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ftm Radio Page - week ending June 22, 2018

Change And The Radio Will Never Be The Same
AI forever Difficult assignments have never cowed the advertising people. There is always a solution, sometimes requiring conceptual, even cosmic, shifts. We love what they do with words, images and the means of displaying it all. After all, they invented the slogan “new and improved.”

Public broadcaster pulls rug out from under competitors
forest v. trees

Measuring media is a time honored tradition. Somebody wants to know who listens, watches and reads because decisions must be made. New media and its cookie-collected data has heaped so much more information on those decision-makers they have turned to algorithms to sort it all out. Some of the results have been scary.

“I care about audience figures,” said UK public broadcaster BBC Director of Radio and Education James Purnell to gathered broadcasting executives this week. “We want audiences to love our programs. We want to attract audiences who don’t use us. We want young people to spend more time with us.”

Fairly standard for a public broadcasting conference, but he continued: “I don’t care about share. I don’t care about beating (UK commercial broadcasters) Global, Bauer or Wireless in the RAJARs. I don’t care because it’s the wrong measure. If the number of people listening to radio fell, then one of us could win the share battle while we all lost the war. Rather than focus on how big our slice of the pie is, we should grow its overall size, we should get more people listening to radio and podcasts. The real challenge is from streamers.”

BBC Radio, in reality, hasn’t competed with UK commercial broadcasters in years. Listener surveys, including the quarterly RAJAR audience estimates, have shown the increasingly different universes of BBC Radio fans and commercial radio fans. Part of it is style, part context and part Brexit. The separation became strategy when Mr. Purnell took the top job at BBC Radio nearly two years ago. Earlier this year he recruited a podcast commissioner, a new position.

A generation ago, business thinker Tom Peters wrote an essay titled “What Gets Measured Gets Done.” He borrowed the title from Peter Drucker and, maybe, somebody else. Anybody working within increasingly complex organizational and competitive structures of the 1980s fell out of their respective clouds. Tom Peters, like Peter Drucker, encouraged people to think differently.

The Truth and Power International Media Conference was jointly organized by the BBC, Czech public radio and the Embassy of the Czech Republic in cooperation with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). It was held June 19th at BBC Broadcasting House in London.

New national channel on the air, lawsuits continue
names in conflict

Hungarian radio listeners finally got their second national commercial radio channel last week. Retro Radio took to the airwaves with a pop oldies format. The second national commercial radio channel has been vacant since the Hungarian media regulator refused to renew the license of Class FM in late 2016.

The new Retro Radio is operated by advertising sales-house Hold Reklam Kft, officially owned and managed by Mátyás Bakai, a recent partner in Radio 1, the other national commercial radio channel. Radio 1 is principally controlled by Hungarian Film Commissioner Andy Vajna under Radio Plus Kft, who separately controlled two local radio stations that had been using the Retro Radio brand name. They have since been renamed; the Budapest station is now Magyar FM and the Nyíregyháza District (north-east Hungary) station is now Best FM. (See more about media in Hungary here)

The Hungarian Media Council approved the licensing in May. There was only one choice, in the end, as the application of Advenio Zrt, original operator of Class FM as a national radio channel, was “excluded” due to an “error,” reported 24.hu (June 14). Advenio Zrt has pursued legal remedies since the license renewal was rejected in 2016 and continues to operate Class FM as an online radio channel.

And there’s potentially another lawsuit. Budapest local station Slager FM operator Tematic Media Group registered the Retro FM and Retro TV brand names in 2016. They have asked a court to deny use of the Retro Radio brand name as it “conflicts with an earlier trademark,” noted index.hu (June 15).

Radio Page week ending June 15, 2018
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Radio Page week ending June 8, 2018
radio in Finland, Sputnik Radio, Spirit FM, Basso Media, radio license

Radio Page week ending June 1, 2018
radio in Portugal, digital radio, Media Capital Radio, M80, brand extensions

Radio Page week ending May 25, 2018
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Radio Page week ending May 18, 2018
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Radio Page week ending May 11, 2018
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Radio Page week ending April 27, 2018
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Radio Page week ending April 13, 2018
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