As you may well have noticed (points upwards) we have gone You Tube with our latest offering. Okay, now that may seem a little daft for a company that is primarily about audio, but there is method in this here madness, I promise you!

I got a little email the other day from our friends at the RAB, the Radio Advertising Bureau. They have employed the husky talents of Arfur Smiff (two effs) to sell the point that in the recent Thinkbox ad for TV advertising, you could close your ears and have the same thing going for you - except you would call it radio. Dead right, is what I say! (Oh, no, stand by, I can hear a Blog coming ..ed).

In giving my own response (by shoving my NEW showreel up on my brand new YouTube Channel), I noticed a comment by one user effectively saying that broadcast media was dead. He really could not be further from the truth! In fact, radio has been stubbornly refusing to lose audience to the Internet, and has even had the impudence to grow! I have been wading through some Rajar and Ofcom facts and figures for local radio, both commercial and BBC, for this country, and found them singularly unhelpful. The reason is no fault of the statisticians but of what they are reporting and why. Radio, like all entertainment, is primarily driven by culture - in fact it is PART of the culture. And we ignore that cultural aspect of radio at our peril - especially as advertisers.

The UK is pretty much a late comer to the commercial radio market; ILR stations not getting the green light till the early 1970s. And in our very British way, our initial foray into the market was somewhat tentative with only around 20 stations or so. I remember, because in the late 1970s, when I was duplicating broadcast carts of commercials for the ILR stations, I knew every one of the traffic managers by name, knew their cats names, their drinking habits and what hair dye they were trying that week (Forgotten it all now, you will be glad to know). This contrasted greatly with the commercial radio I had come across during odd forays into the USA. There, radio stations were so thick on the ground you could use them as a carpet. I remember one small town that had five local radio stations in addition to the County wide stations, the state wide stations and the national stations. The town population was around 5000, I think. In the US EVERYONE listened to radio (they still do), and particularly their local radio station.

Our opening market here was very restrictive, and in some ways it still is. The powers that be (OFCOM these days) are great believers that if a station is not fiscally viable, cannot guarantee 100% up-time and cannot pay a vast amount of money to the government that is has no right to be on air. This is a problem. It means that only large, well organised companies can get on air (and even for them it is an uphill fight to prove their case), and the number of licences, even now, is very restricted. As a comparison, the number of stations in the UK is around the 400 mark (analogue and digital) - that is one station for every 150,000 people. (and wouldn't every station like THAT audience!). In the US, however, there are about ten THOUSAND stations, and that works out at one station for every 30,000 people - an enormous difference.

Of course, breaking the numbers up like that is simply unhelpful. The figure we need to look at is the one that more accurately reflects the CULTURAL importance of radio. In the US it is estimated that 99% of households have a radio and listen to it regularly. In the UK ... well, I couldn't find that figure easily in my quick Internet search, but I did notice that in selling the numbers of DAB radios, OFCOM include all digital TVs - and I wonder how many people listen to radio on their TV in reality?

Getting the Culture Right

So, what is the Culture of radio that I started talking about before being ambushed by meaningless numbers? Well, radio culture, true radio culture, is in diversity and locality. Something radio has always offered more easily than TV, certainly here, is being able to be incredibly local, while still giving a wider, perhaps national option. Yes, TV does do local, but on my local BBC service, I am far more likely to hear news about Brighton or Oxford than where I live near Milton Keynes - sorry, that ain't my definition of local! My local Radio station however, Heart, is just down the road from me, and the news, at least, involves traffic jams outside MY door, not someone else's in another town.

For the local advertiser (who make up the vast majority of advertisers in this country), this is VITAL. For most businesses, advertising is about hitting your precise audience as accurately as possible. If you advertise to 10,000 people, but only 2000 live within reach of your shop, then you have just wasted 80% of your advertising budget. You need a media that is targeted specifically to your locality (most small business that deal with a local population do not sell outside their region - their competitor in the next town does that better). Well, that is not national radio, and it is not local TV, either, and it is certainly NOT the Internet (more about that shortly). It is, however, your local radio station.

But, your local radio station has a problem. Far more than TV, successful radio relies on repeat business - and I mean by that, repeat listeners. It is a time of day thing. If a listener is in their car at 8:30 and tunes into your radio station, you want to make sure that EVERY time they are in their car at 8:30 they tune into you. That means that at 8:30 you need to be the type of station they want to listen to. If you are not, then they wont tune in - I mean, who wants to listen to 1970s disco tracks if you hate 1970s disco tracks? (Hey, I was playing bass back then as a session musician - I am allowed to hate it!) So, a radio station has to develop an identity - a personality, if you like. This can be a very crafted personality such as successfully achieved by the Heart group in trying to hit the broadest and therefore largest amount of listeners in a particular area, or it can me a more "well, if you like me, then you will like my station" sort of approach. The latter is something we see very little of in this country, but in the US you see lots of it. These small, very specific stations, tend to have very small audiences individually - but collectively they are a power force to make the big nationals shudder. And in the US, they have the same rights to survive as the big boys, so they compete pretty heavily for local audience and revenue.

The good thing about Heart and other groups like them, is that they hit a very large audience with their particular identity - and long may they continue to do so! However, the problem with any station is that it cannot hit everyone - of course not, as a station you cannot have multiple personalities all at the same time, it would be a mess and your would lose all your audience in one go! And that means that when local advertisers advertise on local radio, they are only reaching a percentage of the people who might buy their product. Let us say I sell shoes - and everyone needs shoes, more or less. If my station is listened to REGULARLY and OFTEN by 50% of the population (which would be pretty good, lets face it), then my shoes are only being advertised to half my market. I am pleased for that half, but I am not selling to the other half. In the US you advertise on your big local station (hitting half your market), and then your run off to the 10 or twenty little niche stations who have the other half.

In the UK you run off too .... oh, you don't have many places to go. There are a couple of other stations, but they are often competing for the same audience as the big player, and you are still missing a large part of the market. The trouble is that in the UK, that market is either listening to the BBC, either nationally or locally, or not listening at all - in fact, "not listening at all" has been a thorn in the side of UK local radio for many years. You big local is vital (go and spend money there) but you are missing out on market share. So, how do you reach it?

I am afraid, the answer is not a very simple one, and probably owes more to lobbying and campaigning than media buying. And this is where the Culture of radio comes in full force. In the US, if you break down the stations by music type (the most obvious cultural identity for most radio), you find that adult contemporary has 600 or so, hot adult contemporary has about another 300, urban comes in less than 200 and Country has .....er, 1800!! It even beats religion which only can sport 1100. So, guess where the revenue goes? But even in Nashville, not everyone likes country, and some of the leading stations there are rock, adult contemporary and so on. The thing is, one way or another, most people have a station they can relate too - and it is a local station as well!

In the UK, we are in desperate need of more local niche stations. These are stations that not just have a very local focus, but have a particular personality that will appeal to a particular market area. These stations need to be cheap to run, no one worries if they fall flat on their faces, and given lots of local support. One of the best ways is to move the licensing for small locals to the local council. Then it becomes a case of local people applying for a licence to other local people who have been voted in by the local people who will listen to the station - how local do you want to get? These stations do not even need to compete with their large heavy-weight local station - they need to get the "not listening at all" market, and are probably best placed to do so.

New Media Hype

So, how does the Internet feature in all of this? Internet does not work very well locally - actually, it does not work at ALL locally, not in the way people hope. Some years ago, the Internet, through browsers and search engines, tried to work on the idea of "channels." You would break your Internet experience up into areas that you were interested in and streamline they way you viewed sites by moving from one channel to another - just like TV channels or radio stations. In practice this was dead before it started. No Internet site wants to be shoved in a pigeon hole and someone else decide whether everyone or only a particular grouping have access; being available to EVERYONE is what the Internet is all about and everyone wants to be everywhere all at the same time. Needless to say, this channelling idea has not been the greatest of successes, and with search engines becoming so much better at matching websites to search criteria, channelling is unnecessary.

Unfortunately, that means that if you type "Shoe Shop" in your favourite search engine, you get everyone everywhere that has anything to do with shoes. If you type Shoe Shop Milton Keynes (assuming you live round here) you do a lot better - but it is you that has had to run off and get the information. You have not been sold to by a shoe shop in Milton Keynes while you are listening to somebody's new showreel on YouTube! (See what I did there?)

For the local advertiser who is primarily selling locally, the Internet has one very important aspect - the brochure. If you can say your funky website address on radio or print it in the local press, you can give the rest of the info on your site and save loads of time. You can have a map of how to get to your shoe shop, display examples of your product range, post regular news (really important) to show you are still vibrant and interesting (and more importantly, still open for business), and generally give out your less that friendly phone number and address. If you twist my arm, I will even let you put your jingle on your website so that visitors that got there from radio can remember why they were interested in the first place.

One way or another the Internet is incredibly important for the local advertiser, but to rely on it to generate fresh, unreferred business is a grave misjudgement. You need radio, you need LOCAL radio and you need your phone, your shop and your website to catch and convert the leads and opportunities created by local radio (and your ever friendly Jingle writer!)

Now it is just up to the radio industry itself to make sure we hit as much of the potential market as possible, not just focus on the easy middle bit, but offer variety, personality and great production so that local businesses dont just have radio as part of the mix, but realise that it is the focus of their market - even if they are tiny and niche.

Is broadcast media dead? Not a chance - but we could be better!