Firstly, Mark Barber…
For the last 10 years, Mark Barber from Radiocentre, UK, has tried to explain to advertisers how radio can drive growth – but they still don’t get it. He believes that radio remains under-used as a brand-building medium.
Mark revealed the findings from a study that Radiocentre runs every year, documenting how well advertisers are targeting their market through radio. By choosing six brands across the study, from instant coffee to cleaning products, Radiocentre produced specific radio commercials to judge how well the products can connect with an audience simply through audio.
With a robust sample size that was exposed to both TV and radio ads, the study showed that by adding audio commercials into a brand’s marketing, it increases the likelihood that audiences will notice the brand, by 29%.
The experiment found that although TV and online connect with an audience well, radio commercials can help to give an audience a different reason to buy a product, and help build better associations with a brand. It seems that ultimately, advertisers need to take radio seriously, as it offers something TV can’t.
And secondly, Yuri Loburets…
Yuri Loburets, Director of Radio, EGTA, Belgium, showed the audience how to compete in 2017. ‘A radio broadcaster needs to have more than just a general idea of its audience profile’. Yuri believes that it needs to needs to have deeper insights on who its listeners are and what they like.
Through thorough research on what an audience wants, Loburets is able to give detailed advice on how to make people interact with brands. ‘It’s important to offer them something different, to give them a reason to get involved, and to make them happy’. Yuri shows that advertisers can now build custom audience segments to give precise details and target effectively; by analysing a listener’s online activity, when and how they listen to a station, and details about their hobbies, it lets a brand reach who they want with more detail and efficiency than ever.
