Reviewed by Peter Berk, President and Chief Media Strategist, Berk Marketing · Last updated 5 September 2026
Radio advertising & media buying since 1978
Berk Marketing plans, negotiates and places radio and television campaigns on behalf of advertisers. We hold no inventory and represent no station. You call, you reach Peter Berk or one of his Berk-trained partners — not a call queue, and not an account executive who inherited your file last week.
No cost, no obligation. Or just call (866) 747-4707 and talk it through.
Berk Marketing is an independent media buying agency for radio and television advertising. We take an advertiser’s audience, goals and budget, go out to stations, networks and platforms for availability and price, negotiate each against the others, write and produce the commercial in house, place the schedule and track what it returns.
The independence is the service. A station representative can only ever recommend the station that employs them. We can recommend SiriusXM over local FM, local over national, television over radio, or none of the above.
The problem
Advertisers rarely fail at radio because the medium is broken. They fail because every voice in the room has inventory to move, and nobody there is paid to tell them the truth.
You are quoted a price with nothing to compare it against, and no way to know what the same inventory sold for last quarter.
Every proposal recommends the stations that proposal’s author happens to represent. That is not advice, it is a catalog.
Money split across so many stations that none of them reaches enough frequency to move anyone to act.
Strong inventory packaged with weak, priced as one number, so the filler rides along on the value of the rest.
A local spot dropped onto national satellite, or a visual product sold on audio with no way to picture it.
Nobody establishes what success looks like before launch, so nobody can say afterwards whether it worked.
Both sides of the desk
He ran sales at stations including KABC and KMPC in Los Angeles and 91X in San Diego. He knows what a station will accept, what it will never admit, and where the room is — because he used to be the one holding it.
Checkable
Every claim on this page is checkable. Here are the specifics rather than the adjectives.
| On the air since 1978 | Peter Berk began as a college disc jockey at KCHO in Chico, and has been in radio ever since. |
| Selling radio since 1978 | More than 45 years of radio advertising and media buying experience, beginning at KEVA in Evanston, Wyoming. |
| Two decades on the station side | Account executive, then sales manager at KABC/KMPC in Los Angeles, then general sales manager at 91X in San Diego. Peter has sat in the chair where the rate card is defended. |
| RAB certified, 1980 | Certified Radio Marketing Consultant, Radio Advertising Bureau, certificate No. 589, awarded December 2, 1980 after examination. |
| Agency founded 1999 | Berk Advertising Services, Inc., trading as Berk Marketing. Built to represent advertisers rather than media companies. |
| Never a station representative | Berk Marketing has never taken on station representation and does not sell airtime on behalf of any station, network or platform. |
The order of those matters more than the length of the list. Two decades selling radio is what makes the buying side useful: Peter knows what a station will accept, what it will never admit it will accept, and which parts of a proposal are structural rather than negotiable.
Radio
Nine ways into the medium. Each one has its own page explaining how it works, what moves the price, and when it is the wrong choice.
Television and streaming
Not sure which of these fits? Send us what you sell and what you can spend. We will tell you where we would put it, and where we would not.
Get a Free PlanHow we treat clients
Media buying has been automated, outsourced and offshored. We kept doing it the way it worked: one person who knows your account, answers the phone, and tells you the truth even when it costs us the sale.
Whoever plans your campaign is the person who negotiates it and the person who picks up when you call. Peter Berk or a partner he trained himself, never a rotating account executive and never a handoff to whoever is newest.
If radio will not work for your budget, your geography or your offer, you will hear it on the first call. We would rather lose the buy than take money we do not think will come back.
Rates, commissions and what each station is actually delivering, laid out plainly. If you want the proposal broken out line by line, that is how you will get it.
Our longest-running client came aboard in 2011 and is still running. Long relationships are the only proof that matters in this business, and they are not won by being clever once.
The ten-point standard
Before a client signs anything, the proposal is read against the same ten points. If you would like to see what your competitors are running before you spend a dollar, ask us for a competitive report. It costs nothing and carries no expectation that you buy through us.
Why Berk Marketing
Nothing to clear, no quota to hit. Our recommendation changes when the numbers change, not when a station needs the month filled.
In radio since 1978, on the station side for roughly twenty years before founding Berk Marketing in 1999 to buy for advertisers.
Certified Radio Marketing Consultant, certificate no. 589, issued by the Radio Advertising Bureau in December 1980. See the certificate.
Scripting, voice and production handled here, written for the medium it will actually run on rather than repurposed.
Standard media commission built into the placement rather than a retainer billed to you, so our incentive is a campaign that continues.
If your budget, geography or offer does not suit broadcast, you will hear that on the first call rather than after the money is spent.
Proof
The best evidence an independent buyer can offer is not a case study. It is a client who is still here twenty-six years later.
Peter Berk, Berk Marketing
Xtermite, since January 2000. San Diego termite control using orange oil instead of tenting, built with local radio, local TV, direct mail, billboards and online.
Power Sales University, since 2010. Sales training from Jason Evans, who writes and voices his own SiriusXM commercials. He finds radio his best source for growing the business.
Big Lou Insurance, since 2011. Term life for people in their fifties with health conditions, on national radio and SiriusXM, running continuously for well over a decade.
Westminster Mint, since 2016. Gold and silver coins, sold on television with a heavy weight on Fox Business.
How we work
What you sell, to whom, at what margin, and what a lead is genuinely worth to you.
We select stations, networks and dayparts against your audience and budget, and tell you what we deliberately left out.
We take the plan to market, put sellers in competition, and hand you the proposal broken out line by line.
Response is measured against benchmarks agreed before launch, and the schedule is reweighted toward what works.
How advertisers arrive
A station has already quoted me. The most common one, and the most urgent, because a direct quote from a seller changes who is allowed to represent you. It is answered in full in the questions below.
“We tried radio and it did not work.” Usually the structure rather than the medium: budget spread across too many markets to build frequency, a schedule weighted into cheap dayparts, or no measurement in place to tell whether it worked at all. Worth diagnosing before writing off the channel.
“We are being pitched SiriusXM and do not understand the numbers.” Satellite proposals frequently bundle several distinct products behind one headline figure. They have to be separated before they can be compared to anything.
“We need to go national and do not know where to start.” The first decision is not which network. It is whether a national buy or a set of assembled markets better matches where your customers actually are.
“Our agency handles everything else but nobody there really knows radio.” Berk Marketing regularly works alongside an advertiser’s existing agency, handling the radio component while the agency runs the rest.
FAQs
Nothing billed to you directly on most campaigns. We are compensated through the standard media commission built into the buy, split with Hybrid Media Services. Because we own no inventory, we have no financial reason to steer you toward one station or network over another.
No. Radio is the core of the business, but we plan and buy television as well, including national cable, DirecTV, DISH and streaming placements on Hulu. If a budget is better spent on television than audio, that is what we will recommend.
Five thousand dollars a week is where we start. Below that there is rarely enough frequency for a listener to remember the message, and a campaign that cannot be remembered cannot be measured. We would rather say so than take the buy.
Yes, and we do it regularly. Advertisers who need visual demonstration, who cannot fulfill outside one small area, or who need results within two weeks are usually better served elsewhere. Sending someone onto a medium that will not work for them is the fastest way to lose them permanently.
Tell us before you go any further. Once a station or network representative has been in direct contact with you and put a rate in front of you, that account generally belongs to the seller, and we usually cannot represent you on it. Nobody warns advertisers about this, because the person doing the quoting has no reason to. The point at which an agency is worth the most to you is before the first call.
Yes, in house. Scripting, voice and production, written for the medium it will run on. A spot written for a local station rarely travels to national satellite without changes, and one written for television does not become a radio ad by removing the pictures.
It depends on inventory and whether creative already exists. Availability is checked as part of planning, and we will be straight with you about timing rather than promising a start date the schedule cannot support.
That is why measurement is agreed before launch rather than after. If response is not where it should be, the schedule is reweighted toward whatever is performing, and if the medium itself is the problem we will say that too.
Deliberate omissions
A short note on what is deliberately absent from this site, because the omissions are the point.
No guaranteed savings figure. You will not find a percentage discount promised anywhere on this site. What a station will accept depends on that station, that quarter and its inventory position at the moment you ask. Any firm quoting a fixed saving before seeing a single availability request is quoting a marketing claim, not a media outcome.
No published rate card. A rate is only real once a specific station returns availability for specific dates. A number published here would be wrong for most advertisers most of the time, and wrong in an unpredictable direction.
No audience statistics without a source and a date. Audience composition changes continuously, varies by market for the same syndicated program, and shifts when a host changes. Current data belongs in a campaign-specific analysis, not on a web page that would be stale within a quarter.
No claim that radio is right for everyone. It is not. An independent buyer is free to say so, and that conclusion is one of the main reasons the independent model exists.
Where to start reading
These are written to be useful whether or not you ever contact us.
Tell us what you sell and what you can spend. You get back a plan, the stations and networks we would use, the ones we would avoid, and a straight answer about whether broadcast is the right place for your money at all.
Or call (866) 747-4707. No obligation, and no pressure to buy through us.
Tell us who you want to reach and what you want to accomplish. No obligation, and nothing is placed until you approve it.
