Before we get started, I want to mention that I cover Saga with an outperform rating and an $18 price target. Of my radio coverage, Saga has the most pristine balance sheet and the stock trades among the lowest valuations relative to its peers, which is a head-scratcher, so I do believe that this is one of the most compelling values in my universe. With us today are Chris Forgy, who's the CEO, and Sam Bush, the CFO. This will be a fireside chat, but if you have questions, please don't hesitate to send those to me in your chat box. Let's get started. First, I would like to turn it over to Chris for opening remarks. Go ahead, Chris.
Thank you, Michael. For those of you who have followed the broadcast sector for a period of time, you probably have heard a lot about radio and TV's digital strategy. Saga's digital strategy, I'm going to jump right into it because that seems to be one of the bigger questions that we get from investors: talk about your digital strategy and how it differs from your brethren and alike. I wanted to touch on that. It's really less of a strategy and more of a transformational change, and it's a change in company culture. For example, our business units are now called media groups. Our sellers are referred to as media advisors, and our program directors and on-air are termed and now called directors of content and content creators, respectively. The question becomes, why is this forward-facing transformation going on now?
As Michael has said before, we were about 10 - 12, maybe 15 years late into this digital party. We were way behind. The benefit to that was that we had the luxury of observing and learning from the iterations and reiterations and the failures of our broadcast brethren. As I've said before on earnings calls, the second mouse really gets the cheese in this case. Saga's digital strategy is really based on the premise of this: that local advertising is overdue for disruption. It just so happens that Saga Communications, in its 27 markets that it operates in, are in the size of markets. 21 of the 27 markets we operate in are below the size of Market 100. We really have an opportunity to impact those markets. We have a strong impact, as I mentioned, and an influence on the local communities in which we operate.
That includes the advertising community. These local advertising markets are ripe for disruption, and here's why. Businesses now are pouring more money into digital every year. We see it in the reports from Borrell and from BIA. The rapid growth of the digital budgets has outpaced its ability of advertisers to completely understand and use them efficiently and effectively. There are too many digital providers, there are too many conflicting solutions, b usinesses don't know who to trust. In this case, simplicity and clarity with a simple click, visit, and call, and search approach for the consumer journey is what really wins. Another reason is advertisers are fed up with ineffective campaigns and empty promises. They don't like what they are buying, and they don't like who they're buying it from. Finally, there's a shift in consumer behavior.
Advertising strategies haven't caught up with the journey that people take when they buy. In other words, search and display is broken, and t here's a gap where tech meets human behavior. We believe that focusing on the influence of ads and the real consumer journey, when a consumer interacts with a product or service, this approach will allow Saga not only to win the market, but also to redefine it, and t hat's what we're in the process of doing. We also believe today, and frankly, I consider myself a purist. I've often described myself as somebody who is the Bob Costas of radio. In today's environment, you've seen it. Radio by itself is not going to be enough. Radio is powerful. It's the most powerful medium ever in existence. Without search and display to capture that action, potential customers are lost. Every radio ad only and always leads to a search.
If our clients aren't there when they search with the message that inspired them to go looking for in the first place, we're just creating business for their competitors, and w e call this process the blend or blended advertising. Local direct advertisers are under assault. Without a clear understanding of what radio does for them, they have the potential to significantly reduce their overall ad spend. I'll share that with you in a minute. These markets that pitch radio only could lose large portions of their business over the next couple of years, and t hat's no big secret. We see it all the time. We're seeing it now.
We believe the adoption of the blend will preserve and grow radio and realize digital numbers that will allow Saga to double its annual gross revenue, most of it being digital, by disrupting just 5% of the available digital dollars in just search and display, not social or any of the others, just search and display in just 16 of our 27 markets. To further illustrate, I'd like to share some statistics that I think you'll find interesting. In 2024, excluding political, there was $421 billion spent on advertising in the U.S. 73% or $309 billion was spent in digital. Now, 2025 estimates of ad expenditures in the U.S., they're anticipating that topping $456 billion and 80% or $365 billion going to digital. In comparison, radio gets just 5% or $21 billion of the total ad spend.
According to BIA/Kelsey , radio gets a pedestrian 0.6% of the $2 billion of the total ad spend from digital, or $2 billion. That's it. In 2024, radio wrote $2 billion in all of digital, which is less than 0.6% of the total digital ad pie. I mentioned some research that we had, and this is a sample and a small sample, but we're starting to see some really significant results and impacts of the digital strategy on our core business and in our digital space. Local advertisers who are not pitched the blend, we lose 29% of the existing radio business that we had prior to. Local direct advertisers that bought the blended product, and we define the blended product as search and display, their radio spend increased by 9%, and the radio and blended spend increased by 27%.
Local direct advertisers that did not buy a blended product, search and display, their radio spend still decreased by 13%. If they did not buy a blend and were not pitched it, their radio would drop by 13%, and finally l ocal direct advertisers who were pitched a blended product and still didn't buy the blend, we still saw a 1% - 2% increase in our radio spend. Again, that's a small sample, an early sample, but it's showing some things that are really significant in terms of the strategy is galvanizing, it's taking hold, and it is working, and i t preserves and grows our core competency, which is radio. In conclusion, to Mike, thank you for letting me make these opening remarks because I think it will help to kind of set the fireside chat in motion and maybe spur on some additional questions that both Michael would have and you would have.
In conclusion, Saga's blended strategy gets our advertisers wanted, found, and chosen more often than their competition by getting them more clicks on their website, more visits to their store, more calls to their operators, and more searches on Google, Meta, TikTok, or whatever the search engine is. With that, Michael, I'll turn it back to you. I know we'll probably have lots of questions, but I did want to set the stage for our fireside chat. Thank you very much.
No, I appreciate that, Chris, very much. Thanks for that color. We really appreciate it. It's interesting that Saga, to put a little context behind this, Saga has consistently outperformed that of its radio peers up until when the radio industry started to kind of pivot and start developing its digital businesses. I mean, consistently every year, Saga delivered better revenue growth than anyone else in the industry. It seems to me like maybe your markets that you're in might provide some insight into the opportunities that you have, and so m aybe you could talk a little bit about your markets and why your markets are so attractive. Of course, in the context of the digital opportunity, you might want to talk about how you might regain that throne, so to speak, of delivering better revenue growth than others.
Sure, I'd be glad to do that. As I mentioned earlier, we operate in 27 markets across the country. 21 of our 27 markets are smaller than Market 100. We focus on small to medium-sized markets that have state capitals, state universities, strong agricultural industry, and more recently, large retirement communities with high net worth like Ocala, Florida, where they have The Villages. The markets Saga operates in are known, liked, trusted. We pour ourselves into our teams and get involved in government. We've had people in our offices and our markets that have been asked to run for mayor. Many of them serve on city council and are very active in the local community. As I mentioned, we pour ourselves into the community by design.
We raise money for important causes where the money we raise stays in the community and is impacted by both the people that live there and work and enjoy life there. We're part of the fabric of the community, and we get belly to belly with the advertisers, with the influencers and decision makers to move business forward. Finally, Saga does, on average, about $1 million - $1.5 million more a month in local direct business than we do in local agency business. The reason I bring that up is the driver of the blended strategy is local direct business. The fact that we are active in the market, we're already trusted, w e're a trusted source, w e are a light source. They like us, trust us, and respect us, w e're active, t hey know us, we can get belly to belly with people that make the decision in the advertising communities, and they are direct business owners. Because of those things, we're able to impact the markets at a higher rate and a more effective rate than perhaps our brethren.
I think that's a great explanation. I was wondering, I don't think we need to get into the details about your digital start, but you did have a late start. The way I look at it, it offers an outsized revenue and cash flow growth opportunity for the company. Can you discuss where the company is on its journey to develop these additional revenue streams and the challenges and maybe the wins where, you know, as you've kind of gone on to this journey?
Yeah, we've seen significant wins. At one point, we had written in a period of about seven days, $2 million in blended advertising. We believe that, and we can talk about this in a little more detail. When we developed the strategy, and I mentioned all the disruptors that we saw in my opening statement about what we saw and why we saw it. More specifically, we found that if we can just impact or disrupt 5% of the amount of money that's spent in our markets, only our markets, in search and display, we believe we can double our annual gross revenue in a relatively short period of time. That kind of thing has already started. Recently, our digital strategy is growing month over month, quarter -over -quarter, year -over -year. July is better than June. August is better than July. September is better than August.
Our digital percentage of total net revenue has also increased quarter -over -quarter, Michael. It's gone from 13% to almost 16%. We're on a move to get it to 20%- 25% and above. From a three to five-year goal perspective, we would see our business model looking like this: 1/3 radio, 1/3 search, 1/3 display, and t hat's how we see the model going forward, so t here are a number of individual successes that we continue to have. The big piece is when we're seeing our average radio order on a month, for example, and given an average market of $2,500 - $3,000, the orders that we have realized are $30,000, $40,000, and $50,000 a month. You can see the kind of increase and the fact that we've taken almost all of the resources, the third-party resources that we have used, and brought them in-house. Our R&D has increased.
We're adding people, offsetting costs, and increasing margins because of the way we're producing and fulfilling the strategy.
Chris, I don't want to miss, I want to make sure I heard this right. Do you anticipate that your digital revenue, total digital, could be as much as 65%- 67% of total company down the road? Is that?
Yes.
Okay. All right. Okay.
You have to have radio to make it work because that's what preserves the medium that I personally, Sam, have grown up in and love. That's what it does. It grows and preserves the medium that we grew up in. We have to have it because it's the driver to get people wanted. The idea is wanted, found, and chosen. Search gets them found. Display gets them chosen. Radio gets them wanted.
Yeah. That's certainly in line with what another radio company we just had on here earlier has indicated. The other question is, I guess, if you look at Saga relative to the size of others, your development of your digital businesses and so forth, we get questions from investors. Does Saga have the skill set to develop a well-rounded digital platform? As you talked about, Chris, you're saying, hey, search alone is a big opportunity for us. How do you feel in terms of Saga developing this on its own versus seeking third-party or white-label services to round out your service offerings?
Michael, I think one of the things we've observed, and I mentioned this in my opening statement, was that because our brethren has had, we've had the opportunity to watch this go on for some time. They started, reiterated, and then failed. They would start again and fail and start again. One of the observations that we made, right or wrong, was that we believe that part of what was going on is the overuse of third-party providers. It's not the balance sheets that kills you. It's the debt that'll kill you and the amount of debt you carry. Some companies really, in their failures, kept trying and trying again and doubling down on things that hadn't worked. We had the opportunity to watch these things unfold. We believe that we've now acquired, and we have the very best training, we believe, anywhere to talent and train our media advisors.
The other piece is we also believe this is a fundamental difference of some of our competitors, that we don't allow third-party providers to be the experts. Our media advisors and our leaders in our building are the ones who fulfill and do this, t hey don't have digital experts in the building, t hey are the digital experts. We've charged them over the past year and a half to two years to be able to know the digital space as well as they know the radio space or better, and then how the two work. We've spent two plus years in just training and research and development and acquiring talent to train our MAs and market leaders, our media advisors and market leaders, and to fulfill the needs of our customers and all doing it in-house. We still only maintain just one third-party provider.
Recently, they said to us, I got to read this because they sent it to us. One of our third-party digital partners referred to Saga as one of their leading and fastest growing digital channel partners, and t his isn't a small third-party provider, t his is a well-known third-party provider that we use for our display. They're seeing what we're doing, and nobody's really ever done it like this. We're a bit of a pioneer. Is it the best way to do it? I don't know. I haven't seen a better one. It's our path.
Yeah. I know that we talked a lot about digital, but you have other growth initiatives to drive revenue as well, you know, we talked about e-commerce, y ou talked about e-commerce in the past, y ou talked about national, which is interesting because national, you wouldn't think in some of your markets would be a big component. You might address some of those other growth components that you think could drive revenue as well.
One of the things that I don't believe in, I think larger markets are seeing this a little quicker than we are. I don't think you can any longer rely on national to bring you home. It's not going to do that. When you look at network advertising, that's not going to do it either. When you see a downturn in both network and remnant advertising, where you'll hear Progressive insurance and Home Depot and the like, and they'll be in these, you'll hear a lot of their commercials on the air. Most of that is either network or remnant, where they're paying low costs per thousands for those. When you see that business, which is kind of the bottom of the drain, start to drop, then you know things are in trouble.
Over the past two years, while we're building our digital strategy, our blended strategy, we've also employed things like you mentioned e-commerce, which is a phenomenal growth area for us. We went from $400,000 in one year to about almost $3 million about a year and a half later, really from nothing, and are still growing. Our streaming revenue is continuing to grow, and we have some stations now realizing 30% of their terrestrial delivery is on the stream also. That's another challenge for our industry down the road, what happens when the stream outperforms the terrestrial delivery. , so that's another piece. In 17 markets, we have an online news service, which is basically an online newspaper. We do those in markets that are of such size that, once again, we can be a resource and a delivery system for advertisers and for the community to get news.
It started with Clarksville Now in Clarksville, Tennessee, and now we have them in 17 of our Saga markets.
I know we're getting a lot of questions about the balance sheet, and I promised to get that and bring Sam into the discussion. Before I do, I have one more question about radio. We had an executive that indicated that he didn't believe that radio will grow again, and I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the prospect for radio spot advertising to show growth outside of the political advertising cycles.
I think when people say that radio is not going to grow anymore, I think they're probably looking in the verticals that I mentioned, particularly the larger companies, because they're probably right, they're not going to see the growth in national, th ey're not going to see the growth in remnant, they're not going to see the growth in network. Those days are over. Regional, that's probably going to be a difficult time too. Fortunately for us, we are in markets, as I said, where we can impact and have an influence in those marketplaces. We believe that the local direct advertiser, you know, with all the complications and all of the confusion in this advertising space, not just the digital space, but the advertising space, it's getting much more complicated and confusing.
The more simplistic we can make it and easy to understand and easy to attribute, the better we are. That's where we're building our strategy from. Yes, I believe that local radio can come and continue to grow. We're counting on it.
Gotcha. Sam, I want to bring you into this discussion. You have a pristine balance sheet. In the past, you've made selective acquisitions. You've been very diligent about which ones fit your profile, and you haven't stretched your finances. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your acquisition strategy, especially in light of some of your radio operators that carry massive amounts of debt. This obviously distinguishes you apart from the rest.
Yeah, Michael, you're not going to see. I mean, Saga's always been a conservative operator from an acquisition strategy, and you're going to continue to see that. I do think there's going to be some opportunities as we look at what the FCC does, if they relax the ownership limits and so forth. I tell people, I think it's going to be like pro sports. You know, Team A is going to trade somebody to Team B. Team B is going to trade somebody to Team C. Team C is going to trade somebody back to Team A. I think there's going to be multi-party deals that go on. We'll be looking at our portfolio from that standpoint and say, do we want to continue to be in this market, or is it better by somebody else?
We've already had a couple of people approach us about acquiring bigger positions in the markets we're already in and so forth. Likewise, we're going to pick and choose markets like Lafayette, Indiana, that we bought, the most recent market we bought. Previously, things like Ocala, Florida, Charleston, which have done very well for us. The net effect is, we're never going to risk our balance sheet from that standpoint. We do see some opportunities in continuing to bulk up in markets and finding other markets as well. At the same time, and I know we're running out of time, I'm going to jump a little bit and talk about dividend and buyback policy because that's all part of the capital strategy. We have definitely had a significant dividend policy since 2012.
I know we have some shareholders who would like us to not do dividends as much as we've done, do more stock buybacks. We have said when we in our asset sales and potential, what we're doing, we have indicated to the market that we currently do, and I thought it would be closed by the end of September. We could be talking about very specifics on a tower sale that takes into consideration 22 of our tower sites. It's basically a low 10-figure, high 7-figure number, low 8-figure number that we're looking at in the $8 million - $10 million to $11 million range. It's significant numbers. We've committed to put a significant portion of that into a stock buyback as the time, whether it's a private market buyback from sellers, shareholders of our stock that have a desire to sell.
We do intend to continue, and it's obviously up to the Board of Directors, but we do intend to continue our quarterly dividend, and I don't expect, even though it's paying a really strong yield right now, we'd like to see our price grow into that yield as opposed to us changing the yield based on our price. We are very, very focused on giving our shareholders what we think they need and return of capital to the shareholders as we continue to do what we're doing and as we move through the transition and blend it.
Those were a number of my other questions. I do want to highlight the fact that you had mentioned in-market radio station acquisitions. For those that may not understand what that means, it's significantly accretive for you to make those acquisitions and to take out the added cost of, you know, adding another radio station in the market that you're already in.
Yeah, you will definitely see that, Michael. That's one of the things that we will focus on, whatever the FCC does.
That's right. One of the things, and this will be my last question, we have just a minute here, and I think we have addressed most of the questions that I see coming in. The shares trade at a substantial discount relative to your radio peers, yo know, which are trading at much higher multiples. When you look at their higher multiples, they're largely trading on substantial debt leverage when you look at the enterprise value. What do you think, you know, hopefully maybe the stock repurchase kind of gets the stock narrowing that gap a little bit, but what do you think would be the catalyst to narrow the gap and possibly, you know, kind get, attract investors to really take a look at Saga?
I think we need to show the performance that we're beginning to see under the transition to blended sales so we can prove to the market that the philosophy is working, as we know it will, and be in a position where we're seeing stabilization, if not growth, in traditional radio, various aspects, growth in areas like e-commerce, continued growth in streaming, continued growth in online news, and some of the events we do, and likewise show the strong ability of radio to prove out the digital strategy is working and drive business there. We get that going in the way, as you mentioned early on, that we historically have led the industry in financial performance.
Because of the transition and the money we're spending and the revenue that declined to some extent because of all sorts of reasons, economic and otherwise, I think it takes putting us back on that footing as well as to show the industry that we are going to do what we say we're going to do on the capital structure.
Your balance sheet is a big differentiator relative to your peers. I think you have a history of a very compelling return of capital to shareholders. The stock valuation is very compelling. I really do encourage the listeners on the call today to take a look at my research on channelcheck.com and take a look at Saga, SGA. I think it's a very compelling story, a very compelling total return story. With that, I'd like to thank both Chris and Sam for joining us this afternoon, and thank you for listening. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.
Thank you, Michael. Thank you, everybody.