It was the Sony Radio Academy Awards last night and it was brilliant to see Luke (above) from our radio station, Fun Kids, winning the Rising Star (Best Newcomer) award.

My favourite bit of my job is finding new people for projects. I would happily trade all the other bits to just concentrate on talent development. It’s definitely not driven by altruism but really by selfishness, I just get a massive kick out of doing it. Or maybe in the back of my head its what Marsha once told me – “they’ll eventually employ  you – it’s just investment in your own future”.

Talent spotting’s one thing but the most important thing is coaching. Everyone gets better with feedback and making time to do it is really important. At GWR everyone who had at least one direct report had to go on the coaching course. Whether you looked after presenters or sales people, the two-day course gave you some real-world skills to help review people’s work and a framework for them to get better. Later, on PC School, another brilliant initiative, I was once sent to ‘coach’ Howard Taylor using the framework. Thankfully he seemed more terrified than I was.

The course was so good that even today – probably ten years on – I still use the basis of it for all the work I do with our presenters.

Fun Kids is going great guns at the moment. Both commercially and creatively it’s doing really well. A lot of this success is coming directly from the time we spend working with the existing team and attracting new people to come and work with us. As a very small station we’re never going to be able to pay the big bucks, but we try and reward the time those guys give us by helping to support their personal growth.

At Fun, all the presenters get coaching sessions from me where we review a show they’ve chosen. We always talk about how it went, the good and the bad bits and the things to improve next time.  Coaching time means there’s also a regular spot where we can catch up on any broader issues as well. It’s also good to have conversations where we’re not distracted by operational issues and can concentrate on presenter skill.

If you’re a presenter and don’t get regular feedback on your performance, ask! If you still don’t get any, then get a new job. You’ll only ever get better through listening and coaching. If you’re a PC that doesn’t coach your team then you need to get a different job.

We have two ‘new talent’ initiatives at Fun. The first is around a show we call the Treehouse, it’s kind of Blue Peter meets T4. Saturdays from 4pm and repeated Sundays from 10am – it’s a show with three presenters and loads of features. The presenters and the feature makers all tend to be new to professional radio. The Treehouse gives  a focus and pressure to hone skills and be regularly delivering audio. Everyone gets feedback on their work as well as getting to make something fun for the kids! Luke started in the Treehouse before getting his weekday show and many of the feature creators have gone on to do more pro work for us and other stations.

The second initiative happened the other week. It came from the problem I have with demo tapes.

I really feel for people doing demos for Fun Kids – it’s a really difficult one to do. As well as needing to be ‘good’, you also have to pitch it right – not too old, not too young. But really the biggest problem is that, amazingly, these potential presenters don’t seem to be able to read my mind about exactly what I want. I know!  To try and fix this issue, we recently invited people who had shown some interest/done demos/been involved a bit for a presenter workshop day.

We talked about radio and what we all liked and why, I spoke a little about Fun and we all listened to some output to get a flavour of the presented bits of the station. Everyone then did a couple of links, including ones based on our weekly presenter content doc and then we all listened and critiqued everyone’s performance. I found it a really useful day, hopefully all the potentials got something out of it and fingers crossed some of those people will turn into new presenters on Fun.

Clearly, all this stuff takes time. But the more I do it, the more valuable I see it to be. And sitting with Luke as he won his Sony made it all even more worthwhile.

I’m generally very happy that anyone’s creating new and fun websites, especially ones that are connected to radio and audio. Audioboo is just such a site. It allows users to, easily, upload audio to the Audioboo website from the web or mobile. A sort of YouTube for audio. It’s nice and simple to use and has all the requisite social media-ery functions around it.

It, like many websites suffers from an awareness issue. It’s a seemingly good idea, executed fairly well but it’s not run-away-success popular. The world hasn’t really bitten in the way Draw Something suddenly goes viral. I think partly it’s because creating audio isn’t something lots of people think about. Punters are used to writing (for blogs or tweets) but not being entertaining in audio. That’s not to say they can’t – but it’s just a bit more difficult. With YouTube some people do vlogging, but the vast majority of clips are things that have been recorded for other reasons – filming your mate doing something stupid or uploading something that you don’t really have the rights too.

One of the ways Audioboo grows awareness is to encourage media brands to use the service – and then they get those media mentions/links as those brands promote their content on it. It’s not that different to say, radio stations, that talk about Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.

They have a pro product that turns their system into a more long-form podcasting system. So, someone like The Mirror can use it to do that. If you have your audio in podcast form (through any system) Radioplayer has a neat clips service that imports a podcast RSS feed and allows your content to show up in Radioplayer’s search system. So Audioboo talks a bit that their podcast system supports it too. I think £60 for an easy to use out-of-the-box podcasting system is probably not bad value.

However, what I don’t think i’d ever do is talk about Audioboo on-air or use its brand on any of my apps or website.

I talk about Facebook or YouTube on-air because (many of) my listeners understand it. I’m telling them that my stuff’s in that place that they already go, so when they’re there they should remember to check my stuff out. On Facebook I know that so much of my audience use it, that if I show up in their newsfeed with my updates then i’ll get some click thrus to my website or i’m able to provide timely reminders to tune in.

With YouTube it’s slightly different. I’m hoping that people subscribe to my stuff, but mainly i’m hoping new audiences come across what we’re doing through search and recommended videos. I want them to snack on my content, get a positive brand image and then consume more of us on YouTube and then hopefully on the web and radio.

Audioboo doesn’t really do either of those things – so why would add clutter to my radio station by saying i’ve Audioboo’d something?

What I am up for is more stations sharing great audio on other platforms. But if you’re going to do that, either have it on your website (and use it as an opportunity to promote your website) or put it on a website that everyone’s comfortable using – like YouTube!

For me putting audio on YouTube is a no brainer. They host, you’ll get traffic from search, you can easily embed on your website AND you can use that nice screen to show listeners something. A static slide with you station’s graphic and how to tune in is an absolutely fine place to start. We were experimenting with some audio interviews for Fun Kids and a Big Time Rush one did over 3,000 views (listens?) in 24hours. That was all because of the viral nature of YouTube – in the test it had no promotion at all from the station. As well as in-site activity it also got embedded on loads of fan websites -pushing our brand to more people. YouTube also gives me some great analytics so I can see where and how people consume that content.

I’d follow the same rule for other social sites as well. Does the time and effort spent on servicing the network justify the investment?

Make sure that you’re getting a return on your effort and take into account the negatives of helping someone else’s business at the expense of your own. If i’m talking about another product where my content lives I need to make sure that it’s doing something decent for me and not just adding clutter and confusion for my listeners.

So Audioboo as an invisible enterprise system? Maybe. As a consumer proposition for my listeners? No.

Joining me on the podcast are Radio 1′s Adam Heyhurst, Capital FM’s Rich Clarke and Julian Fisher from the Marketiers4dc.

I thought it was really good.

They’ve created a two-hour special that attempts to work on the radio and on video too. You can watch it below:

There’s quite a few clever things they’ve done.

Firstly – the music. Always a rights issue. On the radio (and live streaming) it’s fine – that’s covered by standard agreements. On-demand it’s much more difficult. They’ve got round it by creating a YouTube playlist consisting of their content bits and then adding in the relevant songs. The segues aren’t super-smooth, but it’s a great way to do it and a good creative solution to a problem.

2nd – visual quality. It’s shot really well. Fixed-camera for studio bits, multi-camera for packages and some hidden-camera elements as well.

3rd – ideas. There’s lots of different ideas in there, that do (mainly) work well visually and audibly. Plus if you were listening there’s enough to encourage you to tune into a video stream, without putting you off. The feature ideas are really well put together, there’s things that are funny, embarrassing and clever. This is a programme with real prep put into it – and it shows.

4th – presenting style. Student radio shows with two boys are nearly universally awful. It comes from having two people who sound the same with ill-defined characters laughing at each others jokes. This does not suffer from that problem. The two hosts have particular personalities that are recognisable by a new viewer/listener and engaging to consume.

5th – effort. Overall they’ve really thought about this and executed it well.

Downsides – there aren’t many – I think some of the links are perhaps a little over-long and some of the bits work better on the telly than the radio – but these are minor gripes – it’s a great effort.

Clearly the guys are inspired by some of the YouTubers out there who are making great creative material and also people like Adam & Joe. The conceit of a radio show format gives it the structure to deliver the programme. There’s probably a question about whether it needs to be on the radio and whether it could just live online as video. It would be interesting to see it evolve to include more radio-like elements.

Overall though, I would much rather have this creativity (in part) on the radio, than not at all.

If the guys are reading this, it would be great if they could leave a comment about how they put it all together.

One of the things we were talking about was FM reach – he thought it was an important number as regards to switchover. Me, not so much. The problem is that you only have to listen to FM for five minutes in one week and it’ll appear on the FM reach tally. I think even post the switchover, with the majority of radio stations off the platform, that FM Reach will probably still be significant – though it won’t be generating many hours (ie the volume of listening).

And that’s the thing – you have to look at hours to see how much listening is on the various platforms. A big issue with ‘digital’ is that people are gradually replacing their listening locations with digital listening devices (DAB, DTV and the internet) – you don’t change everything straight away. This is quite different to digital TV – where you have a primary set where you consume most of your television. The number of radio sets that people listen on means  digital reach is around 50% and digital hours are around 30%.

I thought it might be interesting to look at digital listeners specifically and see how much of their listening is to analogue and how much is to digital.

Looking across the UK at people who listen to ‘digital radio’ at some point during a week – 53% of their hours are given to digital radio.

In London it’s 57% of their hours given to digital radio.

Therefore if you’re an analogue-only radio station, it’s not good news. The availability of people to listen you is dropping.

If you’re a station that simulcasts, your at least in both places, but in the digital world you’re facing more competition for hours – ie you need to work harder to remain in the same place.

If you’re a station that simulcasts, but to a bigger area – then you get the best of both worlds. You remain a player in you market and you’re taking the fight to others to grow your hours.

And if you’re simulcasting and have an extra product (see Absolute/BBC or even Global/Bauer) – then again, you’re in a position to grow your hours and build your business.

Update: Phil’s responded on his (new!) blog.

I’m just going to say that again. Because it’s important.

Half of the UK’s radio listeners consume radio digitally at some point every week.

Plus 29.1% of all listening in the UK is through digital radio.

The digital listening (hours) breaks down like this:

In attractive chart form:

Digital Reach:

Digital Hours:

In reach terms, the internet and digital television do a good job in expanding the universe of digital consumers. However in hours terms, it shows how much online/digital television is a minority sport. Internet is more the poorer as pretty much every UK station is on it and broadband penetration at home and work is huge. Digital TV suffers from (outside the big brands) a lack of radio content. DAB has the same issue – there’s still a fair few big local stations not on it yet, but its consumption is strong and growing faster than DTV/internet.

The internet often gets heralded as the future of radio. If you think that, some questions:

1. The vast majority of radio listening is at home/work (in-car’s only around 20%). If broadband is already in the places where most radio is consumed, there’s every UK station (plus all the ones around the world) on it, in great quality, for a long time, why are the figures still so low?

2. In the future we’ll get 4G and that will have loads of bandwidth, surely radio will be consumed that way? Well, 3G coverage doesn’t reach everyone, the 4G roll out will concentrate on the cities and then the towns. The people who have poor 3G now, are way down the list for 4G. How long will it take for coverage to reach 70 or 80% of the population, let alone 95%?

3. Unlimited data is available on some networks already – this is what will increase mobile internet usage. Ignoring the fact, of course, that even with more bandwidth you’ll still have to share it with other people in your cell. Oh, and unlimited costs. T-Mobile makes it available for £41/month. Should people have to pay £41/month to listen to the radio?

Some people say that DAB’s taken too long to take off, that it’s been superseded by other technology and that it should be killed off, that it’s a failure. Well, looking at the figures – internet radio’s bumbled around the 2% to 4% mark over four years – if we applied the same thinking to internet radio we’d have killed it off years ago!

Look, I think radio’s future is definitely multi-platform and that includes the internet and FM alongside DAB and DTV. No platform is going to ‘win’ – each has it’s pro’s and con’s and there’s money to be made and audiences to be reached through each of them. IP is great for return path and personalised services. DAB and DTV is great for broad, mass-market services.

The 50% digital reach number is a fantastic one in describing how the UK is becoming more multi-platform in their media consumption. In the commercial radio world though, it’s the hours that are important. That’s what helps it generate its money.

I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the biggest stations by hours in the analogue and digital world. I’ve made a chart:

The chart was quite hard to do as lots of stations have different versions. Heart for example has all of the ILRs, London, London plus the other Hearts in the London TSA, Heart ILR (a combo of all the ILRs), Heart Out of Area (Heart consumption outside of the analogue areas) and Heart UK (which is all Heart listening). I’ve tried to list the biggest of each and then discount any appearance by the others. It’s quite a manual job, so I may well have missed something.

So, what does it tell us? Well nothing for sure, but I think it does suggest something about the potential future of the radio market. The 50% who now listen digitally will grow their hours as they listen on more digital devices. A bit more on that Freeview box in the study, on the Radioplayer mobile app, that second DAB in the bathroom and the one in the new car. This means they could be listening more to the stations they’re only able to give a few hours to at the moment.

So, firstly, 2, 4 and 1 are still going to be pretty dominant. These are stations that have done a good job of promoting their multi-platform credentials and so they’re still owning consumers whether listening digitally or on analogue. Five Live is also doing well. It, of course, suffers on AM – in a digital world it becomes an easier radio station to listen to. The same is probably true for Absolute. Music radio is not so good on AM, so it clearly benefits. Gold though hasn’t. I think this could say something about the brand and also probably the (lack of) distribution. Gold also faces music competition from stations like Smooth, Magic, Absolute 60s and 70s – an AM upgrade is clearly not enough to fend that off.

Magic and talkSPORT are holding their own – though i’d expect that Magic with better distribution and marketing could push itself up the list. talkSPORT’s doing solidly, with around a quarter of its listening tuning in digitally – which is about the same as all radio. I think the interesting thing for Talk is whether digital has the ability to grow it some new listeners who’ve never discovered it on the analogue dial.

There are some new stations in the list that are clearly going to be players in the future – 6Music, 4 Extra, Planet Rock, 1Xtra and Absolute 80s. They’ve got great national coverage and great, unique, formats.

Heart and Capital do a pretty good job remaining high up the list. They also have a massive opportunity if they can drive their out of FM area listening. They have great products and nationwide marketing – that could really help them in areas they’re new to.

Trading

The other interesting thing that’s popped up in RAJAR are new types of figures for Absolute – each of their stations now has an additional report called Absolute Radio [Whatever] – Trading. These are the figures Absolute wants in the agency trading systems instead of their regular numbers. Why? Well, it’s their main figures but with internet listening removed.

Why? Well, it’s because they’re now going to be selling different ads on the internet streams of their stations. These will use the benefits of IP – the two way nature – to deliver demographically and geographically targeted ads alongside imagery. It’s a really good way to tackle one of radio’s problems – our ads are too cheap! Online they’ve created a premium product that, hopefully, commands a premium price.

It means they can start to get money that might be going to services like Spotify and We7. Absolute also has good internet listening figures – so they’ll have some decent impacts to sell – but with internet listening still their smallest digital platform – it’s not something that’s going to massively effect their traditional revenues. ]]> http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattdeegan/~3/KZhwQqrKhMk/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattdeegan/stalker/~3/gVuhhXzUvcw/ In a previous post I talked about Delivering Quality First (the BBC’s plan to re-prioritise what it does based on the recent licence fee settlement). Since then the BBC management was proposing that £15m to be cut off BBC Local Radio’s £147m/year budget. Today, the BBC Trust’s Chairman has said, because of feedback from the [...] http://www.mattdeegan.com/?p=918 Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:39:51 +0000 In a previous post I talked about Delivering Quality First (the BBC’s plan to re-prioritise what it does based on the recent licence fee settlement). Since then the BBC management was proposing that £15m to be cut off BBC Local Radio’s £147m/year budget. Today, the BBC Trust’s Chairman has said, because of feedback from the audience, that those cuts should just be around £7m.

So we have asked the management to look again at the planned cuts to local radio. To see if they can find more money to protect the local identity of services:

• To scale back the plans for local stations to share their afternoon content with their neighbours, although we accept that in some cases that might still be the best option
• To ensure they have an adequately staffed newsroom
• And to give them a bit more freedom to protect some of their more specialist and content out of peak, whether it be rugby league or specialist music.

This isn’t a bad political compromise. The Trust are seen to be the ‘good guys’ asking Management to follow the views of the listeners and the BBC still get to make some savings, something they have to do, as the Government made them take on hundreds of millions of pounds of new costs. Though i’m not exactly sure, where they are supposed to save money – what’s left to cut?

However, it’s not all about money. BBC Local Radio still faces many problems. In my mind they’re a combination of evolution in the radio market, changing listener behaviour, structural problems at stations and management failings.

These aren’t all my thoughts, by the way, my last blog post on the subject resulted in emails from Editors and other Senior Management sending me their own DQF submissions.

DQF was a good opportunity to really tackle some of these things and put the stations on a firmer footing for the future. I hope that they don’t rely on natural wastage and voluntary redundancies to hit their targets and then just carry on business as usual.

The main issue for me is the tyranny of the newsroom.

These are broad based local radio stations that have news-led programming at the heart of what they do. There’s nothing wrong with this. However they are not news radio stations. Unfortunately, at the moment they sit in the news directorate and are (predominantly) led by news people. Editorial judgement is an important skill to have, but you need to be a professional radio programmer as well. Some Editors are both, but not enough.

Executing a successful radio station is difficult. In each of their markets BBC Local faces significant competition from both local and national stations. Providing one strategy driven from the centre (a la Capital and Real) is easy when your proposition is music-orientated. BBC Local is personality and news led. Each market needs to be programmed to reach the needs of each individual community – to do this needs strong local programming skills.

Some of the under-performing stations biggest faults could be fixed through music and presentation coaching.

Music scheduling is difficult and if I didn’t have the skill to do it myself i’d always rather take a solid network log. I imagine whoever runs the current log gets a disproportionate amount of grief, mainly from people who don’t know as much about music as they think. The problem is that BBC local stations have different TSAs with a different competitive set. Music needs to be tailored for the market. In the old GWR days we had 5 logs that you got depending on who your competitors are – it’s not a bad proxy if you haven’t got the music programming talent to do it yourself. In the new world these stations won’t be able to provide the volume of speech-led shows, enhancing the music scheduling will be vital to future success.

One thing that every BBC local station should be doing with their talent is adequate coaching. If they’re not doing daily reviews with Breakfast and weekly reviews with other air talent then there is something wrong the management. Quality is not just about having the right mix of stories. Reflecting listeners lives with presenters who speak to them and their needs is vitally important.

Websites. BBC Local Radio must be be the largest radio stations and the largest network of radio stations in the world without a website. Links to BBC Programmes and a schedule just don’t cut it. Listen to the way the web is described on-air, it’s painful. Radio is so powerful because of the close connection listeners have with the people who speak to them – the website should help and support the station and its output, not just tell you the local news and when a presenter’s on – especially when the description is:

Your Tuesday starts with Paul Damari’s three day weather forecast, a top tune for this day in history and the early paper review. Traffic and travel, showbiz gossip and two songs from Toto.

Finally a note on the money. Much of the DQF announcements were prescriptive things from the top. If you have the right managers all you would need to do is say to them is this:

“Hey, you used to have £1.8m per year, you’ve now only got £1.4m a year. Sorry! It’s up to you how you spend your budget, but you’ve still got to continue to provide high quality output for 19 hours a day. If you want to network with a neighbour, that’s fine. If you want to change your shift pattern to lose a show, fine. It’s your radio station, we trust you, and will help you if necessary.”

So, in summary:

1. Use the new budget to re-design a station, from scratch, that’s built for today

2. The newsroom is not the most important thing at a local radio station. It’s up there, but it isn’t number 1.

3. 40 personality-led radio stations cannot be centrally managed like a music-brand.

4. A radio programmer needs to run it

5. Local management should have the flexibility to run it to satisfy their audiences and provide public value

6. If they don’t/can’t do what they’ve been asked to they should be fired.

7. Presentation staff should receive high quality coaching. Just because you’ve been their 20 years is not an excuse for being a bit rubbish.

8. A radio station in 2012 is more than just the quality of it’s local news – from music, marketing, presentation to web and social – that’s what needs to be protected and supported.

There was a good line-up of speakers and Absolute have just put up all the videos from the event.

The session that I thought was the most illuminating was the one that explained Absolute’s thinking behind their new signed-in for streaming service. James Wigley goes into quite a bit of detail about how the system works and some of their early results too. I’ve embedded the video below:

The technology behind this kind of service is not insignificant and I imagine the changes needed for traffic management must be huge. However, what it does do is provide new opportunities for advertisers.

As a percentage of listening, streaming (to both to PCs and mobile) is still a very small part of what radio does. In fact it provides about a fifth of the hours that DAB delivers to radio broadcasters. However, that’s still 40m hours a week of listening – an amount that wouldn’t be sniffed at if you were a new entrant in the online music space.

This means that Absolute can start to target some of the money that’s going to Spotify, Last. fm et al by replicating their media formats and then aligning it with a brand that can deliver to a large audience.

It’s so easy for people to think about radio in binary terms and base all decisions on the model we happen to have had for the last 30 years. It’s great that there’s new ‘radio’ products like these that put us into some different games.

Radio is habitual. We make a decision to consume something and then consume it for a couple of hours. Everyday. Forever. When someone interrupts our habits by making a change to something we’ve enjoyed we get annoyed.

However, just because you like, or are used to something, doesn’t give it the god-given right to exist forever. Sorry.

ILR has gone through three distinct phases. We’re now in the third.

1. 1973 to 1992: Launch and growth.

ILR was new. There were few radio stations, no internet, four TV channels, limited newspapers and magazines. It was easy to compete against the BBC because you could find something that they didn’t do.

To win… be more local, be more friendly, play popular music, make sure people know about you and work out how to sell lots advertising (unless you go bust first).

2. 1992 to 2002: Least worst option.

Whilst in the background there was the gradual growth of CDs, multi-channel television and online – it still had a brilliant competitive set – there were hardly any competitors!

Plus through a mix of luck and judgement, commercial radio fixed it’s product.

Some may call it uninspiring, but the explosion of research-led programming meant that ILR played the right kind of music – in decent quality – FM! (and generally) told the DJ to STFU. Happily Radio 1 also threw itself off a cliff offering up its listeners.

The music shift was important as many of the stations positioned themselves with the optimum mix for their market. Broadly it was Radio 1 without the new stuff, Radio 2 without the old stuff – it was the station that everyone could agree on.

2003 onwards

The third age is not so happy.

The downside of being the ‘least worst option’ is that you create very little passion from the audience and you don’t super-serve anyone. When a better opportunity comes along you can be left behind. Playing the middle ground can get much harder.

This was fine before the explosion in choice meant that the listener who prefers dance but tolerated pop had somewhere better to go. The person who preferred a few older tunes gets an easy listening station. The person that wants more company gets the big stars on Radio 2.

ILR

The problem for the vast majority of ILR stations whether 2CR, The Pulse or BRMB is that they failed to re-invent their product when they should have done – about eight years ago – the point when everything was changing.

For the vast majority of ILR stations that haven’t re-branded, their 2011 product is the same as their 1994 one. But, amazingly, probably less tight and focused.

In the same time consumers and successful pop culture brands changed and evolved.

The biggest issue is that consumer has evolved much faster than the stations they grew up with.

I was involved in some of the background work for one of the many Capital re-brands. The research was fascinating. Capital scored incredibly high for loads of images – from news, to travel, to ‘being London’ – the music scores weren’t outstanding but were okay too. But when asked whether they listened the answer was no. They’d found something else that scratched an itch better – generally Heart for the women and Kiss for the youngsters. They still had enormous positive feeling for Capital, it just wasn’t for them.

It was the same story for many other ILR stations, though the lack of competition in each individual marketplace often hid the scale of the problem. 20-years of doing the same thing had burned the traditional ILR perceptions in the mind of the listener. Normally this would have been a good thing, but even though they thought that ILRs did a good job, a growing number of them shrugged and turned on something else. Being number one for local, or travel wasn’t enough. It was no longer ‘the station for people like me’ – and owning that or other images wasn’t going to fix it.

Heart, and then Capital.

This wasn’t the reason for the re-brand of 30-odd ILRs into Heart though. That was driven by cost saving and delivering a more easily buy-able product by advertisers.

Prior to the re-brand, product-wise they were a variable lot. Some, often the bigger ones, had done quite a good job. Looking at GWR FM or Trent FM – their audience had been down a little – but nothing drastic. Whereas Hereward and Invicta hadn’t fared so well. It’s no surprise that Heart has improved some and reduced others. The stats are harder however to crunch since Global changed the TSAs.

Heart’s success is they’ve generally kept a steady ship whilst massively reducing the costs. – I reckon by half to two-thirds. The Heart product is an excellent one, super-slick and relatively clutter free. The thing that really helped Global was that the brand’s values had been worked out a long time ago. It mattered less that listeners didn’t know the brand – what was really important was that they knew what they were. Then it was just communicating it to the audience. Something they did with loads of TV advertising.

Many of these stations had never had any TV-spend before. Existing listeners found that little of their station had really changed and at the same time non-listeners (who knew very well what GWR FM was etc) could be prompted to try it again. A smaller amount of  Hereward FM-related baggage to wade through.

Heart’s difficulty now is that as they’ve pulled back on the marketing gas they’re starting to see some cracks in audience growth, especially where they’ve merged a large number of stations into one. It’s still very early days on that though and you have to remember that they’ve saved a HUGE amount of money.

The product problem they face is whether they’ve actually just created a better ‘least worst station’ and just corrected the output (and pushed back) the years before they see more competition-related decline.

I say that, of course, as if it’s a bad thing. It might just be the nature of what mainstream radio now has to do. Constant Madonna-style re-invention.

Capital, I think is more interesting. In that network they’ve taken a niche product (the ex-Galaxies) and applied a clean lick of mainstream paint. For London it’s also a much more contemporary sound than its ever had before. They’ve also aligned it strongly to what’s modern, mainstream and cool.

As a young station it matters less what ex-listeners think – it’s about constantly attracting the young/pop fans (and those who see themselves as young/pop fans). They’ve managed, in their first year, to alter core brand values and start to shift perceptions. And in London the departure of Johnny (for whatever reason) will help them keep to this goal. They have, however, spent a huge amount of money on TV/big concerts to do this.

What does not work is a re-name (rather than re-brand). Lite FM’s change to Connect or that conglomeration of stations’ move to Touch was a failure because:

1. The old product wasn’t very good – and the new product wasn’t much better (most of the ex-Heart’s were quite good and the new Heart was slick)
2. The new station didn’t have any/strong enough brand values
3. There was little marketing explaining the new station or why people should bother to sample it.

Er, that’s the end of the introduction. You still there?

The main reason that BRMB, Beacon, Wyvern and Mercia need to change are their audience figures.

These stations are not terrible radio stations. Of course there are things that could be changed – music, personalities, production etc. However, even if they changed them to the optimal mix it would not necessarily reverse the declines.

The problem isn’t what they’re doing today. The problem is what’s happened to ILR over the last eight years.

As I talked about above, the changing nature of consumers, the multi-platform competition and these stations being trapped in the middle and not being allowed to evolve are the combination of reasons that there needs to be a big change.

Being ‘BRMB’ is the baggage – not just what’s on those stations today.

A re-brand can return growth to these stations. However, doing it successfully is difficult. Product, brand and marketing need to be perfectly aligned. Because as Lite, Touch, Capital and Heart have found, when you press the button there really is no going back.

There will be discussion about cost-saving, TV advertising opportunities, new competitive market, it being easier to sell to advertisers… and all of these are valid things. However – at the core there’s just a need for ILR to move on.