A Career Apart

Pat Holiday started in radio as a DJ during college. In just 3 years he was on-air nights at WOR-FM New York City, the most listened to FM station in America. He was a long time part of the legendary air staff of CKLW Detroit, and then later its Program Director and VP of Radio Programming for Baton Broadcasting, now CTV.

The history of this unique, trail blazing station was forever etched in history during the GEMINI Award winning HISTORY CHANNEL documentary Radio Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Big 8.

During his time on afternoon drive in Detroit, he was the third most listened to DJ in North America with 2.4 million listeners per week.

He’s consulted across the U.S. and Canada on CHR, Hot AC, the 'MIX' format, AC, Urban Oldies, Format 41, Smooth Jazz, and Newstalk. For almost a decade his primary programming occupation was turning terrible losing radio stations into successes one after another in numerous cities. Most in under 12 months.

As VP & General Manager of CJAY92 Calgary, he grew that rock station to an outright number 1 ranking in less than two years.

He then spent another 10 years as VP & GM of Standard Radio’s 3-station division in Toronto, North America's 3rd largest city. Two music stations, and one NewsTalk station. The cluster routinely had margins of 50% on a gross of $50+ million dollars, one of the highest margins in the broadcast industry.

His final work at Astral Media before retiring, was as the National VP of Programming for all of its 53 English radio stations across Canada. Astral Media, at that time, was the largest media company in Canada.

Pat has been part of two different successful morning teams in Detroit and Cincinnati and a runner up for Air Personality of the year in Billboard Magazine.

He has had the rare privilege of being on-air, managing, and/or programming an amazing list of NINE #1 legendary stations across the U.S. and Canada.

As National VP of Programming, Astral Media acquired the North American branding rights to VIRGIN RADIO from the Richard Branson group. Pat was tasked with the monumental feat of launching and completely overseeing the successful debuts of four brand new VIRGIN Radio stations in under 6 months. Four different cities coast to coast (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver), four different launches, all-different, with new staffs. All of the programming and strategies for the Astral stations were generated completely in house and local by Pat and his teams.