Chris Bungo and Rocco Macri met at WJPZ when they were working in production and promotions, respectively. Their friendship has led to a business partnership of over 3 decades, creating the first-of-its-kind software for radio stations, Promosuite.
As members of the Class of 86, today's guests have the rare vantage point of joining the station on AM, but witnessing the transition and the power of the move to the FM dial. In fact, you'll hear a hot-rocking, flame-throwing promo Chris produced for the station's first FM birthday in 1986. Did it sound a lot like Z100? Depends on how you define "statute of limitations." (Spoiler: there are lasers.)
Chris tells a great story of how he had to beg, borrow, and plead to CRANK UP 89.1's audio processing to make it sound more like a CHR.
Following graduation, Rocco was working in promotions at Hot 103 in New York, Emmis's predecessor to Hot 97. But there was no software to do his job. He enlisted his buddy Chris to figure out what they need. It was a lot more than either of them bargained for, but PromoSuite was born.
In the time since, they've hired notable WJPZ alumni like Jana Fiorello ('02) and Christy (Ogonis) Vincent ('05). Chris and Rocco share how the company has grown, and how the lessons they learned at Z89 inform them to this day. We also talk about what's next for the company, as their new products seek to serve both giant radio companies and mom and pop stations alike.
Rocco also talks about the starts of the Alumni Association and Banquet, and the great pride he feels to have seen these entities become as successful as they are.
More: https://promosuite.com/
Join Us in Syracuse for Banquet on March 4th: https://bit.ly/WJPZ50BanquetTickets
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast is produced by Jon Gay '02 and JAG in Detroit Podcasts
JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. Joined by a couple of Hall of Famers today from the class of 1986. That is Chris Bungo and Rocc Macri from PromoSuite and many other things that you will know them for. And if you've worked at a radio station, chances are you've used their software if you've worked in the commercial radio industry.
Welcome gentlemen.
Chris: Hi.
Rocco: Hey. Thanks for having us.
JAG: All right. We're gonna start, as we usually do on these podcasts with getting to Syracuse. Chris, we'll start with you. Your journey there and how you got involved with the station.
Chris: So my journey to Syracuse I've gotta thank my old high school band director, Peter Bore.
My grades in high school were, eh. So we all know Syracuse has very high standards when it comes to academic credentials. But he was the one who actually talked to the band director up there. And that was apparently what pushed me over the edge and got me into Syracuse. I landed at Lawrinson Hall, 14th floor, and that happened to be the same floor as Steve Simpson, who is a WJPZ alum.
JAG: And a future guest on this podcast.
Chris: Oh, good score. Great. He's working in Minneapolis now, I think. So Steve Simpson was on my floor in my first year. Was working at AER, but not really getting anywhere. At AER, they had me doing news stories, which was just horribly uninteresting to me.
One day, Steve Simpson came up to me, I guess he heard me on AER and said, Hey, you know what? We have for this other station, WJPZ. I'm like, huh? He's yeah. It's like top 40 music. If you want to be a DJ instead of doing news. And I was like that's interesting. And I think, I don't know if Chris Mossman was also on our floor, but somehow I got hooked up with Chris Mossman as well, who was the GM.
And the two of them convinced me to take a 4:00 AM to 6:00 AM shift on Tuesday mornings. It was a ball. So that's how I got to WJPZ. And at that point we were only broadcasting on the internal SU campus cable system. And whoever the company was that did cable for the city of Syracuse as well, we were also on there.
So we would actually get calls from people out in the city as well. That's also when I met Chris Godsick. I think you talked to him already as well. He was the shift before me, I think he was doing two to four. And so that's how I met him. And he was just like, so much energy.
And I was like, ah, I'm at the right place. This is the place for me.
JAG: Rocco, tell me how you ended up at the station and meeting Chris.
Rocco: My credit goes to Marv Albert. I read a book called Crazy About the Knicks, and when I was reading about the author, I saw that he went to Syracuse. I was about 14 at the time and I started realizing that, just about every broadcaster that I admired went to Syracuse and at the time I wanted to be a broadcaster and speak on the radio and do play by play for sports.
So when I got to Syracuse, I went to WAER my freshman year, and there was like a list of five or six things you had to do, a lot of hoops to get on the air. And I have to admit, my freshman year, I wasn't that motivated. In my sophomore year I started writing for the Daily Orange and I found that sports writing was more my thing.
And I had given up on radio, but also I lived next door to the late, great Mike Nelson. And Jeff Erskine, who were both at the station and they were telling me all about it. And hey, it's just on the cable channel right now, but eventually we're gonna go on to FM and you really should join now because it's really popular.
And let me tell you that they know what they were talking about. So I ended up doing a 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM shift. Steve Simpson was our program director at the time and I remember doing a couple of air check sessions with him and that's when I realized deep down that I was probably not going to be Bob Costas or Marv Albert, but I really caught the radio bug and I was at the time an advertising major and Chris Mossman and Larry Barron, who were running the station knew.
And I was working at University Advertisers, so I had asked them if I can have WJPZ as my account, which they did. And then a couple months later, the promotion director on Jim Safiris, is that correct, Chris? Jim had graduated in December, so there was an opening and it was right before we went on FM. So that's how I got involved.
It was really through the back door. I became the promotion director. I had no idea what the promotion director even meant at that time. I'll tell you a quick little story. On the night that we went on the air, January 30th, 1985, Chris Mossman was the first DJ. He gave away tickets to a movie premiere, and when they were done, Chris and Larry handed me a list and I'm like, what is this?
And they said, it's the guest list. I go, what am I supposed to do with it? And they're like, you're the promotion director. I'm like, oh. Anyway, I don't wanna give away what other stories I want to talk about, but it's amazing that I went from being so naive on the first night of FM and less than two years later, I was working in a New York City radio station in promotions, just showing how amazing Z89 is and how instrumental in my life and career.
JAG: I've got a tote board here in the studio. Let me just put one more hash mark on folks who got to Syracuse and went to WAER and wanted to be the next Bob Costas, but then ended up at JPZ and having a much better time. The list seems to be growing with each recording than I do here of this podcast, so how did you guys meet?
Rocco: Yeah, as promotion director, I said, how do we get this on the air? I want to promote this. I don't remember what the first thing was that I wanted to promote and they said, you gotta write a script and go talk to the production director. I think it was Scott Hunter who was the public service director on the initial FM senior staff. He brought me in to meet Chris. And Chris was like big smile on his face. So excited to meet me. And for the first couple months he kept that smile on his face. Now that I've known him. How many years later? 37 years later, we don't smile as much with each other anymore, but I'm gonna say something really nice, Chris. Don't listen.
That was a very pivotal. The second most pivotal moment in my life. The first was meeting my wife and walking by her when she was at a reception desk at Nestle Foods and when I was temping there. But the second was meeting Chris cuz really that one meeting set up the rest of my career.
I ended up working in radio for 16 years and starting a company with Chris and we're 32 years into that. Chris, it was an honor meeting you on that day.
Chris: Yes, it was.
JAG: We've talked to a few other alumni from the mid-eighties that were there for the big transition over to FM. Take me through that through your eyes. You said Mossman was the first one on the air and you launched the FM signal. All of a sudden you can hear the station on campus over the actual air into the city as well, from the top of Mount Olympus. Take me through the evolution of the station as you become, all of a sudden, a big time player in the market.
Chris: Oh boy. Let's break this down a bit, in the spring of 1985, we were both juniors and nothing but respect and thanks and gratitude for the people who actually got us on the air and let's mention them here. Eric Fitch, Hall of Famer as well, who basically wired up the whole works. Chris Mossman, Bob Flint. Was Ellenbogen involved Rocco?
Rocco: Yes. He got the funding for the transmitter.
JAG: I'll do a little cross promotion here, Chris, because the three gentlemen you just mentioned, along with Phil LoCascio, we have a podcast of the four of them together talking about the story and it won't surprise you to know that when we recorded the podcast, Eric was on a headset at a transmitter site on top of the Prudential Tower in Boston doing now what he was doing then.
Chris: So we and Rocco, correct me cause my memory isn't always the best, but that semester, we weren't really all that involved in shaping the station. It was in the summer of 1985 that Rocco and I got together and started really brainstorming about, hey, how could. Make this station exciting and Z100 New York-ish.
Because that was really when Z100 in New York was at their pinnacle. And we both lived in the New York area too. So what I did that summer was I just recorded hours and hours of Z100. I then would take their promos and their top of the hours and whenever I could isolate a little bit of an explosion or a laser or some sort of sound effect from one and then get the continuation of it from another, I was able to splice those all together.
And by the time we got back in August of 1985 up to campus, We had our first sound effects library and Rocco, do you wanna pick it up from there as to what we did in the summer of 85?
Rocco: I'm just hoping the statue of limitations for stealing. All of that has passed and you will not get in trouble.
JAG: 37 years. I think we're okay.
Rocco: Yes. And Malright broadcasting is no longer in existence,
Chris: Yeah. IHeart the successor. But anyway, so we got together over the summer and we talked about, what could we be doing and all of this. Dave Dwyer was the PD after we and Rocco, you can explain some of the ideas we came up with, but we ended up presenting them to Dave Dwyer, the program director.
He was like, this is fantastic. He was also from the New York area, so he's familiar with Z100. And why don't you explain Rocco some of the things that we actually did starting in September of that year, 1985?
Rocco: Yeah, so when Chris talks about the founders of the radio station, me and Chris, I guess we could say we drank the Kool-Aid on that.
We bought into it completely and we knew that, the charter of the radio station was to be a CHR. We really admired and appreciated the way the station came out, in terms of the music that Mary Mancini put together with who else? With Mark Humble and Dave Levin. And it was like combining, it was all done in the CHR style, but it was really trying new music, new wave at the time. I think it was called,
A lot of it coming from Europe. And so the idea was how do we sound more like a top 40 station so that the DJs are getting the right experience and we really have that energy of a Z100. But at the same time, we kind of honor or stay within the format of the new music that we were playing.
Because that new music was also satisfying a little bit of a need to keep the college students at bay about wanting us to be a block format. Because at least you were getting that, that new music feel. But we were still doing a top 40 format. So the idea that we came up with ended up being Future Radio Z89 instead of hit radio, and we played the Future hits.
I think the first liner of the hour, maybe you can get this, Chris. Was at the 04. We played the hits before their hits. What was the exact liner? Do you remember?
Chris: Z 89. We play the hits before they're hot.
JAG: I like it.
Rocco: That wasn't it. It was very close to that though. So that was the concept really.
It was just reworking, putting a little bit of a marketing spin on the programming and everybody bought into it and we all worked together and the station really started to sound great in the fall and we carried that over.
Chris: So let me pick up on that. The station really started to sound great.
I was in a senior staff meeting, and this was in the spring of 1985. The aforementioned Eric Fitch put together a beautiful radio station, a wonderful sound to the radio station. It was perfect for a classical music format, the audio processing. So I'm sitting in this senior staff meeting and Rob Weingarten, who was the sports department, head of the sports department said:
Fitchy, how come I can always tell whenever we go from a song that's on cart to a song that's on vinyl, cuz we had turntables back then. Also for the older songs, the recurrents, I can always tell when it's, it goes over to the vinyl. And Fitch said because that's the source, that's the content. It just sounds different.
And I was thinking I don't think that should really be the case. Larry Barron was our GM starting in the summer of 1985 and took us through the summer of 86 and I said to Larry, A CHR station needs to sound very processed. And it needs to sound dense and just smooth. It's a wall of sound.
This is the 1980s.
JAG: A continuous wall of sound. I had a program director in the late 2000's who came up around 1990, and that was one of his things. The continuous wall of sound. I remember that.
Chris: Yeah. So I said to Eric Fitch, why can't we turn up the compression on our Optimod? He said, no, then we'll lose all the musicality.
I said, but it's not about the musicality, it's about the energy. And he and I went back and forth on that and it was like, it was a no-go. He said we've got compressors on the microphones that makes everyone sound better. I'm like, yeah, but that's only part of it. Fast forward to the very end of August, 1985.
Larry Barron's in town. I'm saying, Larry. Larry, you gotta let me turn up the compression. I gotta turn up the compression. We gotta sound like a CHR. And I had to explain to him the whole thing about what compression is. He's like I don't know if we should we really do it. And I'm like, Larry, it's not like when we're playing Huey Lewis and the News., it's gonna sound like Sade coming out. It's still gonna be Huey Lewis in the news coming out of the radio. It's just, trust me. So he said, okay. So I went up to the top of Mount Olympus to the transmitter and the Optimod and cranked it up and that did it. We were sounding, I wanna say competitive, with the other stations in town.
Even though competing for ratings, that was drilled into us that, hey, we're not here for ratings. We're students. We're all learning. We're gonna make mistakes, et cetera, et cetera. Don't worry about making mistakes. It was never about getting the ratings. But I did want us to sound professional.
JAG: So this is summer 86?
Chris: This is summer of 85. This is the end of August, 1985.
JAG: Okay, so let me hop in for a second. Rocco doesn't know this is coming, but Chris sent me a promo from shortly thereafter. So this is January of 86. This is promoting the one-year anniversary party. It's a promo that is so perfect for the era and, fair warning before I hit it.
It's almost two minutes long, which in hindsight is awesome. Here it goes.
Chris: That was produced using two reel to reel tape recorders. Two cart machines. In the production studio, the mics were Beyer mics. There was no compression on the mics, no limiters, no nothing. And that promo was, I believe that was written by Scotty Bergstein.
Rocco: Yeah, I was gonna, let me jump in. I wanna just say that, one of your questions, JAG, is what skills did you learn at the radio station. And delegation.
I learned and this is a perfect example of it. Me and my team, which included Jeff Bluman, who was our promotion director at the time. I was actually at this point marketing consultant. We put together all the events and the schedule and so I basically wrote out an outline. And Hot Shot Scott, he wrote it and obviously was the voice of it as well.
And obviously, what he did in his career. Is he one of the 50?
JAG: We're trying to get him locked and loaded? Yeah. Trying to get him in for sure.
Rocco: All right. We gotta get him on here. He's just had a tremendous career in advertising, so between him and then Chris producing it, and when we talk about everybody's special talent, that Chris has alluded to it here.
Chris really had the ability to do a lot with little and make the station sound fantastic. And so I got to play this promo when I was looking for jobs. And meanwhile, I had nothing to do with producing invoicing or writing it . But I claimed it all to be mine. And I continued that throughout my career. And I do that today.
Chris: And what was so great working with those guys on that particular promo, they were all very coachable. Jonathan Trowan, who is that high pitch. He wasn't too keen on that, but I said. When we put your stuff together with the rest of this thing, you're gonna see that it's gonna fit in perfectly.
Dave Dwyer was the "Friday, January 31st." He was that voice, and there's one part in there where Scotty hits it to the beat of the music when he says, We will be One. Year. Old. And he does it right in the thing. And I told him, I said, listen, you've gotta do it just because the music that I'm gonna have underneath this, you gotta get it right on each beat.
They were all very coachable and receptive to what my vision was for how this thing should be.
JAG: What amazes me having graduated in 2002 is hearing the voices. They sound somewhat like the voices of my classmates. I don't think the voices of 18, 19, and 20-year-old kids have changed all that much over the years.
Chris: No. This is something else that I wanted to mention. It was wonderful being at the station at that time. Because we had the right mix of, we had access to this brand-new FM station. We had a great group of people. The talent that all came together. During that time was just amazing. And we were 18, 19, 20-year-old kids, but we were producing stuff that was better than 93Q.
Rocco: Yeah. You asked earlier, like about the impact going on FM. I was at staff meetings before we were FM. And this is from memory from a long time ago, so it might not be exact, but maybe 30, 40 people showed up. We did our first staff meeting after being on FM and there was over 200 people.
The promotion department used to be a promotion director and assistant promotion director. I had so many people interested in being a part of the promotion department. We ended up creating five senior staff physicians and then five junior staff physicians. Like I had a 10-person department. The junior staff was more like, I guess interns and assistants, but it gave them a foot in the door to be, on senior staff in the future.
It was just incredible. The talent that we worked with. Sometimes I forget, and then you go back to a Banquet and you hang out with somebody you hadn't hung out with in a. Like I remember, it's unfortunately Larry passed away a couple years ago. But I remember he came back to a banquet.
I hadn't talked to him for 10, 15 years. And just in that conversation, I'm like, man, how was this kid so smart at 20 years old? It's like I had forgotten how brilliant he was at being a manager at 20 years old, like stuff that he was doing. I learned later on as a manager.
Chris: Hold on a minute.
Remember last week talking about Larry and his skills? Rocco and I were dealing with promo suite business and I said, Rocco, look, I'm the head of this department. And to quote Larry Barron, okay, I've heard all of you. I made my decision, we're sticking with my decision. I picked that up from Larry Barron.
A 20 year old Larry Barron, general manager.
JAG: He is certainly a name that has come up on this podcast so many times and it's a real shame that we recently lost him and we're not able to have him on the show himself, cuz I can't tell you I'm losing count of the number of Larry Barron stories have been told on the podcast.
Certainly an amazing impact on the radio station.
Rocco: I wanted to talk about the very first Banquet. Because publicly whenever I've been asked about why I created the first banquet, I always say in my humor that I did it selfishly cuz I wanted to have somewhere to go back to in Syracuse. I never joined a fraternity. Z89 was my fraternity. I'm sure you've heard that a million times.
JAG: That's how I feel for sure. Yeah.
Rocco: And it's funny I said that right from the beginning and I said jokingly, but over the years it's. A proud moment to hear so many people say that the banquet has become this destination on all of our calendars, even in the years we don't go, we join on Zoom now and we get to hang out with people that we either went to school with or people that we became friends with after school.
It's an incredible thing. It's something that I feel very proud of. But I also wanted to put out there that there was another reason for the original banquet, and it was part of a brainstorming. And mainly me and Chris, as I said, that, we really believed in the charter and understood what the founders were trying to do and what we realized as we were ending 1985, going into 1986 on our first birthday, that nobody on campus and a lot of the students that were working at the station didn't realize that the station had been around for so many years before FM.
It's like it started on January 30th, 1985. And we wanted to make sure that there was this understanding of what the history was. So at the first banquet not only did we invite all the older alumni that we had, we didn't have a lot of information, but we tried to invite all the older alumni.
We also wrote up a history of WJPZ, a booklet that is still floating around at banquets now. And that was really the goal. And that's what it's so exciting to be part of this WJPZ at 50. Because that's what we're doing here, right? We're acknowledging that the station started before FM and I congratulate you for doing that.
The fact that the Banquet, for so many years, Ben Green or me, Ben Green, graduated 85, I graduated 86, were always the oldest alum, so it was a battle between us to do the toast, right? I haven't given a toast in 15 years, so I'm very proud of that. That means that, we've done a really good job of getting the older alumni to come back.
JAG: You've got some of the originals like Greg Hernandez coming back every year now, which is awesome. So your point is certainly well taken. Yes. And Rocco, in addition to doing the banquet, another thing that you're well known for in the alumni association is well starting the Alumni Association in that same vein.
Rocco: Yes. That came right after graduation and the good news was that I did not get a job right off the bat. I had to wait six months from graduation before I started at Hot 103 in New York. So in those six months, I took a temp job at Nestle Foods, which is where I met my wife. And the other thing I did was had access to a computer.
So me and Chris started working on putting together the alumni database, and I had the idea of an alumni association. We started to put that together. Listen, there's nothing I've done at Z89 I didn't do with Chris by my side one way or the other. Whether it was my idea or his idea, we always worked together on it.
So we had our first meeting the following year, so that would be January 87. I had a long agenda and I got up in front of everybody and said, okay, we're going to do this, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this. What do you guys think? And they said, great, you run it. Come back to us next year.
Yeah, so I'm the self-appointed first president of the Alumni Association, and very proud of that as well, and to all of the people that came after us that did an amazing job, and special shout out to future, soon-to-be Hall of Famer, Scotty Meach for really taking the ball and running with the Alumni Association.
And so many other people over the years. I don't want to get into naming and miss some names, but Scotty Meach really gets, it's almost like I had a seed of an idea and I got it started, and then Scott really took it and took off with it and made it into what it is today.
JAG: Yeah. Scott and I talked about that in his episode of the podcast as well. So you mentioned everything you've done, Rocco, you said Chris has been by your side. That's true as you started Promosuite, which is a well-known company in the radio industry, what happened between graduation and getting together to start Promosuite?
Rocco: I was working for Emmis. Broadcasting in New York, Hot 103, which is now Hot 97.
I started as the promotion director. Became the marketing director, finally got a computer three years into the job, 1989. And started looking around to see if there was any software for people that do what I do. And turned out there wasn't. So I called my buddy Chris. When he graduated rather than pursuing radio, despite the fact that he was so good at it, both on air and production, decided to teach himself computer programming and was working at some brokerage firms in the Wall Street area.
I called him up and we scheduled the meeting. This meeting occurred in, I believe, July of 1990 which is why I always parallel my marriage to Chris with my marriage to my wife Lena, because that was two months after I got married. And we had a meeting, which is still on a cassette somewhere, God knows where at this point. Where I said, here's all the stuff that I need, in a computer program.
And Chris took about six weeks to get back to me and he called me up and he said, Hey, I've got good news and bad news. And I said, gimme the bad news. He goes if I wrote this program for you, it's gonna cost about $250,000. And I'm like, Chris radio doesn't have that type of money. He goes, yeah, the good news is I don't think this is a project. I think this is a business. That's how it started.
JAG: Chris, how did that play out in through your memory and eyes?
Chris: It was interesting because it took a lot of work to get the thing off the ground. We're talking several million lines of computer code. And it got to a point where I couldn't balance my day job with this project as well.
So I quit my day job. We had no clients whatsoever. I had a few credit cards and quickly ran up the credit cards. It was funny. Rocco would be the "sales manager." I was "at the office," which was my apartment. Everything's come full circle now after Covid, everyone's working from home again.
But, I would play in the background a cassette when people would call of just like background office noise. To make it sound like you're actually calling.
JAG: Oh, that is a radio production guy right there that is straight out of the playbook. I love it!
Chris: To make it sound like a real company.
And Rocco on his lunch hour would return sales calls from a phone booth. That he shared with a bookie. They were fighting. True story. They were fighting over who gets to use the phone booth.
JAG: Were your kneecaps Okay. Rocco?
Rocco: Yes. We grew to respect each other. Yeah.
JAG: That's the salesman in you.
Chris: So that was it. I don't remember if our first station to sign up was WHUR in Washington, DC Yes, they were the ones that signed up. But I think KASH FM. In Anchorage, Alaska was the first one to actually sign up, pay the bill, and get shipped the software.
Rocco: And our contact there was Steve Chapman and every time I had to call him, you had to remind me cuz I was calling him Steve Cashman because it was from Cash FM.
JAG: Not to mention in those days the long-distance bill to call Alaska, I'd imagine.
Chris: Oh yeah.
Rocco: I had calling cards for the phone booth. That's the way. Listen all props to Chris again. I had a great idea, but I stayed employed at Emmis broadcasting for the first 12 years, you know of that date from right up until 2002.
Actually, I left March 1st, 2003. That was my first day officially as a full-time Promosuite employee, despite owning the company for 12 years. And Chris did everything. And those first few years were really tough. My wife also garnered the nickname VP of Corporate Catering, cuz once a week I would bring chicken parm.
Chris: Chicken parm, chicken parm, meatballs, spaghetti.
Rocco: Because otherwise Chris didn't have time to eat. He was just doing cereal and spaghetti all the time. He had no money.
Chris: No money. And along the way, we've tried to hire JPZ. Folks.
JAG: That's actually where I was gonna go next, because you mentioned that 2002 to 2003 transition a minute ago, Rocco, so you hired both my classmate from 2002, Jana Fiorello and Christy Ogonis, who like Jana, is a rockstar.
And Chrisye graduated in '05, so she was a freshman when I was a senior. And you hired two great people that I went to school with right out of the gate.
Rocco: Both Jana and Christie were awesome. Jana was our first client relations representative as a customer service rep. We needed somebody with a bubbly personality.
Nothing fits Jana more than saying a bubbly personality and really good knowledge of radio. And she was fantastic for us. And then we were expanding our sales department, and I met Christy at a banquet, did an interview. My God, I feel like it was in McDonald's. I don't know if it was McDonald's, but it was somewhere right on South Crouse.
And she was great. Both of them really, talk about founders of companies. They really helped us move the needle and get from where we were to where we are now.
JAG: Talk to me about the growth over the last 20 plus years of the company. You guys are huge. I can't think of a radio station that I was at that didn't at least use or know of the software, and I'm like, sweet, Promosuite, WJPZ love. I'll use this.
Rocco: Absolutely. Thank you. I appreciate that. No, it's been great. Mixed emotions on all of the changes in radio over the years. Because when I first started in radio, the New York market had 30 promotion directors and now they have five. . So from a standpoint of radio as a career, I think it's definitely hurt a little bit because of there not being as much jobs. But consolidation really helped people like us.
Chris: Consolidation was really good because instead of having to now target 5,000 different individuals at 5,000 different radio stations. It became a single point of contact. So that allowed us to actually grow the company relatively quickly after that act was passed whenever that was 96 or something.
The challenge though today is that you've got your iHearts and Audacy, which are very centralized hub based in terms of how they run. But then you've got your smaller groups and independent stations, like KBO-FM in Fargo, North Dakota as an example, that run radio in the traditional way.
It's live and it's local and all of that. And the challenge for us, especially over the past five years or so, is we've gotta have our product able to serve both masters. The people that just consolidated. And it is hubs and voice tracks all across the country, but also the mom and pop. So that is a continuing issue for us as to how do we keep the software relevant and working the way that radio needs to work.
Rocco: And to that end we'll do a little shameless plug on where we're going here. When we started our company. Workflow software was not a thing. It wasn't something people considered. We didn't consider it, even though that's what we were, and that's what we created. And we did it for the promotion department.
And as the promotion department touches all the other departments, sales, production, programming, on air. So now we have shifted where our company is now focused on being a workflow application for all departments. So we have Chris and his team have been working extremely hard on the development side.
Chris: I keep inviting you to the meetings. You keep declining the meetings.
Rocco: There's a lot going on the other side of the business too, Chris. But they've done a great job. We have a brand new platform, which is called the Promosuite Plus platform, and it includes three products promo suite production, which is workflow for creating commercials and audio spots. Promosuite digital, which is the workflow to get the banner ads up and the videos on your website. And the all new Promosuite promotions, which hasn't been released yet, but will be released sometime in 2023. So we're really excited because you have to constantly reinvent yourself and that's what, you know, to bring this full circle back to Z89 and learning about radio. If you know how to reinvent yourself as a CHR radio station where you're targeting 12 to 24 year olds who change their taste every six months, , you're gonna be able to carry that over for the rest of your career. So that's where we're at.
JAG: That is a masterful job and a total pro to bring it full circles as we start to wrap up here. So last question I'll ask the both of you is for a funny story that you look back on and laugh. Chris is already laughing.
Chris: This is gonna be at Rocco's expense.
Rocco: Great news.
Chris: I was living down in south campus my junior and senior year, and I had done my shift, 7 to 10. Rocco was on 10 to 1:00 AM. And I'm listening to my Sony Walkman, which some people are gonna have to look up and see what the heck that is, on the bus. And I hear the song playing and I then hear Rocco's saying yeah.
Turn on 93Q in the background. So it sounds like, you've got like some party station on and then say what your song is that you wanna request. And of course this is…
JAG: Oh my G-d, he was coaching the caller.
Chris: Yeah. And this is before cell phones so I'm like, oh my God. Oh my god, So there was no way to stop it. That's my funny WJPZ story. At Rocco's expense.
Rocco: And Chris. that story again proves what I decided that behind the scenes was my future. Not on the air.
Chris: That was a good one. Live and local. Can't get more live than that.
JAG: Chris Bungo, Rocco Macri. Thank you both for your contributions to the radio station as students and to the radio station as alumni two Hall of Famers in the class of 86.
And thank you for your time doing this podcast today. It's great to be with both of you.
Chris: It was fun, thanks.
Rocco: Yeah. And thank you for doing this. I've listened to a couple, they're fantastic. And if you can make us sound good, then I'll know how great you are as a producer.
JAG: No pressure. Thanks guys. .