A digital revolution is quietly taking place on the airwaves and aside from the occasional statement from John Lewis or Dixon’s commenting on the increased sales of DAB (digital audio broadcasting) sets, nobody’s taking much notice. But now is the time to reasses the wireless because this silent revolution is transforming how people listen and interact with their radio, and crucially how marketers can reach this audience.
The future? Expect to hear about scrolling text, digital radio chips in mobile phone handsets, electric programme guides, data broadcasting, and – most importantly – expect to learn a lot more about radio listeners. Its future may resonate with Orwell’s 1984 – room 101 for many, but data heaven for the B2B marketer.
The future is nigh
The Digital Radio Development Bureau (DRDB) was set up in 2001 by commercial and private broadcasters with the task of marketing digital radios in the UK. To date it has been very efficient in achieving this: in 2003 there were 54,000 digital sets, at the end of 2004 there were 1.272 million, and the target for 2005 is 2.5 million. Promoting digital to advertisers has, thus far, not been part of its remit.
Ian Dickens, chief executive of DRDB, explains: “From an advertising point of view, the national coverage has been insufficient for them to get excited. They always said that once you get to one million listeners then it becomes interesting.” No doubt an ever-increasing listenership will provoke interest but it’s digital’s truly unique offerings which will evoke intrigue.
Digital radios have a screen that can display information such as website and email addresses, phone numbers, details on promotions, locations – all of the nitty-gritty information that radio has, historically, struggled to deliver. As yet advertisers have not been taking advantage, but radio stations have promoting competitions, programmes etc. Although the technology is in place there are no models to facilitate the buying of such a service – a problem, no doubt, that will find a quick solution once demand has surfaced, which according to Dickins is imminent: “Sales [of digital sets] are growing, listenership is growing, and advertising will follow. We expect more advertising to move over to digital and expect to see analogue and digital being sold as a package.”
The possibilities? While an ad is playing, vital information could scroll across the screen or perhaps the text feature will be sold separately, unsupported by an audio slot. The opportunities are boundless because not only is the software changing but the hardware, the physical form of the radio is also undergoing an extreme makeover. Take Pure Digital’s ‘Bug’ radio (see main image) – it looks like something from The Jetsons’ sky pad apartment – with a large blue backlit display mounted on a flexible neck, thus elevating and exaggerating the screen, making it prime marketing property. Yet this is just the beginning, Dickens states that radios with bigger screens that allow for images, even moving images are already available, and have ‘taken off’ in Korea.
Last month (February) multimedia solutions company Frontier Silicon launched a digital radio chip for mobile phones. This will allow multimedia and data to be delivered to mobile handsets, thus presenting another avenue to the target market. Dickens of the DRDB elaborates: “You could run an ad and then have a direct response mechanism such as ‘hit button to order brochure’. Though what revolutionary ends it’s used to is down to the creative bodies at agencies.”
Another feature – not quite as earth shattering for marketers – is the electric programme guide (EPG). This works on the same basis as Sky Digital where you can view a menu of programmes, set reminders for certain shows and preset your favourite shows and channels. Already available on certain models, this has created interactivity never experienced before on radio.
Where are the business listeners
Sally Barker, head of the national client development team at radio broadcaster GWR, comments, “RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) is able to identify the way people are receiving digital radio. Some listen through a standard digital set, others listen through television and others on the Internet.” The latest RAJAR figures show that 16.3 per cent of adults listened to the radio online in December 2004, 6.6 per cent of that was to local stations and 10.8 per cent to national. Barker adds, “There is a general assumption that most of the online listeners are at work.”
Knowing that the listener is in the workplace has, no doubt, been pivotal in encouraging generic business suppliers to get on radio. Lynne Springett, marketing and PR manager for the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB), cites The Air Conditioning Company’s and the Royal Mail’s promotional activity with the Capital Radio Group.
However targeting a more specific business audience on radio has been challenging, requiring marketers to take some unconventional routes to market. Take GWR’s digital station Planet Rock, which claims to play the greatest rock artists from the last 40 years. Targeting males between the ages of 35-55, an audience, according to Barker of GWR, that has been badly served by radio output. She comments, “They tend to be business leaders, so this is a brilliant opportunity to target them in an environment that they have discovered themselves and love. At the moment Planet Rock is in talks with corporate motor sports and corporate hospitality advertisers – the sexier side of B2B.”
Good old-fashioned virtues
While radio is changing dramatically, there are some features that the industry and advertisers should be hell bent on preserving: trust and cost-effectiveness. Research points to radio as the most trusted medium – 84 per cents agreed that they have ‘a great deal/ quite a lot of trust in radio’ in the Reader’s Digest Trusted Brands survey 2004.
Lynne Springett of RAB, comments, “Radio is a human medium, it works on a one-to-one basis whereas television is one-to-many. With the radio, although lots are listening, it’s as if the presenter is talking to you.” Springett adds that achieving this trust also relies on tone-of-voice for advertisers, “Tone-of-voice is powerful in B2B because a lot of businesses are seen as impersonal and corporate. The radio gives brands a voice that can be serious or funny.”
Ad-avoidance is much lower on radio than television because people tend to be doing something else while listening. However, as the medium becomes more and more sophisticated with listeners taking greater control over what they listen to, radio may go the way of television in terms of channel-hopping during ad breaks or fast-forwarding. While digital radio networks are optimistic – Quentin Howard, CEO of digital radio network operator Digital One, anticipates a future when ads are no longer ephemeral – the picture of listeners playing and rewinding ads over and over requires an almost total suspension of disbelief. As such it’s up to advertisers and agencies to achieve optimum standout without slipping into the sometimes histrionic approach of TV ads – a turn for the worse which would destroy the trust that radio has, for so long, nurtured. Finding a balance is key here but clever marketing by exploiting all options, and consuming all the available data will help.
Keeping costs down
Radio airtime is cheap (relative to television), radio production is cheap and this is one of its advantages – not only for the advertiser but also the listener as it keeps the medium real. It means that ads for major global IT companies may be flanked by an ad for the local courier and pizza chain. However, as intelligence and data improves as well as technology, there is a danger that this could out-price some of radio’s smaller players.
Howard of Digital One is adamant that this will not be the case: “The market for any advertising is linked to the cost-effectiveness of the medium. Radio’s level of service will dramatically improve – there will be far less wastage than there is with analogue but this should not affect the cost. Certainly the advances in technology do not mean higher costs.” Realistically this decision rests with radio broadcasters when their enhanced audience portfolios start to look increasingly attractive to advertisers.
If you are currently a radio advertiser now is the time to start asking your broadcaster about digital options, to get ahead of the game. If you don’t advertise on radio maybe this will prompt you, as the longer you procrastinate the more alien this medium will become. Howard of Digital One mentioned how around 1999 there was a lot of over hype about what digital could deliver in terms of data: “The expectations were high but the technology didn’t deliver. Now with the current generation of chips it is possible. Now it’s not what technology can do but what you want it to do.” Surely then, now is the time to get excited.
Supplemental: Small chips, big data
The electric programme guide (EPG) along with other features, will slowly eradicate the fundamental flaw of radio – knowing who’s listening and when. Quentin Howard, chief executive of digital radio network operator Digital One, explains, “There’s new technology for measuring digital audiences, technology that will transform radio advertising from being a commodity to something that’s highly specific and targeted. “Digital One designs chips that go inside the radio and measures what programmes audiences are listening to and when. The next generation [of chip] will go even further. All of this is invisible to the listener,” he adds. As such, media monitoring agencies will learn more about listeners’ interests, ie. what programmes they search, record or set reminders for. It is only a matter of time before marketers, advertisers and planners can access a far superior calibre of data on radio listeners. There are also plans for a ‘red button’, similar to that on Sky’s remote controls, which will allow for greater interaction with ads. Howard comments, “This will allow marketers to perform response-based surveys that are very specific and will enable them to assess which ads work and which don’t.”
