EUREKA SPRINGS — SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth:
Nov. 18, 1950, in Kansas City, Mo.
Occupation:
executive director, Eureka Springs City Advertising and Promotion Commission
Family:
wife Beverly, son Jake
My ultimate career goal in radio was
to be at WCFL at Chicago.
I wanted to work for the “voice of labor,” behind Larry Lujack.
My favorite piece of technology is
Apple’s Final Cut Pro Video Editing software.
The coolest album cover of all time is
Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company.
My guitar heroes are
Stephen Stills, Jorma Kaukonen, Andres Segovia and Pete Huttlinger.
Something about me that would surprise people
is I play 11 characters in a play called Greater Tuna, and three of the characters are women.
The first time I visited Eureka Springs, I thought,
[there’s] one heck of a lot of hills!
One thing I’d like to be better at is
guitar playing. I’ve played all my life, and I always want to improve.
The key to getting a radio commercial right on the first take is
proofread and practice.
A word or a phrase to sum me up:
imaginative
“Has anyone ever told you that you have a great voice for radio?”
Yes, Mike Maloney will answer with a chuckle, he has heard that before - so many times he has lost count, in fact. The people who ask that have good ears; Maloney does have a great voice for radio.
And he has made good use of that voice.
“My staff asked me one day, ‘How many commercials have you done?’ and gosh, I really didn’t know,” Maloney says. “So I sat down and [counted], and we came up with between 25 [thousand] and 30,000 different voice-overs I’ve done.”
The astonishing thing about Maloney’s estimate is not that the number is so huge, but that it represents a conservative guess.
The majority of these commercials were recorded during the years he ran his company, Maloney Marketing Group (1993-2011), when he figures he was recording up to a dozen a day in his Cave Springs recording studio.
Some of those commercials were for his company’s clients, while others were work he did for advertising agencies around the country. One time, Maloney was calling someone in New York, was put on hold, and heard his voice narrating a car commercial on a Yonkers radio broadcast.
“The beauty of Mike is that he has that great voice you can use to do all your radio spots,” says Rebuilding Together NWA Executive Director Jan Skopecek, who hired Maloney Marketing Group to represent the Northwest Arkansas Homebuilders Association around a decade ago. “His voice is very distinctive and very impressive.”
Maloney began recording commercials more than four decades ago, when he was a student atNorthwest Missouri State University. He’s still making good use of his voice today, as the executive director of the Eureka Springs City Advertising and Promotion Commission, where he leads a group that promotes the city.
But there’s a lot more to Maloney than a rich voice. He has decades of marketing experience, the knowledge that comes from being mayor of a small town (Cave Springs), and a love of technology and an understanding of its possibilities for a place like Eureka Springs.
Since taking his current position in August 2011, Maloney has been squarelyfocused on introducing Eureka Springs to new visitors and getting those who have visited before to return. Sales tax receipts are up 20 percent from a year ago, indicating that the commission’s efforts have been working wonders.
“It’s absolutely better [since Maloney took his job], not only in the image Eureka Springs is putting forth, but also as an arts colony and in terms of revenue,” says Sandy Martin of Eureka Springs, the chairman of the Eureka Springs Mayor’s Arts Council. “These are all pretty critical [developments].”
TEAM ROCKER
Before Maloney had the voice, he had a guitar.
He has been playing the guitar for nearly 50 years, taking up the instrument around the time The Beatles broke through in America.
“He and I and a friend across the street literally played until our fingers bled - five, six days a week in the summer, for hours and hours,” says lifelong friend Craig Sheumaker of Rancho Murieta, Calif. “He’s a good guitar player and he took it seriously. He really studied it.”
Maloney was born in Kansas City, Mo., and lived there for the first decade of his life. When the inner-city neighborhood his family called home began to get rough, the Maloneys moved to suburban Gladstone, Mo.
He teamed up with Sheumaker and another boy to form a band. Maloney, the lead guitarist, was the youngest of the trio, but Sheumaker remembers the band as being one in which no member had a disproportionate influence.
“It was very democratic, totally collaborative, even though our bass player was two years older than me and three years older than Mike,” Sheumaker says. “Mike was just a really easy guy to get along with, the same as he is now.”
Keeping open the lines of communication, and making sure everyone’s input is considered, are as important to Maloney at 61 years old as they were when he was 15. A major part of Maloney’s work is interacting with the many different groups that make Eureka Springs so unique - from its artists and restaurant owners to its hoteliers.
C.D. White of Eureka Springs has known Maloney for more than a decade and has closely observed his work with the commission. What stands out under Maloney, she says, is the way everybody is on the same page.
“The basis for everything that’s happening is that they’ve got great teamwork in that office now,” says White, a writer with the Lovely County Citizen. “They’re much more proactive, going out there and getting the job done.
“He’s in touch with the business community, with the arts community and with the writing community. He’s just into what’s happening in Eureka Springs.”
The reason it’s easy for Maloney to get so involved in Eureka Springs is because he truly cares about the place. He and his wife, Beverly, made it their regular getaway destination about eight years ago, and they fell in love with thecommunity.
Maloney says he wasn’t actively looking to move to Eureka Springs full time, but when the position opened up with the commission, it was too tempting to pass up.
“This town still has a magical feel to me,” he says. “I figured that if I could figure out a way to make a living here, I’d move here.
“The thing that was appealing about the job was that it was not going to change what I had been very comfortable in doing. I had honed my skills as a person who loves marketing and what marketing is all about. Being able to be a free-form thinker and still able to do that in this jobis really cool.”
TAXING MATTERS
Thick skin isn’t a desired qualification for Maloney’s job; it’s mandatory.
The commission oversees the revenue collected from the city’s tourism tax on lodging and restaurants, and when you’re the tax man, “you’re not always everybody’s best friend,” Maloney says. At thesame time, there are hundreds of individuals whose livelihood depends on the commission’s ability to attract people to Eureka Springs, and these folks don’t hesitate to voice their opinions.
“The CAPC is a very public entity, and he’s held accountable for the tax dollars he collects for people of Eureka Springs,” Martin says. “You can’t just do good ads, you also have to understand the decision-making process in advance and how it will [affect] bottom lines, and how it will be perceived politically.”
This is where Maloney benefits from his experience as mayor of Cave Springs. He held the job during an eventful time in the city’s history, 1994-1998, when Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport was being built in nearby Highfill. There was great uncertainty about what the opening of the airport - and the road that led to it, whichran straight through Cave Springs - would mean for the city.
At the same time, Cave Springs was experiencing a population boom, going from 465 people in 1990 to 1,103 in 2000. Being mayor was supposed to be a part-time gig, Maloney recalls, something like four hours a week, but he says he wound up putting 40 hours a week into it.
“People were putting in subdivisions, and that forced a shift of thinking, of ‘How do you grow a city?’” Maloney says. “Those were big challenges. I was running myown company at the time, so it became a real balancing act. I wouldn’t trade it for the world, but it was tough.”
The Maloneys had moved to Cave Springs in 1980, when Maloney left a promising career in radio to go into marketing, taking a position with the former Gurley Associates. Beverly’s family had been in the area since the turn of the 19th century, and the then-newlyweds bought land there in the mid-1970s, thinking they might retire there decades later.
As it turned out, they wound up building a house and moving onto the property within five years. (The Maloneys still own the land, but today they are full-time residents of Eureka Springs, having gone so far as to change their voter registrations.)
Maloney worked for Gurley Associates until 1993, then started his own company. He served on the Cave SpringsCity Council before running for mayor.
It’s just in Maloney’s nature to rise to positions of leadership, say people who know him. Ed McClure of Rogers, a longtime friend and performing partner, says Maloney exudes calmness in times of crisis, something he credits to his years in radio.
“He is just completely as cool as a cucumber,” Mc-Clure says. “Mike’s just one of those guys that once he gets involved in something, others around him look to him as a leader.
“He’s very much inclusive,very affable, and just naturally likable.”
FISHING FOR LAUGHS
McClure and Maloney have been doing their twoman Greater Tuna shows together for a quarter-century.
The 50 or so shows they’ve done together have all been set in a radio station in the fictional town of Tuna, the “third-smallest town in Texas.” The two men perform as a wide array of characters - often appearing on stage as a grown woman, then changing into another costume and returning as a young boy.
“Times haven’t really caught up to Tuna,” McClure explains. “It deals with smalltown ways and Southernness, and the hook of the show is that Mike and I each play 10 different characters, both men and women. It’s always a lot of fun.”
Maloney loves to perform, which is what made him such a good fit for radio back in the1970s. He worked for the student radio station at Northwest Missouri State University and KXCV-FM, 90.5, also associated with the university and one of the nation’s first National Public Radio stations.
When KXCV came into existence in 1971, Maloney jumped at the chance to get involved. The station played much of the traditional talkradio and classical music that is a hallmark of public radio programming, says longtime friend Rick Stockdell of Fayetteville, but the two of themcreated a popular show called Static in Stereo, which played rock music from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.
During that same time, Maloney was made the station manager of the student station as a junior, a position Stockdell says had previously only been held by seniors. He took the responsibilities seriously, but as always, strove to make it enjoyable for his staff - in this case, by hosting staff meetings at a bar.
“It was clear he had a future in radio,” says Stockdell, the station manager of KUAFFM, 91.3 in Fayetteville. “Mike was always involved, learned quickly and had good ideas.He’s always been pretty mature, and being 6-foot-6 with a big voice doesn’t hurt.”
After earning his bachelor’s degree in speech, Maloney wound up in Colorado Springs, Colo., working for a country music station. In 1978, he was hired by KARN in Little Rock as an on-air personality and program director.
Given its location in the state capital, Maloney had the opportunity to interview powerful political figures. After two years at KARN, though, Maloney realized that all the work he was putting into radio, and the accompanying low wages, were wearing him down, so he joined an ad agency in Northwest Arkansas.
“It was a fit,” Maloney says. “I really liked it. I was a creative writer more than anything else. It was nice to be able to take the skills that I hadworking on the air - writing commercials and programs - and then translate that to a broader market.”
Maloney has been in marketing ever since. His staff at Maloney Marketing Group grew as large as 12 people before the recent recession, and he was forced to close it down in 2011.
That was humbling, he says, as well as the biggest regret of his career. But it was also a learning experience, and he still had all the skills he gained over the past 20 years, which he has transferred to his work on behalf of a single client: Eureka Springs.
Since taking the position with the commission, Maloney has revamped its website. He has made an increased push to attract visitors from Benton and Washington counties, produced advertisements for TV, radio and print, and made use of social-networking sites.
The commission closely studies visitor data to figure out who is coming to the community and why, so it can best target prospective tourists. Staff members also spend a lot of time in the community, talking to the people who make the city so unique.
“He is the perfect fit for his job with the CAPC because he has so many connections and such a great understanding of what needs to be out there, and who needs to be attracted to it,” White says. “He’s doing such a good job. I see an entire change of atmosphere.”
Northwest Profile, Pages 33 on 07/01/2012