Will networks kill the radio star?

Helen Keable, investment director at Manning Gottlieb OMD, wonders whether we have been temporarily dazzled by the bright lights of “scale” and lost sight of why we really value local radio…

It seems that radio has arrived at its fork in the road with its USP rather lost at sea… In the good old days we talked about radio as our “friend” – the term was as cringe-worthy then as it is now, but equally it encapsulated all of the reasons we put radio on our media schedules.

You trust your friends, you listen to them, they influence your choices, you take on board their recommendations… and that’s the role that ILR used to play. It did what it said on the tin. Listeners enjoyed a relationship with their local radio station courtesy of the way those presenters communicated with them – they may have been local celebs, but they lived and worked in the same community, which immediately provided  common ground.

That’s not to say it was without its flaws, not least the low-rent local creative efforts, which were often enough to repel any self-respecting national brand, but that notwithstanding it played its part well.

And for all the many, many benefits that investment into networked brand or “lifestyle” programming is and will continue to bring, a part of me wonders whether we haven’t been temporarily dazzled by the bright lights of “scale” and lost sight of why we really value local radio; because of the influence it has over its listeners.

The often touted “one stop shop” route to radio buying has never really cut it with me – it’s too easy to blur the boundary between a brand that resonates in the bubble that is media-land rather than a brand that actually means something in local communities across the UK.  From an advertising perspective it should always be the latter that matters, and whilst year one of wholesale syndication has brought with it undisputed growth in listening, it remains to be seen whether the higher caliber of presenter and production values that come with it enhance or detract from radio’s original USP of endorsement on a grass-roots level.

Already I can hear my detractors telling me to get over it and move on… but this isn’t about being change-resistant.  There’s a lot to be said for the consolidation we’ve seen in recent years – let’s be honest many of those local services would be a distant memory had they not enjoyed the protection of private owners with a longer-term plan. We’ll all be familiar with the sorry tale of local press and I’m not suggesting that ILR should rest on its laurels and await the same fate… but there’s staying contemporary and there’s shifting the goalposts altogether. The trick, as always, is in striking the right balance.

With Global Radio about to embark on phase two of their network roll-out plan as Capital goes semi-national in January, 2011 will be a telling time for the radio business. Personally I think this will prove a tougher task than their Heart re-brand, not least because of a factor as simple as geography. True to home-counties form here comes my sweeping statement about “The North”; people have so much more affinity with their communities in those regions. When a collection of ailing southern based stations that just happened to be owned by the same group were re-launched under the Heart umbrella a year ago now it was a no-brainer, but I’m not sure that the Capital brand will be welcomed with such open arms in places that arguably have far more distinctive local cultures.

In agency land we claim to be platform agnostic, our role is to identify those apertures where consumers are most easily influenced and can be prompted to engage positively with our brands. Radio has come a long way even prior to the recent changes; it’s one of few traditional channels that can claim to have held audience levels over the long term, it’s even niftily shifted its revenue base very much in favour of national clients, and we only need think about the crowds that stations drive to local events to realise that it must be doing something right.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for a moment suggesting that radio like all media doesn’t need to move with the times, I’m saying that we should think twice before we fall prey to the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome and turn our backs on a USP as compelling and still unique as local influence in favour of pitching radio into the fray of longer-established and more scalable media brands where we immediately sacrifice our point of difference.