Advertising

Air conditions

Philip Kleinman

Licences to print money are pretty hard to come by these days, as the men who run our commercial radio stations can tell you. The prospect of instant wealth may have flashed momentarily in front of the eyes of Capital Radio's crew when it was launched on the advertising high tide of last October (good God, was that only four months ago?), but the Birmingham station BRMB realised things were going to be tough even before it went on the air this Tuesday.

Capital took £1 million in ad bookings for the period up to Christmas; BRMB is giving advertisers double time for their money, as an introductory bonus, yet by last week had still managed to sell only half the spots available for its first fortnight's broadcasting.

Last month Capital is believed to have earned only £25,000, while the ad revenue of the other London station, the all-talk LBC, dropped almost to nothing. This month there has been something of a recovery, with LBC reckoning it will take £30,000, and Capital believed to have bookings amounting to £80,000.

Some theorists used to think that radio would be in a "heads I win, tails you lose" position vis-avis television. When the economy boomed, the argument ran, there would not be enough TV air-time to meet the demand from advertisers and radio would get the overflow. In hard times, when they had less to spend, their money would go to the cheaper medium in preference to TV.

The first part of the theory proved to have some truth in it. The second, alas, has been exploded. Many national advertisers have cut their budgets but they haven't diverted them into radio. Instead, an interesting thing has happened. Whereas in its early days Capital was getting 75 per cent of its revenue from national advertisers and only 25 per cent from local ones, the proportions have now been reversed.

The demand has also shifted from prime morning time, where £120 is the rate for the thirtysecond spot, to off-peak hours, where you can run the same commercial for as little as £12.

Spectator February 23, 1974 Unlike Capital, LBC never ex

pected to get rich quick. A great part of its future revenue is stiP" posed to take the form of fees for the news service it supplies to other commercial statiokis, most of which have not even been set LIP yet. Nevertheless, it too has to have advertising to survive.

So a high degree of importance was attached by both the London stations and the advertising. in' dustry generally to the results of a survey carried out by National Opinion Polls into radio listening. The survey was originally to have been sponsored by both Capital and LBC, but as a result of one of rt the a tr ownss hwi oh i cf from have vt eh ed ohgeggei dn nt ihne igr; Capital pulled out. Nevertheless, LBC went ahead, and NOP dulY produced its figures late last month. These were based on tw° different techniques: one that of aided recall in which 4,000 people wh aedr e questionlistened t we tahbeo uott other, wt thhi ce hy some researchers believe to be more accurate, the diary method in which 400 kept a written note of what they listened to for a fortnight. The diary research indicated that over a million people, or 16 per cent of the potential adult audience, tuned in to LBC solve time each week. The aided recall method produced a rating of onlY 3 per cent, but it was naturally the magic million figure which LBC brandished aloft and which probably helped it to regain sonle of the advertising which had gone up the spout. The same survey's figures for Capital were even more en' couraging: the diaries indicated a, cumulative weekly audience 01, over 1,400,000, or 22 per cent °,' adults, though again on aided five p recall dropped back t° Commercial radio's sighs relief have now been rudely In" terrupted, however, by anothera, uncommissioned survey done bY company called Research Sur"'' of Great Britain RSGB, also using, the diary method, arrived a,'s figures quite different from NR.,Pc 287,000 or 4.4 per cent for LP and 620,000 or 9.5 per cent for Capital. The discrepancies are 011Y underlined by the fact that h,1,,

r two surveys produced rougtq similar figures for listening to the BBC. elf RSGB's aim was to get itself hired to do more research in` radio audiences. In the short though, what it appears to lla‘lf achieved is to revive the doubts uj.

many admen about the visability of buying radio particularly LBC time, at all

A growing view among ''th agencies is that, while the medincor retains its attractiveness' small, local advertisers, natl° ds advertising — the big bran__ which spend the real moneYthe will be tempted into it onlY if der rates charged drop to well 20p per thousand adults reacher Even Birmingham's official Priinnor, time rate represents a cost Of 4ur per thousand. so That's why the stations are Spectator Qpectator February 23, 1974

anxious about their audience figures, and that's why none of them is, after all, going to get rich quick.

Philip Kleinman, editor of Ad Week, writes weekly in The Spectator.