Back to BBC Local Radio

Posted by on . 6 comments.

In a previous post I talked about Delivering Quality First (the BBC’s plan to re-prioritise what it does based on the recent licence fee settlement). Since then the BBC management was proposing that £15m to be cut off BBC Local Radio’s £147m/year budget. Today, the BBC Trust’s Chairman has said, because of feedback from the audience, that those cuts should just be around £7m.

So we have asked the management to look again at the planned cuts to local radio. To see if they can find more money to protect the local identity of services:

  • To scale back the plans for local stations to share their afternoon content with their neighbours, although we accept that in some cases that might still be the best option
  • To ensure they have an adequately staffed newsroom
  • And to give them a bit more freedom to protect some of their more specialist and content out of peak, whether it be rugby league or specialist music.

This isn’t a bad political compromise. The Trust are seen to be the ‘good guys’ asking Management to follow the views of the listeners and the BBC still get to make some savings, something they have to do, as the Government made them take on hundreds of millions of pounds of new costs. Though i’m not exactly sure, where they are supposed to save money – what’s left to cut?

However, it’s not all about money. BBC Local Radio still faces many problems. In my mind they’re a combination of evolution in the radio market, changing listener behaviour, structural problems at stations and management failings.

These aren’t all my thoughts, by the way, my last blog post on the subject resulted in emails from Editors and other Senior Management sending me their own DQF submissions.

DQF was a good opportunity to really tackle some of these things and put the stations on a firmer footing for the future. I hope that they don’t rely on natural wastage and voluntary redundancies to hit their targets and then just carry on business as usual.

The main issue for me is the tyranny of the newsroom.

These are broad based local radio stations that have news-led programming at the heart of what they do. There’s nothing wrong with this. However they are not news radio stations. Unfortunately, at the moment they sit in the news directorate and are (predominantly) led by news people. Editorial judgement is an important skill to have, but you need to be a professional radio programmer as well. Some Editors are both, but not enough.

Executing a successful radio station is difficult. In each of their markets BBC Local faces significant competition from both local and national stations. Providing one strategy driven from the centre (a la Capital and Real) is easy when your proposition is music-orientated. BBC Local is personality and news led. Each market needs to be programmed to reach the needs of each individual community – to do this needs strong local programming skills.

Some of the under-performing stations biggest faults could be fixed through music and presentation coaching.

Music scheduling is difficult and if I didn’t have the skill to do it myself i’d always rather take a solid network log. I imagine whoever runs the current log gets a disproportionate amount of grief, mainly from people who don’t know as much about music as they think. The problem is that BBC local stations have different TSAs with a different competitive set. Music needs to be tailored for the market. In the old GWR days we had 5 logs that you got depending on who your competitors are – it’s not a bad proxy if you haven’t got the music programming talent to do it yourself. In the new world these stations won’t be able to provide the volume of speech-led shows, enhancing the music scheduling will be vital to future success.

One thing that every BBC local station should be doing with their talent is adequate coaching. If they’re not doing daily reviews with Breakfast and weekly reviews with other air talent then there is something wrong the management. Quality is not just about having the right mix of stories. Reflecting listeners lives with presenters who speak to them and their needs is vitally important.

Websites. BBC Local Radio must be be the largest radio stations and the largest network of radio stations in the world without a website. Links to BBC Programmes and a schedule just don’t cut it. Listen to the way the web is described on-air, it’s painful. Radio is so powerful because of the close connection listeners have with the people who speak to them – the website should help and support the station and its output, not just tell you the local news and when a presenter’s on – especially when the description is:

Your Tuesday starts with Paul Damari’s three day weather forecast, a top tune for this day in history and the early paper review. Traffic and travel, showbiz gossip and two songs from Toto.

Finally a note on the money. Much of the DQF announcements were prescriptive things from the top. If you have the right managers all you would need to do is say to them is this:

“Hey, you used to have £1.8m per year, you’ve now only got £1.4m a year. Sorry! It’s up to you how you spend your budget, but you’ve still got to continue to provide high quality output for 19 hours a day. If you want to network with a neighbour, that’s fine. If you want to change your shift pattern to lose a show, fine. It’s your radio station, we trust you, and will help you if necessary.”

So, in summary:

1. Use the new budget to re-design a station, from scratch, that’s built for today

2. The newsroom is not the most important thing at a local radio station. It’s up there, but it isn’t number 1.

3. 40 personality-led radio stations cannot be centrally managed like a music-brand.

4. A radio programmer needs to run it

5. Local management should have the flexibility to run it to satisfy their audiences and provide public value

6. If they don’t/can’t do what they’ve been asked to they should be fired.

7. Presentation staff should receive high quality coaching. Just because you’ve been their 20 years is not an excuse for being a bit rubbish.

8. A radio station in 2012 is more than just the quality of it’s local news – from music, marketing, presentation to web and social – that’s what needs to be protected and supported.

Absolute Radio’s #redefiningradio Event

Posted by on . No comments.

I went along to Absolute Radio’s event at Parliament yesterday – Redefining Radio. It was a good event that demonstrated to Absolute’s clients (and other guests) the way that radio (and broader media consumption) is changing.

There was a good line-up of speakers and Absolute have just put up all the videos from the event.

The session that I thought was the most illuminating was the one that explained Absolute’s thinking behind their new signed-in for streaming service. James Wigley goes into quite a bit of detail about how the system works and some of their early results too. I’ve embedded the video below:

The technology behind this kind of service is not insignificant and I imagine the changes needed for traffic management must be huge. However, what it does do is provide new opportunities for advertisers.

As a percentage of listening, streaming (to both to PCs and mobile) is still a very small part of what radio does. In fact it provides about a fifth of the hours that DAB delivers to radio broadcasters. However, that’s still 40m hours a week of listening – an amount that wouldn’t be sniffed at if you were a new entrant in the online music space.

This means that Absolute can start to target some of the money that’s going to Spotify, Last. fm et al by replicating their media formats and then aligning it with a brand that can deliver to a large audience.

It’s so easy for people to think about radio in binary terms and base all decisions on the model we happen to have had for the last 30 years. It’s great that there’s new ‘radio’ products like these that put us into some different games.

 

 

 

Why changing the name of BRMB, Beacon, Wyvern and Mercia is the right thing to do

Posted by on . 7 comments.

When anything changes, we think how it affects us. Not whether it’s the right thing for them to do.

Radio is habitual. We make a decision to consume something and then consume it for a couple of hours. Everyday. Forever. When someone interrupts our habits by making a change to something we’ve enjoyed we get annoyed.

However, just because you like, or are used to something, doesn’t give it the god-given right to exist forever. Sorry.

ILR has gone through three distinct phases. We’re now in the third.

1. 1973 to 1992: Launch and growth.

ILR was new. There were few radio stations, no internet, four TV channels, limited newspapers and magazines. It was easy to compete against the BBC because you could find something that they didn’t do.

To win… be more local, be more friendly, play popular music, make sure people know about you and work out how to sell lots advertising (unless you go bust first).

2. 1992 to 2002: Least worst option.

Whilst in the background there was the gradual growth of CDs, multi-channel television and online – it still had a brilliant competitive set – there were hardly any competitors!

Plus through a mix of luck and judgement, commercial radio fixed it’s product.

Some may call it uninspiring, but the explosion of research-led programming meant that ILR played the right kind of music – in decent quality – FM! (and generally) told the DJ to STFU. Happily Radio 1 also threw itself off a cliff offering up its listeners.

The music shift was important as many of the stations positioned themselves with the optimum mix for their market. Broadly it was Radio 1 without the new stuff, Radio 2 without the old stuff – it was the station that everyone could agree on.

2003 onwards

The third age is not so happy.

The downside of being the ‘least worst option’ is that you create very little passion from the audience and you don’t super-serve anyone. When a better opportunity comes along you can be left behind. Playing the middle ground can get much harder.

This was fine before the explosion in choice meant that the listener who prefers dance but tolerated pop had somewhere better to go. The person who preferred a few older tunes gets an easy listening station. The person that wants more company gets the big stars on Radio 2.

ILR

The problem for the vast majority of ILR stations whether 2CR, The Pulse or BRMB is that they failed to re-invent their product when they should have done – about eight years ago – the point when everything was changing.

For the vast majority of ILR stations that haven’t re-branded, their 2011 product is the same as their 1994 one. But, amazingly, probably less tight and focused.

In the same time consumers and successful pop culture brands changed and evolved.

The biggest issue is that consumer has evolved much faster than the stations they grew up with.

I was involved in some of the background work for one of the many Capital re-brands. The research was fascinating. Capital scored incredibly high for loads of images – from news, to travel, to ‘being London’ – the music scores weren’t outstanding but were okay too. But when asked whether they listened the answer was no. They’d found something else that scratched an itch better – generally Heart for the women and Kiss for the youngsters. They still had enormous positive feeling for Capital, it just wasn’t for them.

It was the same story for many other ILR stations, though the lack of competition in each individual marketplace often hid the scale of the problem. 20-years of doing the same thing had burned the traditional ILR perceptions in the mind of the listener. Normally this would have been a good thing, but even though they thought that ILRs did a good job, a growing number of them shrugged and turned on something else. Being number one for local, or travel wasn’t enough. It was no longer ‘the station for people like me’ – and owning that or other images wasn’t going to fix it.

Heart, and then Capital.

This wasn’t the reason for the re-brand of 30-odd ILRs into Heart though. That was driven by cost saving and delivering a more easily buy-able product by advertisers.

Prior to the re-brand, product-wise they were a variable lot. Some, often the bigger ones, had done quite a good job. Looking at GWR FM or Trent FM – their audience had been down a little – but nothing drastic. Whereas Hereward and Invicta hadn’t fared so well. It’s no surprise that Heart has improved some and reduced others. The stats are harder however to crunch since Global changed the TSAs.

Heart’s success is they’ve generally kept a steady ship whilst massively reducing the costs. – I reckon by half to two-thirds. The Heart product is an excellent one, super-slick and relatively clutter free. The thing that really helped Global was that the brand’s values had been worked out a long time ago. It mattered less that listeners didn’t know the brand – what was really important was that they knew what they were. Then it was just communicating it to the audience. Something they did with loads of TV advertising.

Many of these stations had never had any TV-spend before. Existing listeners found that little of their station had really changed and at the same time non-listeners (who knew very well what GWR FM was etc) could be prompted to try it again. A smaller amount of  Hereward FM-related baggage to wade through.

Heart’s difficulty now is that as they’ve pulled back on the marketing gas they’re starting to see some cracks in audience growth, especially where they’ve merged a large number of stations into one. It’s still very early days on that though and you have to remember that they’ve saved a HUGE amount of money.

The product problem they face is whether they’ve actually just created a better ‘least worst station’ and just corrected the output (and pushed back) the years before they see more competition-related decline.

I say that, of course, as if it’s a bad thing. It might just be the nature of what mainstream radio now has to do. Constant Madonna-style re-invention.

Capital, I think is more interesting. In that network they’ve taken a niche product (the ex-Galaxies) and applied a clean lick of mainstream paint. For London it’s also a much more contemporary sound than its ever had before. They’ve also aligned it strongly to what’s modern, mainstream and cool.

As a young station it matters less what ex-listeners think – it’s about constantly attracting the young/pop fans (and those who see themselves as young/pop fans). They’ve managed, in their first year, to alter core brand values and start to shift perceptions. And in London the departure of Johnny (for whatever reason) will help them keep to this goal. They have, however, spent a huge amount of money on TV/big concerts to do this.

What does not work is a re-name (rather than re-brand). Lite FM’s change to Connect or that conglomeration of stations’ move to Touch was a failure because:

1. The old product wasn’t very good – and the new product wasn’t much better (most of the ex-Heart’s were quite good and the new Heart was slick)
2. The new station didn’t have any/strong enough brand values
3. There was little marketing explaining the new station or why people should bother to sample it.

Er, that’s the end of the introduction. You still there?

The main reason that BRMB, Beacon, Wyvern and Mercia need to change are their audience figures.

These stations are not terrible radio stations. Of course there are things that could be changed – music, personalities, production etc. However, even if they changed them to the optimal mix it would not necessarily reverse the declines.

The problem isn’t what they’re doing today. The problem is what’s happened to ILR over the last eight years.

As I talked about above, the changing nature of consumers, the multi-platform competition and these stations being trapped in the middle and not being allowed to evolve are the combination of reasons that there needs to be a big change.

Being ‘BRMB’ is the baggage – not just what’s on those stations today.

A re-brand can return growth to these stations. However, doing it successfully is difficult. Product, brand and marketing need to be perfectly aligned. Because as Lite, Touch, Capital and Heart have found, when you press the button there really is no going back.

There will be discussion about cost-saving, TV advertising opportunities, new competitive market, it being easier to sell to advertisers… and all of these are valid things. However – at the core there’s just a need for ILR to move on.

Capital Breakfast

Posted by on . 20 comments.

It’s always very difficult to know why a station’s axed a presenter, it’s normally though, a combination of things. How it performs, how it sounds, what the people are like, is everyone getting on etc. What’s interesting about Capital axing Johnny Vaughan is that they’re doing to a time when he’s (consistently) the number one commercial breakfast show in London.

However, my personal view is that they’ve made the decision at the right time. It is always better to make bold changes when you’re at the top of your game. So often change comes from weakness – declining figures, lack of growth etc – that any new show is already starting thirty-love down.

For Capital, the Breakfast show is popular, people aren’t drifting off to other stations and they tend to be locked in for the rest of the day. Naturally a new host will generate some churn, but with listeners broadly happy it’s a great headstart for a new programme.

I’ve always thought X Factor was excellent at constantly innovating with a winning formula. At the point they were top of their game, they weren’t afraid to swap judges out – bye bye Sharon Osbourne (and Louis Walsh at one point), take the auditions in front of a live studio audience and reinvent Sunday night’s result show as the new Top of the Pops. Conventional wisdom would have been to NOT CHANGE ANYTHING – but they took their lead and constantly developed and improved their already winning product.

Interestingly it’s been when change has been forced upon them – X Factor USA taking away two judges and management focus – that the changes have been less successful.

Back to Capital, I’m sure they’re also haunted by the ghost of Breakfast presenters past. Chris Tarrant caused the old Capital massive success and then massive problems. They were so wedded to Tarrant (he was a constant issue even in PLC annual reports) that they kept hold of him way too long. By the time he moved on, they had a Breakfast audience who were older and didn’t listen to the rest of the output and whoever they replaced him with would have been a massive change. Net result it took years and years for Johnny to be established. They just waited too long.

It’s a problem that Radio 1 now faces too. Moyles is an excellent breakfast host, and probably generates the best breakfast show in the country. The programme is however drifting away from the rest of the network. It’s hugely popular, but the audience is getting much older and the programming has a habit of drifting older topic-wise. Did you hear the hour long (!) interview with John Cleese? It took me ten minutes to realise who it was.

Now, they’ve renewed Moyles for another few years to give the station some breathing room whilst they advance their talent plans, but by doing so they’ve piled on the trouble for the future. By then he’ll be even more off target and his disappearance will lose them a stack of older listeners plus they’ll have to work hard to re-attract the 15 to 24s who’ll already be listening to another breakfast show – perhaps the new one from Capital?

Who’ll be Capital’s new breakfast host? I think the smart money’s on Dave Berry. He’s similar to Johnny, younger, more relevant and still funny. However, Global are excellent at pulling a rabbit out of the hat, and I think someone like Scott Mills could make an appearance. If they go for a Scott-type person or bigger they’ll also have the opportunity of networking Breakfast across the old regional Galaxies – so their new host could come to Yorkshire and the North East. Whilst I think they would be mad to replace Hirsty, with Steve and Karen off to Metro – maybe we’ll see the new host waking up two areas!

Next Radio Videos Go Online

Posted by on . One comment.

In September, me and James ran a radio conference, Next Radio, which went down really well! It was a radio ideas conference and we had a fantastic selection of speakers talking about loads of different topics.

We’ve had lots of requests to put the sessions online, so i’m pleased to say that we’ve just put the vast majority of the videos live on the Next Radio website.

If you came to the conference you’ll be able to watch the videos for free (you should have received an email from us how to do that). If you didn’t come, then it’s £10 to buy a subscription to watch them.

We’ve thought a lot about whether to make them free or fee, so this is a bit of an experiment. If you want to see what they’re like – we’ve put one up on YouTube here. The people who paid for the conference (and the videos) were the delegates and our sponsors, so it seems right that the people who watch them contribute as well. However, agree or disagree, i’m very interested in your views in the comments below.

I think you will get something from each of the sessions, but three that cover very different areas, and are a great place to start are:

1. Brett Spencer’s session on local radio and social media.

2. Sam Bailey and Joe Harland’s take on visualisation.

3. Somethin’ Else’s Steve Ackerman talking about video games and audio.

RAJAR Q3/2011

Posted by on . One comment.

Another RAJAR and more numbers to analyse.

It’s been quite a good quarter for digital, with listening on digital platforms now accounting for 300m hours a week (that’s more than Radio 1 and Radio 2′s total hours combined). There’s also some quite good news for the digital stations too – Planet Rock has its highest total hours ever – making it bigger than (all of) XFM. Two new digital stations also reach the 1m listeners club – Absolute 80s and Five Live Sports Extra – joining Smash Hits, The Hits, 6Music, 4Extra and Kerrang with Planet Rock and 1Xtra not far behind.

Also, just under 300,000 listeners stopped listening to any form of analogue radio wiping 2.2m hours off analogue’s totaliser.

But really, I’m less concerned about who’s slightly up and down and instead keen to see whether there’s any new trends popping up.

I’ve spent most of this quarter speaking at conferences and leading in-station seminars outside of the UK. The key thing they’re all interested in is trying to track how diverse platforms are going to affect their core analogue businesses. Many are in markets that don’t have any traction with broadcast digital radio, but they still see the internet, mobile and de-regulation as threats to their business.

When I present, I often talk about how amazing analogue radio is. It’s a platform where all consumers have multiple radios that pick it up, receivers are super-cheap, they are available in-home, on the move and at work. Plus limited spectrum means there are few competitors. Woo! I then talk about other industries who felt their barriers to entry were great too, until someone lobbed a hand grenade and blew them apart.

The story I often talk about is Craigslist. In America Craigslist has pretty much destroyed classified advertising for newspapers (and with it much of their business model). Now, it wasn’t Craig’s intention to destroy newspapers, he was trying to solve a different problem. Namely to provide a cheap/free way to get rid of your old stuff. It worked and the knock on was massive to a different industry.

I don’t know what the problem will be that someone will solve that harpoon’s our business, but I do know that if we stick to our one boat – analogue radio – then when it starts sinking it’ll be too late to do anything about it.

I thought it might be interesting to use RAJAR to look at how radio businesses are changing.

The data in the two charts below are the same, but are ordered differently. The data shows hours listened for the larger radio groups, broken down by All hours, Analogue hours, Digital hours (that’s DAB, DTV, Online and Unknown digital combined) as well as DAB, DTV and Net separately. At the end there’s two columns that show the ranking of the groups based on two things – All hours and Digital hours.

This chart below is ranked on All hours – in effect the top, er 14, radio groups as we measure them today.

The second chart shows it sorted on digital hours. If the industry was roughly doing the same thing, you’d expect the charts to be roughly similar. There are some strong similarities but there are some differences too. The groups that stand out are Absolute, Town and Country and Lincs. Absolute moves from being the 6th biggest group to the 4th biggest and Town and Country moves from 13th to 9th. Lincs FM group drop from 8th to 12th.

What does this show? I think for Absolute and T&C it shows they’re building new digital businesses. Both have launched new digital radio stations and extended coverage of analogue ones – Absolute upgrading AM to digital and T&C growing the coverage of some of its analogue stations.

I’m not surprised that some stations moan about digital. They look at it as a large cost to simulcast their service to their analogue audience. Well – it is! Clever groups are using digital to expand their existing stations or they’re creating new ones. For them it’s not about maintaining market share by being on a different platform to the same audience – it’s taking the fight elsewhere and battling for new hours.

And it’s hours that turn into cash – and digital, especially DAB, is a brilliant way to do just that. Global generate nearly 10million additional hours to listeners tuning into their brands on digital, outside of the analogue areas. Absolute now, in total, generate 6m hours more than they did in 2007 when Virgin Radio.

If you hear a radio group moaning that they want to protect analogue (at the same time as doing nothing digitally) surely there’s only one direction for their audience and their business?

The Wanted & Global

Posted by on . 5 comments.

A funny article just popped up on The Guardian’s website talking about playlisting in general and specifically that Global (owner of pop radio stations) play The Wanted (an artist managed by another company in their group).

The article touches on payola (paying cash/providing services to get songs on the playlist). In my experience most stations wouldn’t consider playing songs that they think would turn people off their radio station – even for cash. Where the line does get blurry is when events are involved. Whether it’s BBC or Commercial, when a radio station organises a big pop event, they’re guaranteed to up the plays of the artists being featured. Radio 1 often ups the plays before they announce the artists for the Big Weekend, so you can always tell who’s going to be playing.

Probably the closest stations get, is from ‘must carry’ acts for events, ie if you want a Rihanna you have to take a lesser artist on the rosta. That also might result in a few extra plays on the station for that artist.

In the article there’s a mention of the Broadcasting Code in relation to Global’s playing of The Wanted:

No commercial arrangement that involves payment, or the provision of some other valuable consideration, to the broadcaster may influence the selection or rotation of music for broadcast.

UPDATED: Jimmy Buckland writes to tell me ‘undue prominence’ has been removed from the Code. Serves me right for some late Sunday googling. You can tell I don’t really do regulation any more…. 

I’m not sure if this is relevant to Global. I think the question is probably less about the above but perhaps about ‘undue prominence’.

No undue prominence may be given in any programme to a product or service.
The Code goes on to say:
Undue prominence may result from:
the presence of, or reference to, a product or service (including company names, brand names, logos) in a programme where there is no editorial justification; or
the manner in which a product or service (including company names, brand names, logos) appears or is referred to in a programme.
They’re probably fine on 1, though the fine line is going to be 2. When does a DJ talk up for a song become undue prominence?

Undue prominence is a difficult thing though.

Stations could face the same charge about promoting a station website. Or even someone else’s website. Twitter perhaps, or maybe Facebook?

Selling your own products is nothing new though. We’ve already seen radio stations (and TV channels) named after brands –  Saga FM or the Audi Channel, anyone? Should Audi have had to report on Ford’s cars for balance? What about Sky’s cross-promotion of premium channels on its free to air or basic services?

At the end of the day, Global used their own platform to promote their own band, a band that if famous and successful would be completely on brand for their radio stations. Catch-22. Their first ‘hit’ was generated by significant airplay on Capital/Galaxy and Heart (with some late spot-plays from Bauer) alongside significant online support from the Global websites. The buzz generated by the ‘unexpected’ hit then guaranteed further airplay on other commercial stations and for the first time plays on Radio 1. They’ve gone on to be a successful, albeit odd-looking, boyband.

Surely it would be crazy if radio stations couldn’t use their own channels to promote their own activities? After all, if BMG were to a run a radio station, no one would be surprised if they played their own artists would they?

Perhaps if there has to be some transparency all a station should have to do is mention these activities in their Public File?

I leave the final comment to Popjustice…

This performance translates as 'please play One Direction across the Global radio network' #xfactor
16th October, 2011 7:14 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite
@Popjustice
Popjustice

 

The First Next Radio

Posted by on . 4 comments.

I mentioned a little while ago that James and I were running a radio conference. It was a week last Thursday and was an amazing day, delivering beyond both of our wildest expectations.

It’s the first conference that me and James have both been responsible before. We’ve been on committees for events before, but basically with those, someone else does the main bit of work. This was very different partly because we would be out of pocket if it all went wrong! Mainly for my memory, but hopefully as something helpful to others, I wanted to write up some of the things that have crossed my mind when putting it together.

Venue

The venue was at the Magic Circle in Euston. It was great. Everyone’s asked me how I found it.  I think I just Googled ‘London Event Venues’ or something similar. It just stuck out and the numbers were perfect for what we hoped we would sell. They were incredibly helpful and friendly and the rooms were the perfect size for us. It was also different! We wanted to do something new – and the venue massively helped.

Ticketing

We used Ticketleap for the ticketing, which worked really well. Managing over 100 different transactions is difficult. TicketLeap have a great system which can use Paypal, making the whole process pretty easy. We only used about a fifth of their features, but that fifth was great. Taking credit cards, using a management service and coping with Paypal fees isn’t cheap though – around a fiver of the delegate fee goes on that, which still seems expensive to me. It’s clearly a good business to be in!

Price-point

I reckon over 75% of people who went paid for themselves. We wanted to do a conference that ‘radio do-ers’ could go on and keeping the price low meant that could happen. I was really pleased to see some students/recent graduates choosing to invest in their own careers by coming along.

£99 is tight

When you’ve paid for food, venue, ticketing, printing, insurance and photography there isn’t much left out of the £99. Getting the right price for food and venue makes a significant impact on the total cost.

Food

Our initial idea, to keep the costs low, was to have Pizza Hut pizza for everyone. We thought this would be fun and quirky! However all venues specify a caterer or selection of caterers you have to use. The lowest you can get food, some coffee breaks and the staff to serve it is £19.50/head. But that doesn’t really get you much. I met up with Simon from Squires Catering and we talked through the event and what we were after. They made some great suggestions and did a brilliant job for a good price. We’ve only heard positive things about the food, which we’re really pleased about.

Magicians are expensive

We wanted some close-up magic for the day. But not at £400/hour. We’re clearly all in the wrong business.

The Programme

Producing the programme – in reality one massive PDF which was also the first outing of the Media UK radio pocketbook – was made considerably easier by quick printing turnarounds afforded to us by digital printing. The programme actually went to print on Monday morning, and was delivered on Wednesday: useful for last-minute changes! We worked with Thinkpad Print and Design to produce them, printing a few more than we needed. The costs for that, paid for by Media UK, were £5.28 an issue.

Next time. No QR codes.

You have lots of ideas when you try and do these things. Sometimes just say no. I suggested that it would be really cool to have a QR code on the delegate badges linking to that person’s contact details. It stopped being a good idea when I had to manually create them all, and then manually do all the badges. All 150 of them. The QR code was then too small for some readers. Gahhhh. The delegate badges were also actually individually printed  business cards from Moo.

Presentations

Most conferences ask for presentations in advance. They rarely get them. I’m useless at doing it and generally turn up with my laptop asking whether I can do it from that? We bullied all of our speakers into getting them in advance. James then imported them into Keynote. He also fixed and harmonised video, audio, imagery and aspect ratio. This meant that there was no laptop swapping and all of the AV worked pretty flawlessly over the day. It also meant that we could keep the day on time. It was a huge amount of work – but very worthwhile.

Timings

As I was explaining the day to Catherine at the Magic Circle a week before the event, the look on her face suddenly made me very worried. It did seem ridiculously ambitious – loads of short sessions and a short lunch. I had a bit of a panic we’d bitten off way more than we could chew.

Luckily there were some things that kept us completely on time all day. Firstly was, again, bullying our speakers in keeping to time and getting them to do their presentations in advance. We also had an excellent floor manager in Helen Grimes. Helen’s been a Sonys and Radio Festival producer, in addition to her regular radio job. Having an experienced person to get the speakers ready and briefed before they went on stage is massively important and she did a great job. We also had Will Jackson at the front controlling a big screen with a countdown on. As a speaker, I found this invaluable to keep me on the straight and narrow.

No Questions

Not going to the audience for questions also helped massively. We curated twitter comments and added our own, but this allowed us to better manage the flow of each of the sections.

Sponsors

Having Ignite Jingles, the RAB, Hallett Arendt and particularly Broadcast Bionics on board really helped us to fund the day. It also meant we could afford better food and get the day filmed too.

Photography & Filming

This is expensive. We got a great deal from both of ours – Dan Smyth – for the photos and Create for the filming. It’s also good to have some people that you can provide initial direction for, and then just leave to get on with it. There’s a limited amount of things that you can actually do on the day – so having a good team doing those things was massively important.

Direction

Whilst not really being conscious of doing it, providing a strong ‘brief’ for everyone really helped. We knew what we didn’t want and we were also inspired by things like Ted – something that we could easily point to so people understood what we were after.

An Authored Event

Again, something that wasn’t apparent when we were doing it, but the event wasn’t just a branded experience – Next Radio – me and James were very much connected with it. For many of the delegates, even the ones that we didn’t know, it felt like they thought it was definitely from the two of us. Obviously on the day we were on stage a lot but also all the website material was written in a very personal way and even the email to delegates a few days before was from us personally – not the impersonal Next Radio ‘brand’.

I think this generated a significant amount of goodwill from the audience and helped the atmosphere on the day.

The Pub

We looked a bit into doing a sponsored drinks thing in a nearby bar, but in the end it didn’t really come off. Instead we signposted a particular pub to go to afterwards – I was amazed how many people came along – and then stayed! It was a sunny day and a really lovely way to end it as well.

Speakers

Every conference i’ve been to has been made or broken on the quality of the speakers. We picked a really great bunch. I think pretty much each session has been described to me as someone’s favourite, which is great. Also by giving them a short time to speak and by making them provide their material in advance, I think helped them be even better speakers.

Women

It would have been nicer to have more female speakers, we had quite a few extra that we really wanted, but for a variety of reasons they couldn’t come and do the day. In fact far more women turned us down than men. Maybe we were just unlucky? Maria Williams is doing a great job with Sound Women – so hopefully this will start to change. However, what’s also interesting is how few women wanted to come along. This was an event that was really open to a broad selection of people – young/old, new/established in their careers – I really don’t know why more women didn’t want to come? It can’t all be down to the fact our speaker line-up was very male, could it?

Good People

For it to all work it’s imperative that you have good people working on it. Sharing the bulk of the work with James made it all the more manageable. I don’t think it’s something that i’d been keen to do on my own. We both had complimentary skills that helped the workload greatly. On the day as well as Helen and Will, having Joe and Luke looking after delegates and registration and then having an extra pair of hands with Dave helping with all the technology meant the key areas were covered off by people who we trusted to just sort stuff out.  It was really valuable.

Summary

Overall, it was a fantastic day. We’ve had some great feedback something that’s been quite humbling. If we do it again it’s going to be hard to beat.

Jobs By Twitter

Posted by on . One comment.

Alan Geere who heads up Editorial at Northcliffe South has just put out an interesting job ad.

Well, the job’s not particularly interesting, it’s a call for reporters on his titles. The way he’s asked for it though is. He only wants replies through Twitter as an @message.

He says:

I’m fed up wading through turgid ‘letters of application’ and monstrous CVs outlining an early career in retail handling and a flirtation with the upper slopes of the Andes.

I want reporters who can find stories that no-one else has got and write them quickly and accurately.

As someone who’s had to wade through a lot of applications recently I definitely agree that it’s a soul-destroying experience and you’re just crying out for someone to be different.

There are lots of people being sniffy about his idea, unfairly I believe. The purpose of a covering letter/CV is to get an interview. No one gets hired directly from their written application. So why not use a 140 characters method?

You can, of course, read the applications through Twitter Search.

p.s If you’re after radio jobs, I do a free email, details on the right.

Re-Orgs Are Good

Posted by on . No comments.

Usually my blog posts come from one central idea – often a statement, something like “radio uses Twitter wrong”. I then sit down and try and back it up with some evidence or just have a bit of a rant. For example, often the RAJAR ones start with a belief, that I quickly research, and then find out is completely wrong. They’re usually the RAJAR posts where I say “nothing much has happened”. The other posts that I don’t tend to write are the ones I think will get me into too much trouble – I’ve got to eat after all. Then there’s ones that will just get a load of grief for me ‘missing the point’. I’m sure this will be one of those.

At the moment there’s lots of talk about re-organisation in the radio business. Whether that’s the Myers report on how the pop networks should be structured, the impact of DQF or the way Global Radio’s changed how they deliver localness.

Normally the re-organisation never goes down well with staff, the notion of why it’s doing it is challenged and the end result questioned. ‘Change’ is often seen to be part of “all that management bollocks”.

Which is a shame. Because change is an opportunity. For everyone.

If you start anything new, you think about how to achieve a goal, design a plan and then you execute it. It then might go right or it may go wrong. Whilst you’re enacting it you alter things – it’s something that’s new and you need to be able to react.

An athlete, after reaching this point, usually makes continuous changes to refine their processes to make things more efficient to generate a better result. Quite often it’s about simplification – taking unnecessary things away and focusing on the goal.

Organisations often go in the other direction. After you’ve deployed a new way of doing things, the positions get fixed. Over time things evolve but the change usually is additive and comes when you need to react to something. Someone adds additional responsibilities to their job or you make some alterations to deal with new competition. It’s rare that we spend our time refining and getting better at achieving that first objectives.

Small companies do re-organisations all the time, but they’re much less noticeable. When there’s four of you working in an office, you have much greater visibility on your business. The result is roles and responsibilities shift to meet the company’s changing demands. If they don’t then it’s likely the business will disappear. There’s rarely a need to sit down and explain the bigger picture as you all live it.

Large-scale reorganisations are often about meeting a new (or adjusting an old) objective and then working out the best structure to deliver it. Sometimes, of course, that is about money. We have to do x and we only have y.

For me though, an opportunity to reset an organisation to be focused on the world today and building for today’s future is something that should be grasped with both hands. Are we doing the best for our customers? Is the system we run at the moment the best one? What do we already know we should change?

Of course there is a human cost to any change and I’ve seen, first hand, when that’s been handled in a good way and a bad way. Similarly as well as companies handling it well and less well, the same can be said of team members as well. None of us have an unalienable right to do the same jobs in the same way forever.

In radio I think we need to be focused on our consumers and customers. For the BBC they’re the same thing, for commercial radio it’s slightly different. But, we have to look after those customers/consumers in the best way we can within the budget we’re given.

Now you can argue that the commercial organisations pay their Directors too much, or want to deliver profit margins that are too high and at the BBC you can talk about the horrific waste there is ‘in other departments’, but they’re both things out of your control. You can only look at doing the best job for the money you have.

Structure is a means to and end. The end being delivering value for audiences. We are often merely caretakers of organisations that our listeners love. Our role isn’t to preserve the organisation it’s to make sure we do our best to continue to deliver the things that they love.

In an ideal world, we would all be like the athlete. Making iterative changes to do a better job at reaching our goal. In the absence of that, re-formulating what we do every so often is no bad thing.