Why converged campaigns are paying off for South African advertisers

The company is seeing more advertisers put together converged radio and online campaigns that offer deep brand experiences to their target markets. The result is a sharp increase in placements on the jacarandafm.com and ecr.co.za websites.

We are seeing the radio station websites come into their own as a powerful vehicles for advertisers, especially those that also place ads on-air with Jacaranda FM and East Coast Radio. With a 40% growth in the size of the audience over the past year, these websites are enjoying good growth.

Brands that have advertised on these two radio websites include the likes of Tiger Wheel & Tyre, National Geographic, Durban Tourism, Castrol Magnatrek, Standard Bank, Maynards and Royal Canin.

Demographics

The audience has the sort of demographic profile that advertisers covet, with a large percentage of listeners in the high LSM groups, many of them female, the majority living in urban areas and most of them primary or joint decision makers in the home.

For Jacaranda FM, 65% of users fall into the LSM 7-10 band, 91% are the chief or joint decision maker at home, and 61% have access to the internet from their homes. Among East Coast Radio users, 56% are LSM 7-10, 87% are either the main or joint decision maker at home, and 60% have home access to the internet.

But the really important quality of these audiences is how engaged and active they are, both as website users and radio listeners. There's a high correlation between website users and radio listeners. They're the members of the audience that are more invested in Jacaranda and East Coast Radio.

Elton Ollerhead, managing director at Mediamark says that "although we have grown and thrived in the radio advertising market, we have found an increasing demand for converged media buys that help our advertisers to better coordinate campaigns across multiple media channels and in doing so, they are able to unleash better return on investment. There is a growing understanding that blending different media channels into integrated, converged buys, delivers better returns than managing them in silos."

Benefits

Digital and radio work well together, creating opportunities for brands to create campaigns that combine their strengths for exponentially better effects. Radio is typically a lean-back medium which is consumed passively while listeners are doing something else. It's a superb way to build brand awareness and issue a call for action.

Digital is a lean-forward channel where users actively engage with content, for example, by voting on polls, entering competitions, reading content, leaving comments, watching videos, flipping through photo galleries, and interacting with ads.

Here, you can build deeper engagement with users, provide them with more info than you can in 30 seconds of airtime, and collect data (through competitions and opt-in subscriptions) that will help you understand your audience better.

More interactive

Many Kagiso clients are using a mix of radio station airtime and websites to offer an immersive brand experience for that reason. For example, many use interactive games, microsites, multimedia content or online competitions in the digital medium as an extension of the radio brand experience. The combination of radio's ability to create brand awareness and online's immediacy delivers results far better than either could on its own.

Advertisers have found that they get branding value on their display banners on the Jacaranda and East Coast Radio station websites, as well as better than average performance. Both stations boast above market related performance on standard display inventory.

With 17.7 ads per visitor per month, viewable above the fold, for Jacaranda and 19.2 ads per visitor per month for East Coast Radio, the two radio stations also get high marks for frequency.