Insight Analysis: Radio Stations Look To Older Listeners To Expand Reach
The older woman recently became one of the latest targets for consumer magazine publishers, with a flurry of launches into this relatively unbroken sector. Over in radioland it seems that the older audience has also been pinpointed as fertile ground for new services. Much has been written about the untapped potential for advertisers in the reaching the ‘grey’ market, but commercial radio at least, has few vehicles to reach this audience.
It is typically believed that a young, upmarket audience will have more spending power and more inclination to spend than any other audience and, for most commercial media, young to middle age markets are the usual target. This perhaps explains why, of those stations in the old and upmarket quarter of an age-class map compiled by the Radio Advertising Bureau, only one is commercial – Classic FM. The others are BBC Radios 2, 3, 4 and 5. This pattern may be about to shift slightly as a number of commercial operators have put together applications aiming to serve the 40-plus market. This group, whilst not yet ‘grey’, is still the point at which commercial’s reach begins to tail off and the BBC becomes stronger.
A new West Midlands analogue FM licence has drawn interest from the Wireless Group which is proposing that its Big FM service, already broadcasting on AM in Yorkshire, should serve the over 40s in the area with a music and speech-based mix. Competition comes from Jazz FM, which is hoping to extend the older, affluent audiences it has so far gained in London and Manchester. The third major contender is Central Radio’s offering from Forward Media which will provide a mix of “intelligent music radio” from the last 40 years.
Furthermore, Chrysalis Radio has announced its intention to target the older generation in a bid for the new commercial licence in Yorkshire. Chrysalis has unveiled a multi-million pound bid in the shape of a new format, The Arrow, described as “Adult Rock Radio”.