Earshot creative » student radio

URN: It’s the kind of noise students make!

Jonathan Jacob — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:47:27 +0000

‘It’s the kind of noise students make!’ …

… it’s the kind of creative and genius strapline which the URN team at University of Nottingham to pick up Gold at the Student Radio Awards in the Marketing and Station Sound Category (as well as the Best Student Radio Station too!).

URN decided to strip back their ‘commercial’ radio sounding station and went to a purely ‘student radio’ focused sound. A “sound” which made the station look real and pure to its listeners.

Lou Nash at URN tells us more:

This year we have taken a very different approach to branding at URN. The previous year saw a drastic turn towards a very commercial brand, with highly produced and polished idents and sweepers. Although this gave the station a very professional sound, this year’s team felt that the station’s imaging did not reflect the station’s output. URN is, by design, a student radio station, and thus what it produces is a student sound, aimed at and created by students. All our presenters are students, and the vast majority of our listeners are too. Therefore we wanted our station sound to reflect both the presenters and the listeners. A major part of this was to completely stop using commercial voiceovers, and instead exclusively use student voices. Although this made the job much more challenging due to students not being experienced in voicing idents and trails, the results were felt to be much more suitable for the vibe of the station. We therefore wanted the imaging of the station to highlight and celebrate this. With this in mind we came up with a new strapline for the station:

‘It’s the kind of noise students make!’

The simplicity and honesty of the new strapline was designed to reflect the essence of URN: the fact that we are a radio station wholly run by and presented by students. Despite the negative connotations of the word ‘noise’ we thought it appropriate not only as a word that incorporated both sides of radio: music and speech, but also as a more genuine and humorous statement about the inevitable reality of student radio, and the very real possibility of things going wrong! However it has developed from a simple strapline into the station’s general philosophy and attitude to what we do, and what we are trying to achieve.

Download audio file (audio-for-entry.mp3)

Earshot Creative decided to take a deeper look into the award winning entry, by speaking to Lou Nash about some of the key elements of her marketing and branding strategy..

SO WHAT IS THE KIND OF NOISE STUDENTS MAKE?

With our new brand and station ethos in place, we were keen to listen to our fellow students and make sure that the kinds of noises we were making were what they actually wanted to hear! To do this we wrote and emailed out a survey to every student at the university asking for feedback including how often, when, to what, and how they listened to URN and what they liked and didn’t like about our programming, music and website.

Over 2000 students completing the survey, confirming our thoughts that URN had lost touch with its audience. We found that what students wanted was something different, that was relevant to them, particularly when it came to news, and coverage of live events both on and off campus. They also wanted us to shift our playlist to include a bit more new music they wouldn’t find elsewhere. Having our thoughts confirmed by thousands of other students spurred us on to make URN bigger, better and more relevant than ever before.

ONLINE - URN1350.NET

Once again the website has been integral to our brand. Individual pages were created for both SU and URN events including Week One, Varsity, SU elections, Summer Party, After Dark Unleashed and Beat That. Due to the significance and importance of the tuition fees scandal to students, we also had a ‘2010 Demo’ page where on the day listeners who were not able to attend, could track the reporters route along the march using GPS, and view our twitter and photo updates and latest reports. This ensured that were became a resource: somewhere students could go to find out about the big events on campus and off, as well as our coverage of these events.

As part of our aim to keep the website up to date, new promos went up every week promoting future URN events, special shows and OBs, as well as interviews and coverage of SU events. The consistent yet ever changing look of the website kept people interested and instantly informed whenever they visited.

ON CAMPUS AND STUDENT VOICE

Our presence on campus has expanded phenomenally this year with more outside broadcasts than ever before, 24 in total, thanks to our Al Fresco week, as well as more visible involvement in Students’ Union events. All of this was aided by a greater sense of continuation and uniformity within our brand with new banners designed to mirror the T shirts worn by the URN team out and about on campus. We decided to focus our on campus brand to revolve around to colours: teal and purple, both of which feature extensively on the website. This helped us to create a recognisable and memorable visual identity around campus.

An incredibly important part of our news show The Pulse, is the discussion of events that affect students. To get a range of views, and find out what Nottingham students really think, reporters go out around campus every day, wearing URN t shirts, to vox students about their opinions on that day’s stories. This not only improves and varies our output, but also promotes The Pulse to students, with those interviewed more likely to listen in future.

STUDENT EVENTS

Week One was, as usual, a great opportunity to really get the word out about URN to both new and existing students. Our branding started even before the freshers had got to Nottingham, with a page in the Students Union guide dedicated to URN, where we publicised our Week One coverage and our New Members Meeting the following week. Our biggest branding operation was on Move-in day when we sent out a team of more than 20 URN reps, armed with flyers, branded beer mats and fridge magnets. This team also acted as an OB team out in the field. Our on air content throughout that day consisted of The Move-In Show from 11am until 4pm with two anchoring presenters in the studio phoning the team to get freshers involved in various challenges related to their new halls. Students from Derby Hall were instructed to find an object to use as a ‘horse’ and then have a race that was commentated live over the phone by one of our team members. Similarly students from Sherwood Hall had to construct bows and arrows and see whose would go furthest. We also ran a Hall Pride competition where our team would have to gather as many students from a particular hall and get them to shout down the phone ‘We’re [name of hall] and we love URN!’. Each was put through the ‘pride-o-meter’ to see who was loudest, with the winning hall having gathered over 100 students to take part. These kinds of activities immediately appealed to students who had just moved in and were looking for a way of making friends and getting involved.

Throughout the rest of Week One we ran a series of competitions which encouraged students to head to the website and tune in. To utilise the free bus service put on by the Students Union, our mascot Ben the Bear was sent into the town centre each day to hide out and be found by freshers who tuned in listening for clues as to his whereabouts. The first person or group to find him would win tickets to that night’s fresher event, as well as free milkshakes and cinema tickets.

Every evening saw an extension of our usual Friday night Pre-Ocean Show, the warm up to Nottingham Uni’s favourite Friday night club night. Branded ‘The 60 Minute Win It’, it immediately drew in listeners simply due to its name. We also distributed flyers highlighting the prizes that could be won, which included an ipod, dominoes pizzas, bus passes, club night tickets, a wii, meals for two, gig tickets, drinks vouchers, and even a weekend pass and flights to Oktoberfest.

Then first three days of Week One once again saw us broadcasting live from Freshers Fair. This gave us a chance to recruit new members, enhanced by them being able to see us in action. We were played out across the fair, meaning that every fresher would have heard us at least once during Week One. We also interacted with students on other stalls, even staging a dance competition with the cheerleaders, which attracted quite a crowd and was judged by a member of the SU Exec!

Our involvement in Nottingham Uni’s Summer Party had always been very exclusive. Based backstage we would send URN reps out and about getting voxes and bringing the festival to the presenters. This year we wanted to be much more daring and innovative and decided to position ourselves right in the centre of the action. This not only allowed the presenters to really get a feel for what was going on, and thus improve the broadcast itself, but we became a very prominent presence. The team wore our new purple branded t shirts which really made us stand out in the crowd. And with the broadcast coming from the centre of the festival it meant we could get people straight on air, thus making them feel more of a part of our broadcast, rather than voxing them and editing it down to be played out half an hour later. To entice people over to our stall we branded ourselves as a ‘Survival Station’ giving out free sun cream and water, as well as letting people play in our branded paddling pool to cool down. We wanted people to have something to take home with our logo on so we also gave out 250 branded beach balls. The choice of beach balls was even more effective than anticipated: as soon as the big name bands started playing out beach balls could be seen bobbing up and down amid the crowd, with some even making their way onto, and back off the stage! URN beach balls soon became the must-have memento of the day.

GETTING OUR DJ'S OUT AND ABOUT

Due to our growing reputation as a source of great music and musical talent, URN has been asked to provide DJs for a number of important SU events including Graduation Ball, Media Ball, Ice Hockey Varsity as well as the weekly Karni After Parties. They have also built up fantastic reputations beyond the Students’ Union, meaning that URN DJs can frequently be found taking our music directly to our audience, and playing at the big clubs and bars in town including Oceana, Gatecrasher, Stealth, Dogma, Market Bar, Detonate, Crisis and Twisted Hearts.

To ensure that each area of URN had the opportunity to showcase themselves, we organised a series of events which were publicised across campus. To highlight our After Dark shows to a wider audience we hosted a week of brand new music, allowing the After Dark presenters to ‘take over’ the Afternoon Show every day for a week. Each day was themed by music genre with appropriate DJs creating mini-mixes to showcase the kinds of music they play on their shows. This allowed our regular daytime listeners to get a feel of the After Dark brand and what it could offer. The After Dark Unleashed week also included free gigs held on campus and hosted by URN. As in previous years we had a great turn out and an enthusiastic response and were able to push the URN brand by handing out URN beer mats. On the Friday evening, the final day of After Dark Unleashed, we took over the biggest and most popular bar in Lenton, the student area of Nottingham, where a large number of students gather each Friday night to meet friends before going into town. We staged live performances from local up and coming bands, and our very own URN DJs kept the crowds there until the early hours.

STUDENT NOISE TO MAJOR EVENTS

This year we also broadcast and produced shows for national and even international events. One of the most successful was our Oscars night. We realised that students in halls and those without a satellite television were unable to watch the Oscars, due to it only being broadcast on Sky. Therefore we decided to produce our own coverage of the night itself, starting at 10pm and continuing on until 5.30am. By providing a service that was not available to a large percentage of Nottingham students elsewhere we became an invaluable resource, and incredibly relevant.

Similarly we decided to take on Red Nose Day. Instead of broadcasting the event itself, which would have been unnecessary, we decided to raise money for the cause by doing a variety of ridiculous things around campus, thus also promoting ourselves. One such act of silliness involved staging a flashmob in the Students Union shop, promoted through a secret facebook group. On the day the on air presenter played a certain song – the Baywatch theme – a Nottingham Friday night favourite during which it is Nottingham tradition that every male in the room removes his t shirt and swings it around his head. When the song came on a large group of URN and other boys, including members of the SU exec, dutifully donned red noses, took off their tops and swung them around their heads whilst singing along. The girls then went round with URN collecting buckets encouraging people to donate any spare change to Red Nose Day. The reaction was incredible, some boys who had nothing to do with us joined in, many people stood and stared!

STATION

Our big focus this year has been to get more student voices on the air. To achieve this we not only did away with our old professional voiceovers, but also our very limited set of student voices. With ‘It’s The Kind Of Noise Students Make’ acting both as our new strapline and philosophy, we wanted to use multiple voices to highlight the diversity of the station. We didn’t want to limit our brand to only two or three voices, but to record fresh voiceovers for every ident, show starter or trail made. We realised that certain voices work in certain ways. While one voice may sound great in a trail promoting a morning entertainment show, it could equally sound terrible used for an ident for a specialist music dubstep, reggae or drum and bass show.

‘It’s the Kind Of Noise Student Make has revolutionised URN. This year membership doubled compared to previous years, with over 200 members! They’ve had, more visitors to the website, more comments on blogs and texts into shows, and more listeners. The general atmosphere in and around the studios has also been much more welcoming and friendly. Presenters from all areas of URN have got involved and worked as a team to produce fantastic coverage and broadcasts of events, to create a naked calendar, to form a flashmob, and to beat a world record. And this has all been a result of the complete change in attitude to the branding and marketing of the station.

Take a listen to the station and find out more at their website – www.urn1350.net. Lou Nash from URN will also be appearing on a forthcoming episode of the Earshot Creative Review podcast too.

Original writing licensed under Creative Commons. Views within Earshot Creative are personal. Meet Earshot Creative on Twitter if you like.

Mystery voices and winners revealed

Steve Martin — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:10:28 +0000

If you’ve downloaded the latest Earshot Creative Review podcast you’ll already know the results of the Hobsons Mystery Voice competition. If you haven’t heard it yet I thoroughly recommend you make time for it. Matt Lomax from Kiss and James Stodd from the BBC are in the podcast and they’re both characteristically good.

Meanwhile, here are the competition results at a glance and the audio of the prize draw which was conducted for no apparent reason on the edge of the desert in Namibia (although the Namibian capital Windhoek is built on Win, clearly).

Download audio file (reveal.mp3)

The answers

Male voice: Bob Golding
Female voice: Bethan James

Runners up

Each runner-up wins a T shirt of their choice from myradiofashion.com

Ben Townsend from the UK
Brad Piper from the USA
Jen Maine from the UK

Big winner

Harvey McCabe from the UK

Harvey wins a one hour studio recording session with a Hobsons voice artist of his choice. He also gets the rights to use the audio from the session on any of his production in perpetuity and the support of the Hobsons studio manager, Jonathan.

Harvey told me a little about himself.

“Well I’m 20, and a student at King’s College London. I study English Language & Communication, but for the last year or so I’ve been contributing to my student radio station, KCL Radio. The station only a couple of years old and at the moment we’re just publishing podcasts (news/music/features etc.) on our website.

Last September we were kitted out with our first studio as a result of a bursary from the University. Since then I have been working on one-off podcasts, doing features on events in London and at King’s and having a go at covering the chart show.

Recently I’ve been working on my own show for September with a friend, which will be a combination of music, interaction with listeners, and various features. This will give me a great opportunity to practice my production skills, whilst learning more.

Production is my passion and I hope to work in this area as a career after University. This summer I will be working at two radio production companies for work experience and the rest of the time will be spent working on my show for September.”

Many congratulations to all winners and thank you to everybody who took part. We had a huge amount of fun with the competition and our sponsors Hobsons will be delighted with the amount of voice searching around their site the competition prompted. A win-win indeed.

Original writing licensed under Creative Commons. Views within Earshot Creative are personal. Meet Earshot Creative on Twitter if you like.

Route into Radio

Jonathan Jacob — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:34:45 +0000

Skillset and The Radio Academy have launched a fantastic new resource today called Route Into Radio. It gives young people a real insight and understanding into the available careers and skills required to make it in the radio business.

The main feature of the website is an interactive video wall that features short video clips from people in the biz. They’re giving their advice on getting into and getting on in radio. It features a wide range of radio professional across multiple catergories like News and Sport, Interactive and Technical, Sales and Marketing, Business and Management, Presenting and Production. The people interviewed include BA’s, producers, journalists, engineers, sales executives as well as presenters such as Aasmah Mir, co-host of BBC Radio 5 live Drive, and BBC Radio 1 ‘s Scott Mills – and includes a full mix of ”BBC” and “Commercial” bods.

The site also features written case studies, links to radio job profiles, careers and work experience advice, industry information as well as short films on radio production and technical skills. It’s a really well developed and functional resource.

Take a look for yourself at the website over at http://www.routeintoradio.org/

The project is delivered by Skillset and The Radio Academy – with video content being supported by RadioCentre and the BBC. Bauer Media, Community Media Association, Global Radio, GMG Radio, The Radio Independents Group and the Student Radio Association are also supporting the campaign.

It seems a really strong concept that hopefully will encourage young people to see ‘radio’ as an exciting opportunity and avenue to join the media industry outside of the big bright lights of ’television’ and ‘digital’. The videos on the website cover the full spectrum of roles in the business and include some real top names offering their pearls of wisdom. I think it’s important for those in the industry to offer their ideas, knowledge and advice whenever asked. I personally get great satisfaction when I’m delivering or facilitating projects and workshops for young people who’re interested in getting involved in radio.

In summary – thumbs up to The Radio Academy and Skillset for creating a strong industry resource. Let’s hope it gets used and creates stars of the future!

Original writing licensed under Creative Commons. Views within Earshot Creative are personal. Meet Earshot Creative on Twitter if you like.

Student Radio Conference 2011

Jonathan Jacob — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:29:06 +0000

It seems the future of the radio industry isn’t going without a fight! This week I left the London office for the day to join over 350 students from all over the UK, join together with people from all sectors of the radio industry for three days of training, networking and partying at the Student Radio Conference 2011, hosted by Crush Radio at the University of Hertfordshire.

As a conference virgin, I joined the events on the first day with a sense of intrest and nerves. However, iwas thoroughly impressed with both the energy and talent being displayed from the students present but more so with the level of support and the calibre of the speakers and guests who gave up their time to support the Student Radio association. I think the fact that the conference venue was less than half hour from Kings Cross/Central London – helped gather support, but nevertheless – the ‘guestlist’ was a ‘Who’s Who’ of radio.

I started my conference experience joined by Gemma Parkinson, Brand Manager of Capital Network and Talia Kranes, Entertainment Liaison at Bauer Media along with others at a ‘Radio Surgery’ organised by the Student Radio Association. The surgery was devised to start the conference with the opportunity to provide one to one sessions with students who wanted to find out more about radio. It was really good fun to start the day meeting students and also to hear about a really exciting opportunity available at Global Radio called the Global Academy, which was actively promoted by Gemma. Good to know that the scheme is actively praised and encouraged to others by Global Staff!

I then popped along to the conference welcome speech by the current SRA chair – David Walker. After a few technical errors (c’mon it’s a radio conference!), it was clear there was a general excitement for the event to start!

Conference Keynote Panel

The first session was the key note panel, which included industry leaders Rhys Hughes, Mike Hanson (both BBC), Tony Moorey (Absolute) and John Simons (GMG) providing advice to wannabe radio stars such and their view to the future of the industry.

Monday afternoon saw a variety of speakers provide insight into Events, Marketing and Promotions. Clara Raven and Richard Burnham started the afternoon talking about events. Clara examined the Radio 1 Big Weekend in depth and provided a deeper understanding into both the challenge and successes of the events delivered by the team at BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra. Richard then followed with a presentation into some of the elements explored by him and the team at Global Radio when organising large, group events such as the Summertime Ball and Classic FM Live with some real practical advice for any budding event managers of the future!

Afterwards, I chaired (a rather scary experience!) a session with my S&P counterparts from Absolute, Global and Bauer. The session aimed to motivate students into generating revenues, partnerships and money making activities for student stations by looking at some of the practices and insight from across commercial radio.

Liz Cunningham, Head of Commercial Programming at Kiss Network spoke in depth into the coordination of the recent ‘Kiss Chosen One’ promotion with Blackberry and provided students with an insight into delivering creative and multiplatform campaigns. Heidi Humphrey, Commercial Programmer at Global Radio gave the student audience a sense of inspiration when describing her career journey from student radio in the US into working both on and off air at GWR into her more recent roles at Global with Capital and Xfm. Lauren Stone, Promotions Account Manger at Absolute Radio demonstrated some of the ways that online is used as a ‘selling’ tool to potentional clients and reinforced the need for creativity when coming up with ideas in order to win business against other media (and other radio brands!). A massive thanks to Heidi, Liz and Lauren for giving up their time to be on the panel and to Carina Tilson at Global Radio for her support in putting the session together.

After the session – the four of us spoke with some students who had a serious interest in the promotions/commercial sector of the industry and asked some more detailed questions. Students from Birmingham University spoke of their work with the Heart FM Street Team and how they’re finding it a useful ground to ‘get their foot in the door’. I couldn’t agree more!

One student, Matt ‘Shaggy’ Marchat took the proactive approach of coming up to me in the bar afterwards and handed over a demo. “Nothing new that!?” I hear you say. What really surprised me about Matt’s six track demo – was the first five tracks were examples of his commercial production and wasn’t just a CD full of ‘that was, this is’ links and live reads. This was someone who made a Demo CD of adverts!

I finally got around to listening to the adverts and I must say are extremely strong. The creative treatment is well executed and delivers the clients key messages well on all six occasions – especially the ‘My Mate Robert’ advert for Roberts Radio. If you’re looking for a new commercial producer or fancy giving someone that big break – I’d recommend getting in touch with Matt – he’s on Twitter @shaggymarchant. (Matt – when you’re earning millions from com prod, I want 10% – OK?)

My afternoon was finished catching up with old colleagues and joining other radio folk in the SU bar (with amazing beer prices!) to catch up on all things radio and watch a live recording of Steve Lamacq’s afternoon show on BBC 6music. Steve is a great supporter of student radio and his university challenge-esq game show featuring fellow BBC staff versus students was a great end to the first day of the conference.

Steve Lamcaq BBC6 Music Show from #SRACon

Demo Factor

I really wanted to stay for the entire three days as I believe a variety of more high profile speakers at breakout sessions coupled with entertainment ranging from Westwood DJing, Tulip and Greg from Radio 1 hosting the quiz, ‘Demo Factor’ hosted by Adam Catterall – were presenter demos were critiqued and ripped to shreds by an industry panel in front of the crowd and the ‘I Love Student Radio Awards’ hosted by Iain Lee were a must see! The #SRA hash tag seemed alive with excitement from students all engaging into what seemed like a fantastic plethora of activity for the trainee broadcasters.

In Conversation .... Geoff and Dave Gorman (Absolute Radio)

A massive congratulations to the SRA Exec and Crush Radio (the host station) for executeting a strong and well-planned event. The range of opportunities and insight into the industry was extremely powerful and was delivered with a steller selection of talent/speakers from all levels of the industry from big wigs to those at junior roles too. I do hope students who went take out the advice and learnings they were taught, and keep in contact with any new contacts made from the twitter addresses and business cards that were being handed out.

I look forward to continuing my involved with the Student Radio Association by supporting the annual Student Radio Awards again in 2011. Student Radio is a great pool of talent both on air and off air, the conference was an incredible opportunity for students to meet people and take their first steps in the industry. I hope it continues to get the support it deserves from BBC and Commercial Radio and delivers opportunities and avenues nurture the talent further.

Disclaimer – All posts and views are my own, and are not endorsed or representative of any current or previous employer.

Image Source: Ila Desai – ilayad@gmail.com

Comments

Saturday 30 April, 2011, Julie Goodley writes: Student radio is not only fun to participate in but a great source of potential radio stars of the future for commercial and public radio stations too. It's nice to see the respect in which student radio is held when the big names of broadcasting turn up and contribute so positively. Keep it up!

Original writing licensed under Creative Commons. Views within Earshot Creative are personal. Meet Earshot Creative on Twitter if you like.

Earshot Creative Review for January 2011

Steve Martin — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 09:53:13 +0000

Ben Townsend, Steve Martin and Jonathan JJ Jacob.

Our guests this month are JJ (Jonathan Jacob) of First Radio Sales and recent graduate from the University of Nottingham Ben Townsend who helped secure URN‘s recent clutch of student radio awards.

In the podcast you’ll hear audio from Liverpool’s Juice FM, City Beat of Belfast, Surrey and Hampshire’s Eagle Radio and URN. We also discuss how student radio is feeding mainstream stations with new talent on both sides of the mic, and play some great audio from Australia’s 2Day network and the new Capital FM network.

You’ll also get a head start in our new competition to win a voice session with Hobsons.

The audio

Play the audio here: Duration 42’38″

Download audio file (ecr_jan11.mp3)

Download the audio (160kb/s mp3, 51.2M)
Subscribe via iTunes.

Jonathan Jacob

JonathanJacob2011CV

Ben Townsend

Ben Townsend CV

Latest tracks by brgtownsend

URN’s winning written Marketing and Station Sound entry for the 2010 SRA awards (pdf)

URN’s audio entry

Credits

Imaging by Chris Nicol at WizzFX using the voices of Elly Fairman and Andrew Burt. Thanks to radiobeds.co.uk for the music beds and Session Singer Online for the vocal cut. The Earshot Creative Review is sponsored by Hobsons. Find out more on their Hello Hobsons blog.

Next Month

Hear the Hobsons mystery voices and win a voice session.

Views expressed are personal and not necessarily those of First Radio Sales, Hobsons, City Beat, Juice FM, Eagle Radio, URN or the BBC. The contributors acknowledge all rights held by the owners, creators and performers of the recorded works which are included solely for the purposes of education and review.

Comments

Sunday 21 August, 2011, Home | brgtownsend writes: [...] a work in progress, but I have posted some links below as an introduction to myself and my work. http://earshot.tvi.gg/2011/01/creative-review-january-2011/ LinkedIn Profile http://uk.linkedin.com/in/brgtownsend Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe [...]

Original writing licensed under Creative Commons. Views within Earshot Creative are personal. Meet Earshot Creative on Twitter if you like.