Radio Essay Exemplar

Radio essay exemplar

Intro

Despite the advent of new technology target audiences still have a close relationship with their favourite radio station(s). Radio is a medium that usually creates background noise and allows the audience to listen to a wider variety of music than what is on their I-pod. Audiences also form close relationships with the personalities that host radio shows whether they be talk-back hosts who callers can share their problems with or popular breakfast DJ’s who the audience can text or view on a website. Radio stations take advantage of this relationship by enticing listeners with competitions, promotions and gimmicks. They do this in order to convince advertisers that they have the largest market share of a particular age-group. Then hopefully they will gain a large portion of advertising revenue in order to make a profit.

One radio station that is popular with those aged between 45-59 (baby boomers) is Coast FM. Coast is owned by The Radio Network and the people in its audience are likely to have paid off their mortgages, have disposable income for holiday overseas and new cars. They are generally looking forward to their retirement interests (fishing, reading, tramping, gardening etc).

One way the Coast FM is able to identify this target audience is through Radio Diaries. The Radio Network contact Research International to undertake the surveys twice a year in the big cities and once in smaller centres. People are randomly selected, via electoral rolls and given a survey to fill out over seven days. In Nelson about 800 people will do this. People mark of their radio listening in 15 minute blocks on the form if they have listened for more than 8 minutes in that quarter hour. The survey can often ask for other information on a person’s lifestyle, income, gender etc which is used by radio stations to create a picture of their target audience as with Coast FM above. The information from diaries provides ratings which are published on The Radio Bureau website. This has an impact on the ad-rate that radio stations can charge advertising clients. Other ways that Coast FM can measure who is listening is through its website, monitoring texts/callers and focus groups.

One of the techniques that Coast uses to appeal to the baby boomers is a low number of advertisements per hour. Advertising is seen as a real turn off to them. They hate being yelled at with ads 15 minutes per hour and tend to channel surf or sometimes not bother and switch the radio off. So by only playing 5 minutes of ads per hour, and no more than two ads back to back, Coast FM have attracted a loyal following amongst the baby boomer audience who will keep tuned into the stations. The audience probably takes more notice of the ads when there are less of them. The ads that are played are usually more sophisticated and specifically aimed at this audience (holidays, big ticket items like cars etc)

Longer news bulletins appeal to this audience because they are of a generation who like to be informed and kept up to date with NZ based news, sports and entertainment along with international news, compared to Generation Y who don’t care as much. Coast helps the needs of this audience by taking their news feeds from the ZB network and incorporating them into the hour and half hour. They also include a lot more business and political news (eg the day’s happenings in parliament, as well as Stock exchange info) This appeals to the audience as a high percentage of them own their own businesses and like to be kept informed of changes to their retirement investments or are keen followers of sport.

Without its audience it is impossible for a media product to achieve success. Advertisers depend on a commercial media product to rate well with its specific audience, if not advertisers will find it difficult to get a return on their advertising investment. If a media product like a radio station does not have a significant share of the radio audience it will like be rebranded, reshaped or simply removed entirely from the airwaves (eg Fifeshire FM in Nelson).

Commercial considerations are one of the most important factors driving the radio market in New Zealand. Currently NZ has more than 200 AM and FM stations, thanks to the deregulation of the radio market in 1989. NZ has a higher ration of radio stations to its population than any other developed nation. As a result there is fierce competition among the two major owners of radio in New Zealand CANWEST and The Radio Network for audience share and the advertising dollar. Both cover 90% of the radio advertising revenue in NZ with the rest divided up between independent radio stations. With the cost of radio frequencies so high (the last one sold for $6.5 million to the Radio Network) there is commercial need to return this investment to the owners of the radio stations. Therefore it is important that radio stations ratings (from radio diary surveys) are strong.

Kiwi FM is a good example. Set up by the Radio Works at the start of 2005, it replaced a poorly rating (and resourced) Channel Z in the Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington markets. Its difference from its competition, like the bNet student radio stations, was it dedication to playing only Kiwi music. However it became clear within the first 6 months of 2005 (from radio diary surveys) Kiwi FM was struggling to find an audience, picking up only 0.6% of the important Auckland market. In comparison Channel Z’s worst rating before taken off the air was 1.6%.

CanWest thought that by offering a unique radio product with a kiwi brand, it would attract or appeal to the loyalty factor of NZers and therefore take in wide audience coverage, from generation Y to baby boomers. Survey results have not shown this. CanWest seems like it will continue to back the station, probably because it is one way to prevent the NZ Govt from setting up a youth radio network (similar to Australia’s JJJ) that Labour promised everybody during the 1999 election. If Labour had created a youth radio network, the pop-rock stations in Australia did after Triple J was set up. Therefore it is difficult to work out whether Kiwi FM’s entry into an already overcrowded radio market was done simply to stop the government from hading out its three radio r\frequencies to a youth network in NZ. By showing the Govt that a youth based network wouldn’t work in NZ CanWest have therefore protected the ratings and profitability of its own popular music stations (like the Rock and The Edge). This could mean that Kiwi Fm was going to be axed (due to its poor ratings) but the government gave Radioworks (CanWest) an early Christmas present in the form of three free frequencies to continue Kiwi FM in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington for another year (the government claimed it was culturally important to support the Kiwi music industry). This has had a major effect on the competitive environment of the radio industry. The government has therefore given millions of dollars worth of frequencies to Radioworks without allowing the other major radio competitor TRN to bid for them. TRN are angry with the government because they have provided Radioworks with an unfair commercial advantage. CanWest can now use the frequencies, they have to use for Kiwi FM for expanding their more popular stations like The Breeze at no extra cost to them.

Kiwi FM’s predecessor Channel Z is another good example of what happens when a station rates poorly and does not attract enough advertising. Channel Z was designed for a youth audience (15-29) but in the three years that it existed its ratings never lifted above 3-4% (its final rating was 1.6%) This was sad, because Channel Z had a loyal following among the 14-29 age group, but never seemed to rate well – probably because its listeners never had the chance to be surveyed by Radio diaries (research International only surveys people in established homes not in flats or hostels) Therefore the audience that listened to Channel Z was never accurately represented in the two major surveys each year.

There is some concern in the radio industry about the decrease in radio listeners especially in the big cities. At the start of 2005 the CUM figures from the first survey was down by 64 000 in Auckland. This may be a glitch in the survey but more likely that sections of the audience has stopped listening to radio. The audience is leaving mainstream radio for either alternative radio stations or MP3 players and pod-casts. This could be one reason why the ZM network of stations have invested heavily in creating free music pod-cast downloads on its websites for its target audience.

Therefore the relationship between a media product like radio and its target audience is incredibly important if CanWest and TRN want to remain profitable. They will have to both look beyond audience demographics and look at starting up radio stations that cover different ethnic audiences and also attract the younger audience back with enticements like free pod-cast down loads.