Comments on: Pennine FM closes (again)

By: Roger Greenwood

Roger Greenwood — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:39:27 +0000

You don’t think one of the causes of the drop in advertising could be down to the PRS bullying tactics, forcing many small businesses to ban radio’s at work? It must be having some effect, because no one I know is paying the PRS!

By: Paul Easton

Paul Easton — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:09:02 +0000

Sorry, James, but although, as you rightly say, the Central Office of Information is radio’s biggest spender not all government-produced ads are paid-for.

Recent campaigns, such as the one advising people on how to identify and deal with stroke victims (“F-A-S-T”) are legitimate campaigns. The (very) rough ‘rule of thumb’ for spotting a paid-for ad is whether there is also a companion TV commercial for the same campaign.

However, as an LBC listener you can’t have failed to have heard those oft-repeated ads about sausage-smuggling, the one with the girls whose friend has had an accident on holiday (“What’s she like?”) or those warning people not to leave the tops off bottles of tablets.

All of those are what are known as “Fillers” and are supplied free-of-charge to stations – http://www.coiradiofillers.co.uk/ or (for community radio stations) http://www.radiobank.co.uk/

“Radio Fillers are short health, welfare and safety messages that provide high quality content on issues that are important to your audience. They are available in a variety of lengths, from 10 secs to 60 secs to sit neatly in your schedule.

“Fillers offer you flexible, ready to run programming to help fill any break, as a quick fix for an unexpected gap in your schedule, or as an alternative to a programme trail. Fillers are free of charge and fully cleared.”

Back in another life I used to freelance for the COI’s radio department where I produced paid-for commercials and ‘Fillers’, which is how I know.

By: James Cridland

James Cridland — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:29:18 +0000

Those COI commercials are anything but freebies: they spend £21m on radio each year, and are (by far) radio’s biggest spender. The uncharitable might claim it’s a government subsidy into the commercial radio marketplace. The charitable (like me) would claim it’s because they reach an audience that’s impossible to get any other way.

By: Paul Easton

Paul Easton — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:32:13 +0000

It depends on what you mean by “sensible amount of commercials”, though. How many of those ads were sold as part of a bargain package, or were ‘bonus spots’ or freebie COI government ‘fillers’ (such as can be heard ‘ad nauseam’ – no pun intended – on LBC for much of the day)? Unless they’re actually generating real revenue it makes no difference how many ads you might have on-air.

I don’t know the state of Pennine FM’s finances, but in its previous incarnation as Home 107.9 accounts from a couple of years ago showed the station was losing somewhere in the region of £3,000 a week!! In fact Home 107.9/Huddersfield FM never made any money and accumulated losses were over £1million.

It’s always sad to see stations fold like this but, as John Myers has said in his recent report, there could be many more to follow over the next year or two.

By: Roy Martin

Roy Martin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:43:26 +0000

Latest reports are that the transmitter is still on, with no word on when it will be turned off or saved at the last minute.

It will make five stations so far this year, but the total so far in recent history would stand at nine.

There is a full list of recent closures located at the link below:

http://radiotoday.co.uk/e107_plugins/wrap/wrap.php?23