It was the Sony Radio Academy Awards last night and it was brilliant to see Luke (above) from our radio station, Fun Kids, winning the Rising Star (Best Newcomer) award.

My favourite bit of my job is finding new people for projects. I would happily trade all the other bits to just concentrate on talent development. It’s definitely not driven by altruism but really by selfishness, I just get a massive kick out of doing it. Or maybe in the back of my head its what Marsha once told me – “they’ll eventually employ  you – it’s just investment in your own future”.

Talent spotting’s one thing but the most important thing is coaching. Everyone gets better with feedback and making time to do it is really important. At GWR everyone who had at least one direct report had to go on the coaching course. Whether you looked after presenters or sales people, the two-day course gave you some real-world skills to help review people’s work and a framework for them to get better. Later, on PC School, another brilliant initiative, I was once sent to ‘coach’ Howard Taylor using the framework. Thankfully he seemed more terrified than I was.

The course was so good that even today – probably ten years on – I still use the basis of it for all the work I do with our presenters.

Fun Kids is going great guns at the moment. Both commercially and creatively it’s doing really well. A lot of this success is coming directly from the time we spend working with the existing team and attracting new people to come and work with us. As a very small station we’re never going to be able to pay the big bucks, but we try and reward the time those guys give us by helping to support their personal growth.

At Fun, all the presenters get coaching sessions from me where we review a show they’ve chosen. We always talk about how it went, the good and the bad bits and the things to improve next time.  Coaching time means there’s also a regular spot where we can catch up on any broader issues as well. It’s also good to have conversations where we’re not distracted by operational issues and can concentrate on presenter skill.

If you’re a presenter and don’t get regular feedback on your performance, ask! If you still don’t get any, then get a new job. You’ll only ever get better through listening and coaching. If you’re a PC that doesn’t coach your team then you need to get a different job.

We have two ‘new talent’ initiatives at Fun. The first is around a show we call the Treehouse, it’s kind of Blue Peter meets T4. Saturdays from 4pm and repeated Sundays from 10am – it’s a show with three presenters and loads of features. The presenters and the feature makers all tend to be new to professional radio. The Treehouse gives  a focus and pressure to hone skills and be regularly delivering audio. Everyone gets feedback on their work as well as getting to make something fun for the kids! Luke started in the Treehouse before getting his weekday show and many of the feature creators have gone on to do more pro work for us and other stations.

The second initiative happened the other week. It came from the problem I have with demo tapes.

I really feel for people doing demos for Fun Kids – it’s a really difficult one to do. As well as needing to be ‘good’, you also have to pitch it right – not too old, not too young. But really the biggest problem is that, amazingly, these potential presenters don’t seem to be able to read my mind about exactly what I want. I know!  To try and fix this issue, we recently invited people who had shown some interest/done demos/been involved a bit for a presenter workshop day.

We talked about radio and what we all liked and why, I spoke a little about Fun and we all listened to some output to get a flavour of the presented bits of the station. Everyone then did a couple of links, including ones based on our weekly presenter content doc and then we all listened and critiqued everyone’s performance. I found it a really useful day, hopefully all the potentials got something out of it and fingers crossed some of those people will turn into new presenters on Fun.

Clearly, all this stuff takes time. But the more I do it, the more valuable I see it to be. And sitting with Luke as he won his Sony made it all even more worthwhile.

I’m generally very happy that anyone’s creating new and fun websites, especially ones that are connected to radio and audio. Audioboo is just such a site. It allows users to, easily, upload audio to the Audioboo website from the web or mobile. A sort of YouTube for audio. It’s nice and simple to use and has all the requisite social media-ery functions around it.

It, like many websites suffers from an awareness issue. It’s a seemingly good idea, executed fairly well but it’s not run-away-success popular. The world hasn’t really bitten in the way Draw Something suddenly goes viral. I think partly it’s because creating audio isn’t something lots of people think about. Punters are used to writing (for blogs or tweets) but not being entertaining in audio. That’s not to say they can’t – but it’s just a bit more difficult. With YouTube some people do vlogging, but the vast majority of clips are things that have been recorded for other reasons – filming your mate doing something stupid or uploading something that you don’t really have the rights too.

One of the ways Audioboo grows awareness is to encourage media brands to use the service – and then they get those media mentions/links as those brands promote their content on it. It’s not that different to say, radio stations, that talk about Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.

They have a pro product that turns their system into a more long-form podcasting system. So, someone like The Mirror can use it to do that. If you have your audio in podcast form (through any system) Radioplayer has a neat clips service that imports a podcast RSS feed and allows your content to show up in Radioplayer’s search system. So Audioboo talks a bit that their podcast system supports it too. I think £60 for an easy to use out-of-the-box podcasting system is probably not bad value.

However, what I don’t think i’d ever do is talk about Audioboo on-air or use its brand on any of my apps or website.

I talk about Facebook or YouTube on-air because (many of) my listeners understand it. I’m telling them that my stuff’s in that place that they already go, so when they’re there they should remember to check my stuff out. On Facebook I know that so much of my audience use it, that if I show up in their newsfeed with my updates then i’ll get some click thrus to my website or i’m able to provide timely reminders to tune in.

With YouTube it’s slightly different. I’m hoping that people subscribe to my stuff, but mainly i’m hoping new audiences come across what we’re doing through search and recommended videos. I want them to snack on my content, get a positive brand image and then consume more of us on YouTube and then hopefully on the web and radio.

Audioboo doesn’t really do either of those things – so why would add clutter to my radio station by saying i’ve Audioboo’d something?

What I am up for is more stations sharing great audio on other platforms. But if you’re going to do that, either have it on your website (and use it as an opportunity to promote your website) or put it on a website that everyone’s comfortable using – like YouTube!

For me putting audio on YouTube is a no brainer. They host, you’ll get traffic from search, you can easily embed on your website AND you can use that nice screen to show listeners something. A static slide with you station’s graphic and how to tune in is an absolutely fine place to start. We were experimenting with some audio interviews for Fun Kids and a Big Time Rush one did over 3,000 views (listens?) in 24hours. That was all because of the viral nature of YouTube – in the test it had no promotion at all from the station. As well as in-site activity it also got embedded on loads of fan websites -pushing our brand to more people. YouTube also gives me some great analytics so I can see where and how people consume that content.

I’d follow the same rule for other social sites as well. Does the time and effort spent on servicing the network justify the investment?

Make sure that you’re getting a return on your effort and take into account the negatives of helping someone else’s business at the expense of your own. If i’m talking about another product where my content lives I need to make sure that it’s doing something decent for me and not just adding clutter and confusion for my listeners.

So Audioboo as an invisible enterprise system? Maybe. As a consumer proposition for my listeners? No.

Joining me on the podcast are Radio 1′s Adam Heyhurst, Capital FM’s Rich Clarke and Julian Fisher from the Marketiers4dc.

I thought it was really good.

They’ve created a two-hour special that attempts to work on the radio and on video too. You can watch it below:

There’s quite a few clever things they’ve done.

Firstly – the music. Always a rights issue. On the radio (and live streaming) it’s fine – that’s covered by standard agreements. On-demand it’s much more difficult. They’ve got round it by creating a YouTube playlist consisting of their content bits and then adding in the relevant songs. The segues aren’t super-smooth, but it’s a great way to do it and a good creative solution to a problem.

2nd – visual quality. It’s shot really well. Fixed-camera for studio bits, multi-camera for packages and some hidden-camera elements as well.

3rd – ideas. There’s lots of different ideas in there, that do (mainly) work well visually and audibly. Plus if you were listening there’s enough to encourage you to tune into a video stream, without putting you off. The feature ideas are really well put together, there’s things that are funny, embarrassing and clever. This is a programme with real prep put into it – and it shows.

4th – presenting style. Student radio shows with two boys are nearly universally awful. It comes from having two people who sound the same with ill-defined characters laughing at each others jokes. This does not suffer from that problem. The two hosts have particular personalities that are recognisable by a new viewer/listener and engaging to consume.

5th – effort. Overall they’ve really thought about this and executed it well.

Downsides – there aren’t many – I think some of the links are perhaps a little over-long and some of the bits work better on the telly than the radio – but these are minor gripes – it’s a great effort.

Clearly the guys are inspired by some of the YouTubers out there who are making great creative material and also people like Adam & Joe. The conceit of a radio show format gives it the structure to deliver the programme. There’s probably a question about whether it needs to be on the radio and whether it could just live online as video. It would be interesting to see it evolve to include more radio-like elements.

Overall though, I would much rather have this creativity (in part) on the radio, than not at all.

If the guys are reading this, it would be great if they could leave a comment about how they put it all together.

One of the things we were talking about was FM reach – he thought it was an important number as regards to switchover. Me, not so much. The problem is that you only have to listen to FM for five minutes in one week and it’ll appear on the FM reach tally. I think even post the switchover, with the majority of radio stations off the platform, that FM Reach will probably still be significant – though it won’t be generating many hours (ie the volume of listening).

And that’s the thing – you have to look at hours to see how much listening is on the various platforms. A big issue with ‘digital’ is that people are gradually replacing their listening locations with digital listening devices (DAB, DTV and the internet) – you don’t change everything straight away. This is quite different to digital TV – where you have a primary set where you consume most of your television. The number of radio sets that people listen on means  digital reach is around 50% and digital hours are around 30%.

I thought it might be interesting to look at digital listeners specifically and see how much of their listening is to analogue and how much is to digital.

Looking across the UK at people who listen to ‘digital radio’ at some point during a week – 53% of their hours are given to digital radio.

In London it’s 57% of their hours given to digital radio.

Therefore if you’re an analogue-only radio station, it’s not good news. The availability of people to listen you is dropping.

If you’re a station that simulcasts, your at least in both places, but in the digital world you’re facing more competition for hours – ie you need to work harder to remain in the same place.

If you’re a station that simulcasts, but to a bigger area – then you get the best of both worlds. You remain a player in you market and you’re taking the fight to others to grow your hours.

And if you’re simulcasting and have an extra product (see Absolute/BBC or even Global/Bauer) – then again, you’re in a position to grow your hours and build your business.

Update: Phil’s responded on his (new!) blog.

I’m just going to say that again. Because it’s important.

Half of the UK’s radio listeners consume radio digitally at some point every week.

Plus 29.1% of all listening in the UK is through digital radio.

The digital listening (hours) breaks down like this:

In attractive chart form:

Digital Reach:

Digital Hours:

In reach terms, the internet and digital television do a good job in expanding the universe of digital consumers. However in hours terms, it shows how much online/digital television is a minority sport. Internet is more the poorer as pretty much every UK station is on it and broadband penetration at home and work is huge. Digital TV suffers from (outside the big brands) a lack of radio content. DAB has the same issue – there’s still a fair few big local stations not on it yet, but its consumption is strong and growing faster than DTV/internet.

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.

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.