Demographics and Commercial Radio – Revisit

Following on from yesterday’s post, Ed made some further points, so I’m going to go and have another dollop of thought about it. Some of the post below has been posted as a comment on his site, but then I’m going to expand on it here.

I agree with most of what Ed says – and particularly about bloody Newsbeat, which is horrific. Might as well call it “News for Spanners” and be done with it.

2) Yes, it would seem that commercial radio is far too structured, but it has to be that way to maintain advertising income. And it has to maintain advertising income to pay big salaries. And it has to pay big salaries because the BBC, on its own initiative and with our money, pays way over the odds for big names. The BBC has to take at least some of the blame for commercial radio being so rigid
(from Ed’s post)

In this, I disagree – I would suggest that commercial radio is formulaic because it’s the format that is currently seen to “work”. If there were a commercial station that did things differently to all the others, had a decent national *and* local news (including local travel) without being brain-dead and banal, then I’d almost certainly listen to it instead of R1.

Just because most stations fit the mould, that doesn’t mean that *all* of them have to. And if someone did a different format, I suspect a lot of listeners would go to it, thus promoting that new format via listenership figures.

As an idea (and going back to the days of Laser 558) you could have a 5- or 10-second blipvert at the end of every other track, rather than a splodge every ten/fifteen minutes. “Those tracks were sponsored by [department store]” – high repetition, and thus high brand-name retention in the audience, but without being fucking annoying four or five times an hour. I listen to Radio 1 (hey, let’s widen that to BBC Radio) because I don’t want to be swamped by shitty banal little adverts. Make them different, make them interesting, make them less intrusive, I could be persuaded. I pay a licence fee in order to not be advertised to. (That might not be grammatical, but you get the idea)

Having presenters with a personality – regardless of whether everyone actually *likes* that personality, so long as most do – also helps. Commercial Radio presenters at the moment feel like an identikit “built from modules” thing, and that’s Not Good. In R1’s example, I suspect Moyles is an utter c**t, but at least he’s got personality. Chris Evans, ditto.

At the end of the day, yes, put on a presenter with personality and you’ll lose some listeners who can’t abide them, but you’ll gain far more listeners who agree, and/or who just listen in order to be offended. (Daily Mail readers, f’rinstance)

Or why not do the advertising in a completely different way? Have shows where listeners send a text message in to the show, and get an advert by return text ? Run tie-in competitions, and let the advertising be a part of that? Have show tags/sponsors in the same way that commercial TV (by which I again mean ‘non-BBC’) does?

There are any number of possible options for commercial radio – they don’t all have to follow the same format, but they do so because it’s “easier” than being original. And if a station were brave enough to go with something out of the ordinary, and original, I’d most certainly give them a fair crack of the whip.