Offline advertising: Radio Ga Ga

According to figures from the Advertising Association (AA), radio has been the largest growing advertising medium of the nineties, rising by 240%, compared to television at 83.2%. This has been driven in part by the huge growth in independent commercial stations over the past eight years and looks set to continue, offering more advertising opportunities for advertisers on both a regional and national basis.

As internet usage continues to grow, research suggests radio is the one medium which is least likely to be hit as TV viewing and reading may slip, internet users are more likely to combine surfing and listening.

This complementary relationship between radio and internet was a principal attraction for Yahoo!, says brand manager Lindsay Biggart. Yahoo! used radio as a major part of its marketing campaign last year and found that it worked well for building brand awareness and also driving traffic. Biggart also says the ad campaign worked for Yahoo! due to the fact that, at the time, radio was not a key component of the marketing mix that many dotcom companies now use.

The increase has been dramatic for Virgin Radio too, which booked its first dotcom ad campaign back in 1998, with Amazon. Now Virgin boasts a large number of dotcom advertisers, sponsors and competition partners, including Confetti, Sports.com, ic24 and YouTravel.

Lee Roberts, deputy sales director at Virgin Radio, says the number of dotcoms advertising on the station has increased fivefold in the past 12 months, particularly last Autumn when bookings were driven by the pre-Christmas rush by e-tailers. At the end of 1999, around 17% of ad revenue had come from dotcoms.

**Does radio give you reach?**

According to the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB), listening to the radio is considered habitual and loyal, with listeners tuning in to the same stations at the same time each day. Radio is also considered a passive medium, with people listening whilst doing something else, such as driving, cooking or cleaning. As such, radio is often considered the perfect medium for a cost-effective and targeted campaign, which can also result in reduced wastage.

Virgin's Roberts says that radio is a subtle medium but fundamental in the way in which it intrudes into people's minds, sneaking into the consciousness. He believes it's far better than TV in terms of one-to-one marketing as the audience is much more intricately broken down by the numerous localised and themed radio stations, allowing for a higher level of planning and more precise targeting.

Research conducted by RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) shows that listening hours of commercial radio are up and stand at just over 490m hours per week, representing an additional 20m hours on the previous quarter. Further, figures show that the average listener now spends 15.4 hours a week listening to commercial radio, an extra hour to that recorded for January-March last year. There are now 31.8m adults in the UK listening to commercial radio each week (RAJAR).

Yahoo!'s Biggart says that because of the numerous opportunities for on-air promotions or sponsorships, this allows the advertiser to build relationships with the DJ's, which in turn builds the relationship with the audience. Biggart says: “It is a useful tool in building integrated campaigns, a lot of why we select radio is due to the radio's relationship with its particular audience - and to tap into that is a great device.”

**Traffic driving or brand awareness?**

While the web is seen as a key traffic driver and TV more suitable to brand awareness, where does that leave radio?

Yahoo! says it received an uplift in traffic after its radio campaign (no figures were disclosed), with Biggart claiming that the surge tallied with the amount spent on the campaign. She says: “We will use radio again not as an exclusive marketing medium, but as part of a marketing mix. To achieve a high level of response, it comes down to the creative and using radio as part of an integrated marketing campaign.”

Travel site ebookers is finding that radio works well for direct response, with constant monitoring finding that whenever a recent ad campaign kicked in on Magic FM, the site was seeing a 30-40% increase in sales, according to the RAB website.

Community site Dobedo.com used radio as pre-launch activity in an effort to create an initial usage boost to its service. Martin Osterdahl, director of international operations at Dobedo, claims that its first promotion on the Pepsi chart (on Capital Radio) gave Dobedo 4,500 new registrations within three hours and during the hours after the show.

Osterdahl says Dobedo spent ”a couple of hundred thousand pounds” on its radio activity and considered it, “well worth it”.

However, QXL wasn't so enamoured with the medium, finding that its radio ad campaign did nothing to help drive traffic to its site - or increase sales. Alex Czajkowski, marketing director at QXL, says: “We have experimented with radio in every possible way, contests, promotions, straight forward traffic advertising. But radio just does not drive traffic. If you use radio to build traffic the financial loss is exorbitant - arguably radio is too expensive to drive traffic.”

Czajkowski added that last year QXL spent 0.5m on its radio campaign, and received little response. “The increment in terms of traffic and registers was nowhere near making it cost effective,” he adds.

However, results did show that radio had performed for QXL in terms of brand awareness, although this did nothing to change QXL's views as Czajkowski says it will not be allocating a significant spend for future radio advertising.

In addition to advertising and sponsorship, radio is also increasingly being used for promotions and competitions. For example, Virgin Radio has recently run a competition to win 24,000 with Mirror Group Newspaper's ic24 portal.

Considering that radio stations boast such close and loyal relationships with their listeners, these co-promotions can work well as they are seen as being endorsed by the radio station, therefore lending credibility - and a sense of trust - to the service.

Roberts says: “Inevitably promotions offer better opportunities for advertisers, although the costs are higher for this, an advertiser will feel that they have had more information put across, and the product or brand stands out more, and generates excitement.”

**Dotcom packages**

To encourage more internet companies to advertise on radio, GWR's commercial arm, Opus, developed a ‘fast turnaround' advertising solution for its dotcom clients, in April this year.

The package offered dotcoms the opportunity to advertise to the 4.5m nationwide listeners of GWR - the majority of which are thought to be between 25-34 years old - within 48 hours, providing airtime and an in-house creative team.

However, it didn't prove to be as attractive as expected, says David Fisher, strategic executive at Opus. The package was actually not used apart from one or two clients, he says: “It seemed to work as more of a PR exercise, in terms of showing potential advertisers exactly what radio can do. It did bring new clients to us who wanted to find out more, which led to more airtime being bought.”

Fisher claims that radio works depending on the brand, but the most important aspect of radio is giving a dotcom company credibility. He says: “Putting commercials on big stations and giving it high frequency makes the listeners take the brand or product much more seriously. They trust the station and in turn the listeners trust the ad.”