Radio Memories At The MRG

A speech at the last conference which caught the imagination of Douglas McArthur of the RAB was the inspiration for the paper by Andrew Ingram (RAB) and Charlie Makin, the managing partner of Booth Lockett Makin. Radio Memories was inspired by McArthur’s desire to create a new milestone in radio research. BLM was then charged with this weighty responsibility after fending off stiff competition.

The thought was that most evaluation techniques of advertisements assume that advertising memories are one-dimensional. However, they argue that the memory is most definitely not one-dimensional and the vehicle of communication has a dramatic effect on how memories are stored and ultimately recalled.

BLM proposed to the RAB that they should attempt to evaluate the presence and effect of implicit and explicit memory in radio as opposed to other media.

Makin asserts that implicit memory would play a greater part in media where movement, vision and sound were not present. Traditional media evaluation techniques would not measure this and therefore would be ineffectual in estimating the effects of radio and press advertising.

However, Chris Wilson at Semantics disagreed with part of their findings saying that implicit memories are low level and it is necessary to be aiming at the long term memory. So, how do you best measure radio memories? Research was undertaken and the results came back with the conclusion that we should not take radio memories for granted and we should assume that they are tricky to access. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, we need to ask what it is actually, that we want to achieve – recallability or recognition.