Maximise your radio player
Posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 10:07am. #
I’ve done a bit of listening to radio out of the US recently. Mix 98.5 out of Boston (“the best variety of the 80s 90s and now” – sounds familiar), and then Jack FM Los Angeles (“Broadcasting from a dumpy little building in beautiful downtown Culver City”).
Both stations are owned by CBS Radio, I discover. Both stations never mention their website on-air, ever.
But, both stations do something interesting in the commercial breaks.
Commercials on US streaming radio were a bit of a sticking point when it came to streaming radio live. Just like in the UK, voiceovers are paid for the usage that their voice gets – so, if your voice is on Hallam FM in Sheffield, you’ll get paid less than if your voice is on Galaxy 105 across all of Yorkshire, or if your voice is on Classic FM nationwide. In the US, if I understood it correctly, the voiceover studios didn’t simply grumble and shuffle their feet awkwardly as they did in the UK – they got the lawyers involved. As a result, when you listen to radio online, you hear a different set of ads from those that are used when you’re listening terrestrially.
There’s nothing particularly new in this: if you listen to Classic FM in Birmingham, you’ll hear different ads than if you were in London. Same goes for ITV, of course. Or Absolute Radio. Or even BBC television continuity, where you get a soft welsh voice in Wales, and idents saying “BBC One Wales”.
The interesting bit comes when you start putting different messages into the internet stream that directly point you to things you can do online. (As well as slotting in geo-targeted ads, so your Los Angeles station plays Boston ads if you’re listening in Boston. I’m guessing I don’t get this, living in London).
So a typical CBS Radio ad break appears to:
1. Promote “All Number Ones Radio”, which is an internet-only radio station that just carries, well, number ones.
2. Promote an online car dealer. This is technically known in the business as “paid-for radio advertising” (a seemingly shrinking trend, but one that has appeared to work okay for many years). The call to action is… “click the banner”.
3. If you’ve not already got it yet, the third ad in the monster ad break is promoting the radio player. A silky-voiced man comes on and tells us all the interesting things we can do when we maximise the radio player. Find new stations, take part in contests, blah, yada.
CBS Radio don’t shy away, then, from promoting other stations in its stable: unusual for commercial broadcasters in the UK, who by and large don’t acknowledge the existence of other radio stations they run. (When was the last time you heard XFM promoting Capital, or Heart promote Galaxy?)
But CBS Radio also understand the benefits of promoting their own radio player – and understand that once we start listening, we minimise the radio player and get on with our work. A call to action to “maximise your radio player – the possibilities are endless” is an interesting one; but one that recognises that radio players, these days, are more than just a little box with a stream in them.
- What does your radio player have in it?
- (You do have a branded radio player, right? You’re not just firing up Windows Media Player?)
- What does your radio player do to increase your station’s listening figures?
- Can you target your online listeners using a separate audio stream than what goes out on the air?
Photo: yat fai ooi, from Malaysia. Used under licence.
This is something that has been of great interest to me over the last few weeks, as I’ve been using the CBS and Clear Channel iphone radio player applications.
The whole thing isn’t entirely thought out yet, as quite often an internet-only commercial will tell me to “click the advert on your radio player”… which, of course, isn’t displaying on my iphone. While the idea of that extra level of interactivity is to be encouraged, it isn’t perfect yet!
(Interesting also that the Capital FM streaming at musicradio.com is better audio quality than both the above services)