So, the date’s set – 6 June will be the day when GCap gets taken over by Global. Due to the vagaries of English corporate law, GCap won’t cease to exist, as the cartoon on the front of Media UK would seem to suggest; instead, the GCap name will continue to trade. My old boss, Fru Hazlitt, leaves the company though, and a new set of people will look after the biggest name in radio prior to a (if approved) full merger later.

Consolidation’s something that was written about extensively when the rules changed to allow it in the late 1990s. It was widely thought that consolidation would happen quickly; my then employer Emap (now Bauer Consumer) was tipped to be one of the winners. That consolidation was hellishly slow in coming; but come it has, as we see the radio marketplace in the UK shrink to a small number of names.

The question is whether consolidation is good news.

Due, in many ways, to the Radio Advertising Bureau and the RadioCentre, radio’s dead easy to buy – if you want to buy spots. Buying sponsorship or promotions across many different groups is much harder, and when you move into the new media area, there’s seemingly little or no easy way to do one network buy. If you want to buy a 30” spot across five radio groups, and back it up with ad banners across all five group websites, you’ll discover a confusion of ad banner sizes, pricing strategies and product offerings – and that gets worse if you try to buy the ‘livetext’, the scrolling text on your DAB radio or Freeview screen. It’s a good bet that, as consolidation continues, it’ll increasingly help radio get the most out of their new media offerings: great news for all concerned in the areas I’ve worked in for a while.

But will consolidation be good news for listeners? Consolidation may lead to more networking; which (depending who you talk to) removes locality from output and thus makes radio less relevant and thus less listened-to, or adds the capability of attracting bigger names from film and television into radio through syndicated shows, making commercial radio a better listen and better able to fight the BBC. The benefits of cost-cutting are balanced by the potential drawbacks of homogenisation. Now, the experience in the US with operators like Clear Channel would tend to show that this is bad news for consumers: but we’re not the US, and commercial radio here has the high-quality output of the BBC to keep standards high throughout the industry.

To me, consolidation is undoubtedly good news for the radio advertising industry. The question is whether it’s similarly good news for the listener. Only time will tell.

Photo: John Ryan Brubaker. Used under licence.

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