Radio needs to stop being insular

That their medium can do the entire job and to hell with media synergy.

The worst are radio stations. They are not only paranoid about other media, they are even more paranoid about competing radio stations.

Paranoia

Talk to anyone involved in running a local radio station and they will tell you that the reason for their paranoia is because the market is over-traded, bloody and very, very brittle. That the move from a nice convenient handful of about 25 stations not all that many years ago to roughly 150 now, was ill-conceived and suicidal.

Talk to anyone involved in running a radio station in America and they will scoff at 150 constituting an over-traded market because, they argue, when one compares all the relative aspects of the broadcast industry here and in the US such as population density and so forth, by comparison we should be able to sustain something like 900 stations here before things get really hairy.

But, what I am convinced of is that if some of our radio stations would get shot of some of their stereotype blinkers, things could go a lot better for them and for the whole radio industry for that matter. And then one could sustain at least 400 stations.

Huge service

For a start, station managers would be doing the entire industry a huge service if they concentrated on improving the standard of radio advertising, which remains shockingly bad. It is absolutely beyond me that stations will put so much effort into flogging airtime and then allow their audiences to be insulted with the absolute commercial garbage that constitutes the bulk of radio advertising today.

But, even more importantly, a paradigm that desperately needs to be shifted is that concerning competition.

Traditionally, a radio station in South Africa sees every medium as competition. TV, print, outdoor, cinema and everything imaginable below the line is simply doing nothing more than stealing ad share.

I don't suppose one can blame any radio station for harbouring this very real paranoia because that's precisely what all the other media think radio is doing.

But, what I can't understand if why radio stations all hate other radio stations to the point of viewing them as even bigger enemies than all the other media put together. It simply doesn't make sense, given some of the anomalies that have become glaringly apparent in this industry.

Drive time

Ignoring for a moment the really big ethnic players such as Ukhozi FM whose listenerships run into millions and for whom strategic alliances wouldn't make a huge amount of sense, this certainly does make a huge amount of sense for broader spectrum urban stations, particularly in drive time.

A quick look at any modern car radio, irrespective of the sex, gender or race of the driver, will show a bouquet of between three and five "favoured" stations.

Research, I'm convinced will show that commuters channel hop through their bouquets to a lesser or greater degree depending on their tolerance level of boredom or the time of day.

It cannot be all that difficult to define these various bouquets which the relevant radio stations could sell together in some form of loose strategic alliance. Given that the demand from media buyers is "Don't tell how wonderful you are; give us a tangible package we can sell to our clients," there's no doubt in my mind that this is the way to go.

Club to death

Rather than trying to club each other to death, radio stations should identify common groups of listeners and package these in a single deal that will allow an advertiser to target the same audience throughout the day as it moves from one station to the next and back again.

Of course it won't be easy. And I agree that I am probably being extremely idealistic. Mortal enemies will have to work together and even worse, they'll have to work out how to equitably share the proceeds.

But frankly, in spite of the drawbacks they're going to have to do something because my sense is that marketers and people who buy ad space and airtime prefer to look at packages, rather than have to deal with individual radio stations. Hopefully radio station management will see this as the enormous marketing opportunity that it is.

Maybe it's a pipe dream. Perhaps it's all too idealistic. But then again it might not be quite as painful as all the old adversaries might think.