Missed the bus?

When your station offers a mass-market proposition in a highly competitive city like London a bit of visibility can really drive awareness. And one way to be visible is to spend a bunch of cash on good old-fashioned above-the-line advertising.

This tactic has worked well for LBC 97.3 in recent months. Its heavyweight outdoor campaign on taxis helped LBC become the number two London station in the market. Meanwhile, Capital FM has built its recent success in part on a decent events strategy.

Now Heart 106.2 has also been putting some energy into outdoor advertising with big red ads on even bigger red London buses. What Heart has saved on the creative they seem to have spent on the media with huge numbers of bus sides carrying the station’s message across town.

The ads may be hard to miss, but awareness doesn’t in itself bring new listeners even if it can help recall and therefore improve the effectiveness of diary-based measurement. To convert awareness into genuine audience you also need trial. It’s the next step up the engagement escalator.

So given the prominent Heart branding on these buses I assumed they’d take the next logical step and were introducing people to Heart by playing the station inside the buses.

Heart is a brilliantly well-programmed station that would undoubtedly attract new listeners through trial and a short bus ride could be a great opportunity to let people sample a new radio station.

An opportunity missed it seems – the driver of the Heart-branded bus I caught this morning was listening to, er, 5 Live.

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Pirate radio in London

I’m indebted to Andy Buckingham for highlighting this video. It is striking in two ways:

Whatever you think about pirate radio in London, you’ve probably not seen a better shortform documentary on the subject than this.

And secondly, who made the film? Not a broadcaster but a footwear manufacturer, Palladium.

Broadcasters, licensed or otherwise, no longer have a monopoly on the best content.

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Radio at the Edge

If you want to make your radio promotions ever-more compelling and effective you really need to think about what’s next in radio and how to exploit it.

I say that with some confidence and a perhaps little smugness, having just helped a team of BBC World Service people secure the P&M award for best cross-platform campaign.

More on that soon, but not before you can get the same forward-thinking insights that helped us, just by turning up at an event in London.

Radio At the Edge on 9 November promises a strong line-up of sessions and guests this year, covering subjects across programming, marketing, web production, business and strategy disciplines. The day has everything from learning from Google’s approach to advertising to understanding the new mobile revolution.

If any of that excites you or worries you, Radio At The Edge is the event to attend.

Disclosure: it’s odd how some deals are structured but, by writing this post, I am promised beer and sausages from James Cridland. Study the photo above and then let me know whether you think I got a good deal.

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Student Radio Awards – lasting memories

With apologies for the lack of recent bloggery (working hard, new channel launch, consultancy in Kenya, getting ahead for Christmas etc.) here are those reflections on the Student Radio Awards, as promised…

This was a brilliantly organised event and the IndigO2 venue had just the right amount of modern showbiz appeal to give the evening an established, professional air without being stuffy. Well done to the Student Radio Association. They even managed to unite Andy Parfitt (suit) and Ashley Tabor (knitwear) in what looks like live karaoke, but wasn’t.

 

From the conversations I enjoyed with students, passion for radio remains as strong as ever with speech radio appearing to be particularly popular right now. Hardly surprising given current on-air trends towards greater dominance of personality and fewer formats promising little more than your iPod can offer. You could easily argue that Moyles is a speech-led show, especially if you only ever hear the podcasts.

To the main event, and the team from Nottingham’s URN collected a huge number of prizes including the overall station of the year award. Expect to see some of these faces (pictured) around a professional radio boardroom table before too long.

 

As one of the journalism judges I can tell you that URN was extremely strong in news, managing to cover a large number of well-targeted stories with consistently solid story telling, interesting writing, great use of audio and confident presentation. That’s the right mix for a win. Have a listen.

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As this is supposed to be a promotions and navigation blog I ought to mention URN’s neighbours Fly FM who picked up the Marketing/Branding award. I haven’t heard their audio so if you happen to have a copy please get in touch.

One mystery… what was Jason Donovan doing at the awards? He didn’t perform nor did he present anything and I didn’t see him on the judges list. But he was jolly nice to everybody in the upstairs bar. Top man. Let’s start playing his songs again.

And Panko Crusted Chicken? It looks like this (pictured). Yum.

James Cridland has written a more thoughtful, longer and generally better piece about the awards on his blog.

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