Feature: Networked Stations Create Radio “Brands”

As with the cable and regional newspaper industries, the UK’s radio sector has undergone a period of consolidation in recent years creating a handful of major radio operators. With stations often covering many areas of the country, these companies have begun to brand certain stations in their networks under one name and format. EMAP On Air, for example, has developed both the Magic network of stations, which plays music from the last four decades for 35-54 year olds, and the Big City network of eight stations, which targets 15-34 year olds.

Similarly, over the last few years Chrysalis has been developing the brand for its Galaxy station format; there are now four Galaxy stations in Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and Leeds. Along the same lines, Capital Radio has its Gold network, whilst GWR operates a number of Classic Gold stations around the country.

One of the benefits of networked radio stations is that they offer national advertisers a neat package through which they can reach target audience groups. The graph here shows each of the main networks’ key audiences, where the audiences are indexed against an All Adults percentage weekly reach, which represents an average, or 100. The chart shows that the Galaxy network’s Adults 15-24 is indexed at just less than 300. This means that the weekly reach percentage for Adults 15-24 is almost three times higher than the network’s All Adults average. Conversely, the Capital Gold network has a key audience in the 45-54 year old bracket, where the index is 150.

For radio operators, not only do these networks allow stations to be sold in packages, but the stations themselves can be promoted generically, almost at a national level – Capital Radio is known through its Gold stations well outside London, for example. In the emerging world of digital radio, building brands becomes ever more important as stations are carried nationally, via digital TV broadcasts, and more and more services join the fray.

However, a few agency buyers have questioned whether the networks really do connect with a homogenous audience or whether they are simply used as a convenient and easy way to sell package deals to advertisers. As Jonathan Gillespie, head of radio at BMP OMD, says: “Branded networks are an attractive buying proposition as they can lend a uniform programming environment, but they have to be real. Just because a set of stations has one thing in common … doesn’t mean that the network name for them lends any homogeneity. Sometimes they can be sales tools rather than reflections on a lifestyle.”

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