A few weeks ago I wrote a little disparagingly about Brisbane’s B105 and Brisbane’s KIIS 97.3 both claiming that they are “Brisbane’s #1 hit music station”, so I found the image below amusing. Posted by Keri Jones on Facebook from the early 1990s, it shows Pennine FM also claiming it was “West Yorkshire’s Number One Hit Music Station”… there truly are no new ideas in radio!
There’s a lot to unpack from this press ad, over thirty years later. Why was it important to promote the weekend music shows – especially when three of the names you see here weren’t part of Pennine FM’s weekday lineup? Why didn’t the Network Chart with David ‘Kid’ Jensen: easily the biggest name on the station, even if it was networked from London, get a mention? Why eleven men and one woman? Why are two of them wearing ties? Why is one wearing a suit? Would this have been better just promoting the sports team?
It’s not been announced yet, but one of the sessions I’m running at Radiodays Europe 2025 in Athens in March will be on radio marketing and advertising to our audiences: billboards, newspaper ads, TV ads, social media promotions, promotional items, and everything else. I’ll be showing the good, the bad and the ugly to a panel including a top advertising creative and a top radio consultant (Francis Currie), asking what works and what doesn’t. I’ve wanted to do this session for a long time, and I’m really looking forward to it.
If you’ve a favourite TV ad, billboard, social media ad or anything else that might be fun to put up on the big screen, do get in touch – james@crid.land will find me. I don’t want to criticise current work – so leave your current stuff alone; but stuff you thought was brilliant or “a bag of washing” are both good. You get extra marks if it’s not a European station.
Incidentally, Virgin Radio Dubai is the UAE’s number one hit music station, I heard in a taxi earlier this week.
- Local Radio Is The Most Trusted News Source, says a study. It’s from Audacy, a local radio broadcaster in the US, but despite that, there may be things to learn from it. (Congratulations to them for emerging from bankruptcy this week too.)
- Amazing fact: Star Wars had a 13-part radio drama series, made with Lucasfilm, the BBC and NPR. In 1981, it was apparently a massive success – giving NPR the ratings, publicity and donations that kept it alive at a time when it was threatened the most, according to The Star Wars Radio Dramas: Brian Daley and the Serialization That Saved NPR, a book that came out in July. Disney now have the rights for it, and they aren’t very keen on allowing radio stations to broadcast it again; WAMU asked to re-broadcast it in 2021, but were rebuffed. Apparently there are bootleg copies out there – and should anyone want to interview Rick Toscan, who was one of the people who conceived and produced it, let me know.
- Last week I was in the little Pacific island of Niue. I’ve written a travel blog about it all, because of course I have. A fascinating experience! I was also, for a very short time, in Dubai. Next on the agenda – Ottawa in Canada, where among other things I get to interview three massively important radio people on a stage, get to use a teleprompter for my ten minutes of speech just beforehand, and get to visit the art-deco French Embassy.
- The former station manager of CBC Radio 3, Steve Pratt, has written a book. I reviewed Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers and rather enjoyed it; there’s a link to the first chapter for free. You might know Steve better as the co-founder of Pacific Content, too.
- In the asiCast podcast this week, I talk to asi’s Research Director Richard Marks about the major trends in podcasting and in audio more generally. I’ll be speaking at this year’s asi International Radio & Audio Conference in Venice on November 6th.
- The BBC has opened applications for two funds: the Indie Development Fund and Audio Lab. Successful applicants of both schemes will receive funding to develop creative ideas and benefit from mentoring opportunities from the BBC.
