By Emily Hamann
The Bellingham Business Journal
David McInnis has spent his career in online advertising and marketing.
Now, he has expanded to radio.
McInnis, a Ferndale entrepreneur, has bought WebmasterRadio.fm, an online radio platform aimed at the marketing
industry.
He has relaunched it as Cranberry Radio, and brought it under his marketing company Cranberry.
The stations is the largest platform of its kind that specifically has programming dealing with the digital marketing industry.
“The top names in the marketing
industry are show hosts for us,” McInnis said.
Although, he plans to change that.
“We plan to broaden the appeal and add to the programming,” he said.
The relaunch is going to mean a totally new direction for the station.
McInnis’s existing company, Cranberry, does online content marketing — like those online articles and videos that
companies release about their industry or
products, but aren’t advertising for a
specific product.
Getting into radio gives McInnis another medium for his clients’ advertising.
“It gives us more inventory to sell ads onto,” he said.
McInnis wasn’t actively looking to buy a radio station, but jumped at the chance when the opportunity presented itself.
“It was more, kind of, the stars lining up,” he said. The previous owners of the station were business contacts of his.
They gave up the station to pursue another project.
Now McInnis wants to increase the
listenership of the station.
“We want to go into all aspects of life,” he said. He’s planning on adding between six and eight more talk shows before the end of June.
He’s even going to be co-hosting one, called “40 over 40.” Every week he’ll profile a different person over 40 doing big things in their industry.
McInnis has been working in online advertising almost since there was an online to advertise on.
“I started out doing web design and
getting people on the internet,” he said. “Once you’re on the internet, if nobody can find you it’s not very useful.”
In 1997 he started PR Web, which is a press release newswire.
It takes press releases from companies and sends them to journalists, bloggers and makes them appear on search engines.
“It’s kind of like a direct to consumer PR,” he said. “It was really, really good at doing that, at driving traffic to people’s websites.”
In 2006, he sold PR Web for $28 million in cash and stock.
He founded Cranberry in 2014, aiming at the new way businesses are found online — not by distributing press releases, but by releasing content.
“All we really want to do is help
companies gain visibility,” he said. “That’s all we’ve ever done.”