An update on the radio landscape by James Erskine.

I have always loved radio. It’s in my blood. My first job whilst at university was working at a commercial radio station and my first job after university was working as a radio planner/buyer at a big media agency.

I am a radio geek and, as a business, we have always delivered engaging and effective radio and audio campaigns. We currently have three brands with ongoing radio activity and one or two more campaigns due to go live. 

I like to keep up to date with the way the industry is talking about itself so last month I attended RadioCentre’s (the trade body of commercial radio in the UK) ‘Tuning In’ conference. A star studded event held at the Picture House Cinema in London.

Highlights:

Some of the presentations were not news to me. I was aware of how radio fosters a unique connection with its listeners, but many of the statistics presented helped dispel myths about radio.

• It is not dying! In fact, commercial radio in particular is thriving. Albeit in a slightly different way to how it has achieved success in the past.
• It is also not being replaced by audio streaming platforms and podcasts. Whilst listening to those platforms is strong and increasing, it is radio that still takes the lions share of audio listening – making up 70% of all listening! 
• Commercial radio is growing too, in terms of the hours listened to by audiences. 
• Finally, when you think radio might be old fashioned and for old people, let me surprise you; Commercial radio is still the main audio medium to reach 15-34s.

4 Ways Radio is doing this:

Radio has not stood still and is wildly different to how it looked 10 years ago. It has changed in a few key ways:

1. Big talent. There was a time when the local radio presenter was a huge name in a particular region. While that can still happen, recently radio (and particularly commercial radio) has attracted big mainstream talent that everyone knows. The talent are used to drive ratings to the all important breakfast show on some big networks. Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden present Heart Breakfast, 8 years ago Chris Moyles came back to radio to present on Radio X, Ken Bruce and Simon Mayo present on Greatest Hits Radio and Kiss has Jordan and Perry formerly of Diversity. This mainstream talent delivers a calling card for a station. It delivers engagement as the talent acts as a gateway for listeners to connect with the station brand. It is also, very obviously, a point of difference to streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer.  You can listen for the personality radio offers.
   
   

2. Big brands. The conference was held a week after Global Radio had launched 12 new radio stations. None of those stations was brand new. All were brand extensions of existing radio formats. For example, Radio X Chilled and Classic FM Movies. Whilst this does not rely on inherited wisdom of a local radio station serving a local market, it does offer brands and advertisers the opportunity to engage with listeners with host brands – the radio stations – that listeners have already bought into.
   
   
   

3. Hours and frequency of message.  Listeners may tune in for the talent, they may stay tuned for the radio station brand, and then stay in the radio station brands ecosystem due to the brand extensions. All of this means listeners stay tuned for a long time and these listener hours mean advertisers have the opportunity to deliver key messages frequently. This frequency of message is invaluable to advertisers. A single hit on a radio station is not really worth doing. Radio gives brands the opportunity of relatively high frequency campaigns.  On behalf of one of our customers, the Global online school, King’s InterHigh, we sponsor the no-repeat guarantee on Absolute Radio 90’s. This represents an awesome way to engage slightly older parent audiences on a brand that can be trusted and delivers incredible frequency of message.  We also developed a solution using shorter sponsorship credits which deliver brand recognition and longer form station-voiced 40 second messages which explain the brand proposition. This is a good example of how radio can be used to BOTH drive traffic AND develop a brand.
   
   
   

4. Radio is keeping up with the times. Much of radio listening is on DAB and more and more is via connected devices. This is good for two reasons, it shows radio is migrating its audiences over to up to date listening platforms, and it means advertisers get more accurate data when looking to target audiences. Radio is a broadcast medium, so much of the targeting can be done when refining your commercial messages, but increasingly we are able to find out more about a target audience and who is actually listening. 

Conclusion:

If radio is something you have not considered recently, let us help with an audit of the commercial radio marketplace, looking at all the opportunities that present themselves from radio and audio.

If you are currently running radio activity, and you are not sure how hard it is working for you – we are more than happy to have a look at your existing activity and have a think about how we might refine and re-energise it. Drop me an email james.erskine@wearerocket.co.uk. 

Radio is still an incredibly exciting space to engage with and to use as part of your campaigns and ongoing activity.