Steak Shapiro mailed cassette tapes to 14 program directors he had never met, got one call back, and has been in Atlanta ever since. He was fired inside a year, so he wrote a business plan and bought a radio station instead. He ran 790 The Zone for 17 years, sold it, got fired again, and built a content studio that now makes work for Coca-Cola, Delta and Home Depot. His name is Stephen. A steakhouse in Minnesota is why nobody calls him that.
This episode is a little different from most Soundstripe Sessions. It is not about making music. It is about the thing music usually ends up inside: brand storytelling, and how completely the economics of it have changed.
Jeff Perkins talks to Steak about the all-girls college that gave a 13-year-old his first radio show, the neighbor who raised a million dollars for him in one conversation, why he stopped chasing restaurant clients, and the question he asks before anyone picks up a camera.
Key takeaways
- He got into Atlanta radio by mailing unsolicited cassette tapes to 14 program directors and hoping one of them owned a tape player.
- Job security in radio, in his experience, meant owning the station. So he wrote a business plan and did that.
- The restaurant clients his food brand was built to serve turned out to be the wrong customers. The right ones were Delta, Home Depot and Coca-Cola.
- His starting question on every project is not creative. It's "what does a win look like," and sometimes the audience is one person.
- The 30-second commercial as the center of a brand is finished. Brands now run as something closer to a daily publishing operation.
- Big agencies are losing to speed. Not to better ideas.
Listen to the episode
The safest city in America
Jeff: I want to take us back to the beginning, the origin story. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up.
Steak: I grew up right outside Boston, in Newton, Massachusetts. The hard scrabble streets of Newton, as my kids like to say, voted two years in a row the safest city in America. So I love to tell my kids, you don't know what I've been through. My dad drove a Saab and all the Mercedes and Range Rovers were pulling in at carpool. We've been through it, man. We have been through it.
Steak: It was that normal great town right outside of Boston, and I just had a passion for sports like everybody from Boston. Have you ever met a guy from Boston who didn't talk about Tom Brady or the Celtics and annoy you? We're all the same no matter what our background is. I had an awesome childhood where we'd get home from school, drop our books, and five hours later somebody's mom would drive by and say, your mom's looking for you. And we'd stop playing football, basketball, baseball, whatever we were doing.
Jeff: A simpler time. Is that safe to say? I also grew up in the mean streets of Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Steak: It's hard to say you're a tough guy when you live on Lark Lane in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. There's Rikers Island, which is terrifying, and then there's Lark Lane, which sounds like the least aggressive place you could ever grow up.
Steak: But I will say this about the Northeast. I didn't grow up with an affluent mindset or upbringing. My success has come down to hard work and grinding and failing and trying again. And there is a New Jersey and Boston blue collar thing, don't complain, don't whine, don't think you're a big deal, that I do believe has given me an edge in Atlanta. Nobody wants to hear any whining. That's what the Northeast teaches you.
A sports show on an all-girls college station
Jeff: Tell me about your journey into radio. How did you get into sports radio?
Steak: The first time I heard a show called The Sports Huddle, guys on the radio on a Sunday night, I was like, these dudes, this is a job. They're just sitting around talking about the Sox or the Celtics. And I thought that was the craziest thing ever. So at 13 years old I was like, well, I want to get on the radio. Would anybody have me?
Steak: Believe it or not, Wellesley College, the all-girls school, did not have a sports show on their station. Not shockingly, especially back then, when women's sports weren't anywhere. And I called up and said, how about a sports show? They gave me an hour on a Wednesday afternoon from three to four. I was 13 or 14 years old. And I walked into a radio studio. I was obviously terrible, and you're terrible for a long time in radio or TV until you figure it out. But that was the first time on the air.
Steak: I was fascinated that the way you're sitting right now, with that microphone and those headphones, you could talk into something like that and somebody could be driving down the road a mile away or 50 miles away and hear you. I still think it's the coolest thing. I've been doing it for 30 years. I'm going to talk this morning and there's going to be some guy driving around on 400 or 285 or in Athens or Augusta, and they're going to be able to hear me carrying on.
Steak: So I wanted to go to the Newhouse School at Syracuse. Newhouse is kind of like being a bench coach for Duke. Marv Albert went there. Bob Costas went there. Ted Koppel went there. All the biggest sports talent went through Newhouse. I did not get in, and they told me you can't transfer in if you go to liberal arts. I didn't have the grades. So I figured, I can go freeze and pretend I'm going to get into Newhouse, or there's this place called Tulane University in New Orleans that has no communication school and nothing to build my future on other than a good time. And I said, I'll opt for that. I became an English major at Tulane.
Jeff: So you start with an internship out of college, or out of your master's program?
Steak: The only reason I really went to get a master's was that companies needed you to actually be a student. I couldn't get a job at WEEI, the big monster sports station in Boston, unless you were in school. And I kind of needed a journalism background, because I didn't have any. So I went and got my master's at Emerson, because then I could legally be hired.
Steak: It's funny how radio corporations actually had to do things by the book. Back when I owned a radio station, if you said you'd work for free, I was like, sounds good to me. Bro, you want to work in sports radio for the whopping price of zero, just to be in the building and learn and do research and go to games? That's what I wanted to do. I didn't care what you paid me.
Steak: So I got a degree, got my first internship, and I was the worst producer. The one producer you don't want is the guy on the other side of the glass who thinks he's better than the on-air hosts. You want the guy who says, I want to do research, I want to book guests, I want to figure out the puzzle and put it together, I want to be organized. You don't want the loudmouth thinking, I'm funnier than that dude, I would handle this a different way. I got super distracted. Meticulous is a great thing for a producer. I was none of those things.
Fourteen cassette tapes and one phone call
Steak: The only way to get good on the air is being on the air. And at some point I realized that living in Boston, your first gig on the air is not going to happen in a town where nobody leaves their job. That's like an aspiring actress saying, if I don't start on Broadway, I'm not interested. So I had to be open to moving anywhere in the country. I'm a Boston guy through and through, but my career opportunity was more important.
Steak: So I sent old school cassette tapes. Cover letter, envelope, licked the envelope, and wrote down 14 program directors. Milwaukee, Miami, Tampa, Atlanta. I hadn't been to any of these towns. There weren't really job openings posted. I just had a radio directory where all these stations were listed, and I sent tapes to every program director, hoping they would open the envelope, take out the cassette, find a tape recorder, put it in, listen, and then call me on my home phone. You talk about throwing darts. I was throwing darts.
Steak: Some guy from Atlanta called me and said, I need a fill-in guy for mornings while somebody's out of town. If you pay your way here, I'll put you on for a week and we'll see how it goes. And that was 30 years ago. I haven't left Atlanta since.
Steak: I got fired within a year. And then I started my own radio station. We figured out the best job security was to own your radio station. Very unorthodox. But anybody in radio and TV, it is a litany of firings and new management, new ownership groups, new formats. It is not the environment I grew up in in Newton in terms of stability. I had to pivot, and that's been the story of my career. Just keep pivoting.
Where the name came from
Jeff: When did you get the nickname Steak? Because your name is Stephen.
Steak: My name is Stephen, which is not as TV and radio friendly. It's not a great story. A guy at the radio station went to Minnesota, went to a steakhouse called Manny's, and they had a special on the menu called a Steak Shapiro instead of a New York strip, because the joke was that everybody in New York was either a Shapiro, a Cohen or a Goldberg. So he comes back in the office and he's on the air saying, you'll never believe this, I went to Minnesota and they called a steak there a Steak Shapiro. So they started calling me that around the office, it got on the air, and I was like, well, it's better than Stephen. I'll just run with it.
The name turned out to be a career asset, in a way nobody planned.
Steak: I got hired by the Food Network. I did a year as a judge, one of the coolest things I ever did. Jesse Palmer, who would go on to much bigger things, was our host, and we gave away food trucks around America and Canada. But the casting director out of Canada was looking at a video of Kevin Rathbun, a big chef in Atlanta. We'd done a Falcons pregame where Kevin and I would cook different foods. They played the Eagles, we'd make cheesesteaks. They played the Packers, we'd do brats. So the casting people Googled Kevin Rathbun, who had just won Iron Chef and beaten Bobby Flay, and my big fat head showed up. And they were like, you've got to see this, there's a guy who calls himself Steak, this is hysterical. That's literally why they even looked at me. They liked the video once they watched it, but the nickname 100 percent got me that Food Network gig.
Steak: And the gentleman who gave me the name was the king of Boston sports radio, Eddie Andelman. He just passed weeks ago. He was the guy I listened to, the reason I wanted to be in the business. Twenty years later I was his intern. And five years after that I co-hosted a show with him. So it was a full circle moment.
Buying the radio station
Jeff: You picked a challenging career. Did you ever think about going and getting your CPA, or going into a normal job? You're a great sales guy. Or was it always, I'm going to be on air and I'm going to make it work?
Steak: Family was in the shoe business. Definitely wasn't interested in that. It wouldn't have been a bad career, because I could have been a sales guy, but I was like, I'm not going into the shoe business. Never considered it. It's like hearing guys say, I don't know what else I would do.
Steak: I was not a sales guy. I was taught by my closest friend, who I owned a radio station with for 17 years, Andrew Saltzman. He's like, bro, you talk well, you like people, now you own this radio station, we're going to go out on meetings and you're going to pitch people on why they should advertise on sports radio. He goes, you're a salesperson. And that's where this whole notion of an English degree comes in. Being able to read and write well, communicate well, influence people, have a personality, be dynamic. Those are all sales qualities. So I've become a great salesperson. That's really what I'm great at, and hopefully good enough being on the air.
Steak: But I didn't have a plan B. I was unbelievably passionate that I wanted to be on radio and television talking about sports. Did not think I'd be a business owner. Did not think I'd run a marketing agency. Those were not on the bingo card. But like every entrepreneur will tell you, there were pivots all along the way. I was like, I want to be on the radio. It gives me juice every morning. That kind of adrenaline was addictive once you had a microphone in front of you.
Jeff: How did you go from being a radio guy to owning the station? Because those are two really different things, being the personality versus being the owner.
Steak: I don't recommend it. I don't recommend being the boss of every guy you're on the air with.
Steak: Atlanta was a land of opportunity in the 90s. We had a couple of million people here. Now we're a bigger market than DC or Boston, five or six in the country. But back then all these Northeast folks were moving here, all these transplants, as we call ourselves. And I was fired within a year, because the sports station I was on got leased to another company. That company said, we hate sports talk, because we own the teams in town, and they don't like those Northeast guys being critical. So that format's over, you're officially done. My whole show got fired right after the show.
Steak: So I'm in Atlanta, I'm out of a job, I'm engaged to be married, and I'm in my late 20s. And there was a little station with a terrible signal, the worst of all time, called 790 AM. They'd had a deal fall through for somebody to lease the station. So I wrote a business plan to say, why don't I start sports radio in Atlanta? I'm not a genius, but I think I know how to program it. All I did was listen to it non-stop. Philly's WIP, New York's WFAN, Boston's WEEI. I can model that.
Steak: And I sent the worst business plan in history to my neighbor, who was a Bear Stearns guy. I was like, can I give this to any legitimate person in Atlanta, or are they going to slap me over the head with it and say, you're a bum? And as happens with finance guys, he had done two radio deals in the last two years and both had done incredibly well. I could have written the word radio in crayon and handed it to him and he would have done the deal. So he says, not only do you not have to worry about pitching it, I'll just get the money myself. And he got paid back within 15 months, because radio was on fire.
Steak: There was no podcast. There was no Spotify. There were no audiobooks. There wasn't even public transportation in Atlanta that anybody took, like in other cities. So every time you looked at the roads in Atlanta, 99.7 percent of the people in the cars to your right and your left were listening to local radio. It was a $400 million ad market. It's now under 200 million, which is like every other city.
Steak: So all of a sudden I went from unemployed, moving to Philly to do overnights at WIP, which was the gig I had, to, oh, you now own a radio station. You're head of marketing, head of programming. I hired my buddy Andrew Saltzman from San Francisco. He said, I'll move, you give me half the company. I was like, dude, 50 percent of zero is zero, sounds good to me. So I secured all the money, he came and ran sales, and he taught me that I'm in sales.
Barstool before Barstool
Jeff: I think you're not giving yourself enough credit. Yeah, you're riding a wave, but you guys had some really innovative programming at the time. When you looked at the other stations in Atlanta, they were very corporate. They had some good personalities, but you guys were different. Mayhem in the AM was just like, what is going on here?
Steak: We were incredibly creative and innovative. We had a thing called the AFC NFC party. For years we had a Bye-Bye Buckhead when Buckhead closed and put 10,000 people on the streets, and we hired the Gin Blossoms. We started music festivals. When the Thrashers came to town, we had people sleep in a hockey goal on Peachtree Street, and the last guy left living there got Thrashers season tickets. Poor guy, five days sleeping in a hockey goal. We had a guy dribble a basketball from our radio station downtown, on the highway, to the Hawks arena. Completely illegal. Could have been taken out by any 18-wheeler. We just did not care.
Steak: We were Barstool before Barstool. We had a house we set up with video cameras and called it 790 Big Brother. We put all the personalities in a house and you could follow us online. If it came to closing a deal or being innovative, that was our mindset. But we weren't owned by corporate. Back then it was CBS Radio, Cox Radio, Clear Channel, Susquehanna, which owned 99X. Everybody was under corporate rules and we were this renegade, locally owned pair of knuckleheads.
Steak: I did understand talent. If you're funny and self-deprecating and you understand entertainment, that I was always good at. Virtually 90 percent of the on-air personalities in Atlanta worked for us at some point. Elle Duncan, David Pollack, and a lot of national guys came through our stations.
Jeff: I remember the Two Live Stews. They were national.
Steak: Our producers too. Scott Shapiro now runs Fox Radio. Peter Schrager was an intern of mine back in the day, and of course he's blown up at ESPN and NFL Network. Just a combination of great talent rolling through Atlanta.
Steak: I understood what good talent was. You've got to be a great storyteller. You have to be funny. You have to have some life experiences. You didn't have to be an athlete, but you had to be a guy I want to have a beer with after work and tell stories with. And then of course there's the sports thing, but for us sports is innate. I've read the Boston Globe sports page every day for 55 years, literally. So that stuff was easy.
Steak: Other sports, I wasn't from down south, so we looked for people who didn't sound like me to give you your SEC football. I was not the guy you turn to for the history of the Alabama Auburn rivalry. But we hired guys. A guy named Chuck Oliver, I hired him in a contest, another promotion we had. We ran a contest to become a full-time on-air personality, and hundreds of people came by. Chuck Oliver got that job, and he's the longest running college football talk host in the South. He was hired in a contest we came up with.
Selling the station, then reinventing again
Jeff: So all good things come to an end. 790 comes to an end.
Steak: We sell the company, because we were hemorrhaging in St. Louis. If we hadn't bought St. Louis, we would have kept cash flowing money and been great. But you take chances. It's like a guy who's got two great restaurants and somebody tells him he's got to have 20, and next thing you realize, I haven't been in any of those restaurants. The really smart restaurateurs know. Hal's did well for years in Atlanta because Hal sat at that bar for 25 years and watched every plate come out. If you want to run a station, you have to be there. We were not in St. Louis. We sent a team to do that, and you learn lessons. I'm not going to sit here and lament that we took chances, but yes, we sold the business 14 or 15 years ago.
Steak: And then I had to reinvent again. What am I going to do? I stayed on the station that bought us, and then, unbeknownst to me, one of my co-hosts told some incredibly off-color jokes. We all got fired for it. I could sit here and lament that I got fired for something I knew nothing about, but you're in live radio. It has hazards that come with it. Back to your CPA line, that's a much safer route.
Steak: So I had to figure things out. I started a company called Bread n Butter in the content space, and I wanted to create the food and dining brand of Atlanta. Content is content. Storytelling is storytelling. I don't care if you're talking about whether Matt Ryan is a better quarterback than Michael Vick, or why Chicago deep dish pizza is overrated, or whether New Haven has the best pizza in America, or what the most important side dish at a steakhouse is. It's all the same. How do you present it? How entertaining are you? Are you passionate about it? I couldn't sit here and talk to you about the S&P 500 and have a lot of fun. But food and sports, that's how I see the world.
Why the money was not in restaurants
Jeff: Talk about that journey with Bread n Butter and Atlanta Eats. For those who aren't from Atlanta, Atlanta Eats is a show where every week you're going into different restaurants around town, interviewing the chef, the customers. Talk about starting that and where it is today.
Steak: I had to raise all the money locally. I was really smart about it. I got really rich guys who didn't really know what the hell I was talking about, but they knew I'd been successful in Atlanta. I was the smallest investment of the richest people in town. They didn't know what I meant when I said food content company. We're going to own the brand for restaurants. Whatever, dude, what do you think is going to happen with Georgia this year? It sounds like you know a lot of people in town, which is really why we were successful. I moved all my radio clients over. So I raised a million dollars.
Steak: The business model was completely cracked. We started with a TV show, and we had to produce the show, create the content, spend on leasing. We didn't have edit suites. It's amazing we survived it. But the notion was we're going to own food in Atlanta, which we did. We created a barrier to entry. Now there are 60 brands like ours, not at the same level, but whether it's influencers or Infatuation or Eater.
Steak: My whole thing has always been try to be everywhere. Stay on the radio and do sports. Have a show, Atlanta Eats. Then get into social and digital. Now I'm probably known more for my social posts on Instagram and TikTok than anything. Give the perception that you're everywhere. Always be selling your business.
Steak: But the company really started when our 10,000 hours became filming, storytelling, content and production. Something I knew nothing about. And through those 10,000 hours we figured out that the people you really don't want to seek dollars from are restaurant groups. They don't understand marketing. Their margins are horrendous, and it's going to be a grind. You know who would be good to work with? Home Depot, Delta, Coca-Cola, Georgia Power, Gas South, ParkMobile. Great companies who said, we need better storytelling, we need to be creative, we need to attach ourselves to restaurants. Everybody wants to attach themselves to restaurants.
Steak: So we started doing the food angle around companies. Now we're strictly an agency, and 80 percent of what we do has nothing to do with food and nothing to do with attaching culinary to brands, which is what we were known for. But it took a while. It's a roller coaster of trying to figure out where we can land to actually make money and create some equity. 790 The Zone was profitable in seven months. Bread n Butter hadn't found its way until really two or three years ago, and we were around for nine years before that.
The Prius and the knife maker
Jeff: What's interesting, especially going into the agency world and serving brands, is that traditional agencies approach storytelling in a very boring way. Whereas you've always been, how do I integrate this brand into something that has cultural currency? It's not just an ad about the brand. It's, let me put this brand into a show about a restaurant.
Steak: That's where we took our swings, because everything went through Atlanta Eats. We worked with Southeast Toyota, got a big deal with them, and realized that back then sustainability was the buzzword and the electric car thing was about to happen. So we did five different stories about sustainability and recycling, all these things that matched up to the brand and the Prius.
Steak: We drove a Prius to a knife maker in Athens, Georgia, where these guys lived on a farm and had goats and made their own eggs, and they made $700 knives from scratch. We drove up with Linton Hopkins, a big chef in Atlanta. We gave him a car, probably paid him, I don't know how much, probably not a lot back then. He drove to the farm, they made him a knife from scratch using all these sustainable products, and that became a two and a half minute story that Southeast Toyota would put out. It looked completely different from a 30 second commercial.
Steak: That was our secret sauce, and we did it in radio also. Give me an advertiser's name and we'll find a way to link sports or entertainment into it. We had to do it then, because all these other radio stations were crushing it. We did some stuff that's completely unorthodox. But we got our reps in storytelling.
The 30 second commercial is over
Steak: A lot of the work we do now, the buzzwords in corporate are, how do we elevate our workforce and make them excited? How do we tell stories about what we're doing in the community? How do we tell stories that make it seem like we're a great place to work? Companies have their own portals now. A company like Home Depot has 450,000 employees. Just marketing to them to make sure they love their job and don't want to leave, and to slow down turnover, has huge value. Or having your CEO seen in a certain light. Look at Ed Bastian at Delta. He is practically the brand. So I talk to all these CEOs and they're like, we want what he has. Well, that has to happen organically.
Steak: But the point is, your brand is no longer a 30 second commercial. Those days are over. It is a living, breathing organism every day. Your LinkedIn, your social, your TikTok, your Instagram, your YouTube channel. Used to be you got a 30 second commercial on the NFL, and that's your brand. Well, that is over. Look at the amount of content Delta does. We really don't do a lot with Delta at all, but if you follow the brand, they're everywhere, with stuff that has nothing to do with flying. American Express, they're trying to create stories that make you cry. You may not even see a credit card.
Steak: So that was really good for our industry, and still is. Make the brand the co-star. Brands understanding that they need stories separate from straight commercials is why we've had success.
Jeff: What about the channels you're developing content for? Is it still television, or are you developing for every channel?
Steak: Our TV show is pretty old school. It's over-the-air TV. People watching me are over 40 or 50 years old. And Atlanta Eats is a formula. We don't make a lot of money on it, but we tell the best restaurant stories, four or five minute pieces that you'd see on Food Network. We're the best local restaurant show in America. There aren't that many, so it's like a beauty contest in Montana. Nothing against Montana. There just aren't a lot of them there.
Steak: Then our social is always evolving. You're living on TikTok and Instagram, then there are newsletters, then there are blogs. But that's a straight media play. Eighty five to 90 percent of our revenue is as an agency. That's eight day shoots, creating six different stories, five second pre-rolls, 15 second, 60 second. Those brands have multiple outlets and much bigger audiences.
Agency bloat, and why speed wins
Jeff: What's interesting about what you're doing is that you have a much scrappier approach than big agencies. I worked in the big agencies for a long time, and I would spend 12 months of my year and the output would be two television commercials.
Steak: Agencies are in desperate trouble. There's so much bloat. We're going to film in LA, we're going to be there for two weeks, we're going to send this many people, we're going to have an expense account. We hired guys from Turner and they were like, yeah, we need a 20 person crew. It's like, that's adorable. You get four.
Steak: Back in the day the agency bloat was about trying to win awards. There's a total arrogance on the creative side, and they want to shoot with directors who are four times more expensive. It's like, bro, it's a pretty simple product. We don't care about winning an award. I own the company. I care about trying to pay for Tulane University. That's how I'm thinking.
Steak: If you want to change a creative because you think it will get you the clicks you need, or it will sell the product, fine. But you can't change a creative because people's egos are such that they think this might win them awards. Thirty second commercials used to be king. They're not anymore. Agency bloat. They're all in trouble, they're all getting bought by private equity companies, they're all getting folded. And big brands have so much disdain for the money they spent over the years with agencies.
Jeff: It's velocity. It's speed.
Steak: Their own internal agencies can't get anything turned around. All these companies have internal agencies and those guys have no incentive. My incentive is, I'm like a bulldog. We've got to turn this around. You need volume. We've got to finish that project, get to the next one, finish that, get to the next one. Are they happy? How do we get to other areas of the company? We're thinking from a sales mentality and an execution mentality, not about some fancy director in New York who wants to shoot in Brooklyn and then fly over to the London studios. That does not fly. And that's why we're winning. We don't have that mentality at all.
What does a win look like?
Jeff: You're winning because you're scrappy, but you also tell great stories. Delta, Home Depot, Coke, these are the best brands in the world, so the bar for their marketing is high. What's your approach on storytelling? How do you think about the creative process of getting to a great story for a brand?
Steak: I really think it's the question of what are we trying to accomplish. Everybody knows what makes them feel something. And this whole notion that it has to be under two minutes, or has to be at four. How much time have you wasted on social media where you're like, I don't have time to watch this, and now you're two minutes and 48 seconds in and you either can't turn it off because it's a phenomenal story, or you don't know how they sucked you in.
Steak: Who are the personalities involved? Why is this story compelling? A lot of our work is product explainers and training, and that stuff pays the bills. But you need creative, talented people who don't take themselves too seriously and who are always asking, what does success look like? It's not hard to create stories that make you feel something, either super proud of the brand, or wanting to highlight the associates who do such a great job.
Steak: Just have talented people who listen to the client. This is what they want. Once this gets in front of the big wig, is he going to be happy with it? Because guess what they're thinking? Eventually my boss is going to see this, and either I'm going to be in a good place or I'm going to be screwed. And if I'm screwed, then you put me in that spot. In these companies, middle management are scared to death. They're showing it to somebody. A finished product, a board of directors, an investor meeting, a company getaway. You've got to make that person look good.
Steak: So who is the audience? Sometimes it's an audience of one. We did a lot of work for Emory, and the guy who ran Emory said, I've got a $10 million ask out with this guy for our cancer research. So I need stories about that, because it's going to help me get to my 10 million. If we pay you for a few stories, but it helps me get to my goal of making them see all the progress we've made in that department, that's a win.
Steak: Or the audience is, my board of directors needs to find out what the hell I did for the last 12 months. I need to make it look like this brand is popping. Those are a lot of times the questions you have to ask.
Jeff: It's not just telling a story to tell a story. It's telling a story that accomplishes some bigger goal the team or the client is trying to get to.
Steak: And not so you win an award for how creative and abstract and interesting it was. I mean, you can have both. I'm not saying our people aren't talented and creative. But they're going to work regularly with us by following that model.
Production value is not the point
Steak: It's like Hollywood. The set designers, the writers, it'll never come back. There's one third the business out there. Guys who are in their 50s who have to be waiters because they were never without a job, and now realize the roles they filled aren't needed. There's not enough new content being created. You can do it off your phone and get better numbers than anything we can do.
Steak: Conan O'Brien said it. He knew the late night game was over when he went on that show where they eat the hot wings. He had a bigger audience on that appearance than any show he ever did in the history of Conan O'Brien. And they shoot with two cameras, with no set, with nothing. So you have how many people working on a late night show? 100, 200? It doesn't fly. My kid's on YouTube every night. Forget about Mr. Beast. Go 10 levels underneath Mr. Beast. There are shows with no real production costs that'll do 20 times the audience of a 12:30 network show. I grew up on Conan and Letterman. That's over.
Jeff: I noticed even with your own social, you're doing food reviews on the phone. You don't have a crew and a rig.
Steak: Dave Portnoy is the example. Look at the production value. He doesn't even zoom in on the slice. One bite, everybody knows the rules. It's completely organic. I am that guy. We grew up in the same town. We care about the same stuff. He's a thousand times more wealthy than I am. But I know the mentality of, where do you get a great slice of pizza? And that's why you can't fake it on social. There's no production cost to what he's doing, and he can review a pizza restaurant and change that family forever.
Steak: I did it with Pizza by Yandy's. Biggest video of my life. Normally if I get a thousand shares that's a lot. I got 25,000 shares on this one pizza place in Sandy Springs. And Portnoy would come after. But that's one out of how many reviews. I had no idea that would be the one.
Steak: Honestly it's not good for my company. We want you to hire big productions. But it's more about organic. Is this guy full of it, or is this relatable? Same thing with all these influencers. I don't care if they're doing makeup or food. You can tell the difference between someone who's full of it and somebody who's organic.
Steak: So the lesson is, if you have a big personality, let it come through. The Falcons were horrible this year and I'd grab the phone as soon as the game ended and do a rant for a minute, and I heard a lot of, I love that, because it was so raw and funny.
Steak: It's been fun going to visit my daughter in college and having a bunch of 20-year-olds come up and take photos with me. I was like, oh, you love the show? And they say, I'm 20, I don't listen to live radio. They're talking about my 53 second Instagram review. Fish tacos don't film as well as a steak and cheese or a cheeseburger. Sushi is never going to get clicked. Nobody ever said, I've got to go, that looks so delicious. Gratuitously delicious is going to play, and healthy isn't. You're not going to go on and say, dude, look at this salad I put together, look at my utilization of the cucumber mixed in with the corn and the black beans, is this epic? That's not going to play.
Steak: So you take enough swings and you know what plays. I can tell somebody that a video may look pretty and that thing has no shot. Nobody needs you to give an education on ahi tuna and some delicate little bite. And I know that because I've been doing it a long time.
Why he is still on the radio
Jeff: You're still on the radio even though you bemoan the radio industry a bit. Is it that you just can't quit?
Steak: Not sports talk. Sports talk is the only format that completely matters, because it's hyper local. If you're playing music, you're screwed. You're like, why do I need a radio station? My daughters would no sooner listen to a seven-minute commercial break to hear more music.
Steak: I do it because it's good for my brain. It's my dream from when I was eight years old. I still love it. I still get adrenaline. The show's called The Steakhouse. One day I have on Ed Bastian, the CEO. One day I have on Ford Fry, big chef. One day I have on Alex Anthopoulos. Who gets that opportunity on a 100,000 watt station? I'd like a little more freedom, not having to be somewhere every day, but that's the tiniest violin. The fact that somebody still wants to pay me for my side hustle. My real job is my company.
Steak: It's also a great way to stay visible. When you call a CEO, or a guy building a billion dollar company, at least he recognizes my name. And I love to talk to people. I'm curious as hell. Whether you're a barista, I want to know what the busiest time of day at Starbucks is. Or my Uber driver, what shift do you avoid at all costs? Everybody's got stories. I love doing that. So if somebody's going to give me a microphone, and sports is still a lot of fun. That's the most fun part of my day. Not even close.
Best meal in Atlanta
Jeff: Two more quick questions. Best meal in Atlanta.
Steak: I love Houston's. I know it's a chain-ish thing, but I'm a huge Houston's guy. The martini they shake up for you halfway through and give back to you. The spinach dip. The sandwiches. Their execution. They're the perfectly executed hospitality company.
Steak: But if you say to me it's date night, I'll give you one. If your buddies are in town and you're ready for a huge night, I'll give you that. If it's family night, I'll give you one of those. If you just say favorite, I'm going to stay safe and say Houston's.
Jeff: Guys' night out.
Steak: You've got to go to Hal's.
Jeff: Date night.
Steak: You've got to feel macho. Aria is a beautiful place. Kyma is a really good restaurant. If you want to get more adventurous, head into cooler places, like Lyla Lila downtown.
Advice for 13-year-old Steak
Jeff: If you could go back and give 13-year-old Steak Shapiro, or Stephen Shapiro, one piece of advice, what would it be?
Steak: Calm down. I would say calm down. This energy is a really good thing for business. Sometimes it's not a good thing for your mental health. When you run as hard as I have, at the level I have, the highs are incredibly high and the lows are rock bottom stuff. So maybe just take a pause every so often.
Steak: But I hate to be cliched and say I wouldn't change anything, because that's part of what got me on the radio and TV and got me running a company. What I would say is, anybody who thinks you are not going to have incredibly tough career moments is wrong. This is it, I'm screwed, I don't know a way out, I've got to support my family, this company's not going to make it, my investors are going to be furious. There is not a career without that. Ask any entrepreneur. Massive failures. Why'd you move the company there? Why'd you grow this?
Steak: I don't know how you control the highs and lows at that level and not make it so painful at times when you get hit hard. But I know it's not some glamorous world when you're doing the things that I do. That's why I stay on the radio, because that is an actual fun, glamorous, cool thing to do. There are a lot of other things that are none of those things. Wondering how you're going to make payroll, and if that client doesn't come through, that's not a fun place to live. But as they say in the Godfather, it's the business that we've chosen.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Steak Shapiro?
Steak Shapiro is an Atlanta broadcaster and media entrepreneur. He founded and owned the sports station 790 The Zone, which he ran for 17 years, and now hosts The Steakhouse on 92.9 The Game. He is also the founder of Bread n Butter Content Studio and the creator and host of the television show Atlanta Eats, and he has appeared as a judge on Food Network programming.
Why is Steak Shapiro called Steak?
His given name is Stephen. A colleague at a Boston radio station visited Manny's steakhouse in Minnesota, where a New York strip was listed on the menu as a "Steak Shapiro," and told the story on air. The nickname stuck around the office and then on the air. He credits Boston sports radio host Eddie Andelman with giving it to him, and says the name is the reason a Food Network casting director first looked at his tape.
What does Bread n Butter Content Studio do?
Bread n Butter is Steak Shapiro's Atlanta-based content and marketing agency. It started as a food and dining media company built around Atlanta Eats, then shifted to brand work for companies including Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot and Georgia Power. Around 80 percent of what the studio produces now has nothing to do with food, and roughly 85 to 90 percent of its revenue comes from agency work rather than media.
Why did Steak Shapiro stop targeting restaurant clients?
Restaurant margins are thin and, in his assessment, restaurant groups are difficult marketing customers. After roughly 10,000 hours of production work, the studio found that large brands with bigger budgets and multiple distribution channels were a better fit, and that those brands wanted the food and culture angle anyway.
What question should you ask before making a brand video?
According to Steak Shapiro, the first question is what a win actually looks like, not what the creative should be. That means identifying the real audience, which is sometimes a single person such as a donor, a board, or a CEO, and working backwards from what that audience needs to feel.
Are 30 second commercials still effective?
Steak Shapiro's view is that the 30 second spot no longer functions as the center of a brand. Brands now operate as ongoing publishing operations across social, LinkedIn, YouTube and internal channels, and the work that performs is often longer, story-led, and only loosely connected to the product itself.
Does production value matter for social video?
Less than most brands assume. He points to Dave Portnoy's pizza reviews, shot on a phone with no production, as proof that perceived authenticity beats polish. His own most-shared video was a phone review of a Sandy Springs pizza shop that earned around 25,000 shares, roughly 25 times his usual.
