30-minute “Fireside Chat” at NobleCon21, CEO Bill Wilson repeatedly characterized Townsquare Media as “differentiated” from other local media companies. The “digital first” company focuses exclusively on markets outside the top 50. Many of its 74 markets don’t have a local television station or newspaper, often making Townsquare the only local media outlet in town. Radio alone gives it 50% penetration in most of these markets, 77% when digital is factored in. “That is highly differentiated,” Wilson said. “You’d never have that type of penetration and reach in Miami, New York, or Nashville-type markets.”

Small and medium markets also mean less competition for selling digital services and advertising products, which make up more than half of company revenue and cash flow. “The fact that we are so differentiated and stick to our knitting and are in these size markets is a core differentiator, and one of the reasons we’ve outperformed the industry to date in terms of local media,” Wilson claimed.

The company’s digital expertise and reputation have allowed it to white label its digital advertising products for other media companies, such as SummitMedia. “TSQ” has half a dozen clients signed up for the white label service so far, Wilson said. “We believe this is going to be a $50 million revenue opportunity at a 20% margin within five years.”

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been growing pains along the way. Townsquare Interactive, which launched in 2013 and charges SMBs an average of $300 a month to manage their digital marketing, took a hit coming out of the pandemic when a return-to-the-office mandate caused hordes of employees to skedaddle. Adding to the disruption was a redo of TSI’s service model from a one-to-one approach to a call center/interactive voice line. “We did the right thing for the long term,” Wilson told Noble Capital Director of Research Michael Kupinski in the Q&A. “But that was very disruptive because the people who were used to their one person, some of them canceled.” The result: a $7 million cash flow loss inside two years. The good news, he said, is TSI has returned to “strong profit growth” of $34 million in 2025 and profit margins rose from 27% historically to 33% this year. The subscription-based services unit will be the company’s biggest profit growth engine this year “or close to it,” Wilson predicted.

AI Predictions

Wilson is also betting that AI will help make Townsquare more efficient and improve profit margins down the road. Earlier this year, it started using AI for design tasks at TSI such as resizing images. AI tools also monitor outbound sales calls to help with coaching sellers and listen to inbound service calls to gather info about clients. “When I think about the next three to five years, I think AI is going to be incredibly transformative,” Wilson noted.

After reinforcing the importance of radio as media’s top reach medium to the roomful of investors, Wilson spoke about its revenue challenges in 2025, a year marked by tremendous upheaval, high interest rates, bruising tariffs, a slashed federal workforce, a government shutdown, and other negative macroeconomic factors. “Advertising overall this year, not just broadcast, I think has been muted because of that,” Wilson said. Not including political dollars, Townsquare’s broadcast revenues are down 8% year to date, compared to a 6% decline in 2024.  “That’s still outperforming the industry,” he said, adding that he expects the industry decline will “moderate quite substantially” in 2026, perhaps by as much as half. “There’s some in the industry who believe it will grow over the next five years, and they may very well may be right,” he continued. “But we take the perspective that it’s going to be a traditional cash cow low-single-digit decliner. Yet it has tremendous attributes. I think the fact that so many people are listening on a weekly basis speaks to the emotional connection that radio has.”