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“I have a young daughter, she makes me listen to nursery rhymes while we’re stuck in traffic. Sometimes it’s nicer than listening to the radio,” says Peter Vegas, creative director at Impact BBDO in Abu Dhabi.

Ouch. Having hung around a one year-old for a couple of weeks last year, we know how bad some of those Barney nursery rhymes can be. (Elmo, however, is in a league of his own; he wasn’t made for kids in this writer’s opinion.) Creative directors such as Vegas are radio’s harshest critics because, let’s face it, listening to radio advertising in the UAE can be a pretty painful experience. It’s a medium plagued by dodgy scripts, bad voice-overs and even worse jingles.

That much is hard to dispute. So you wouldn’t expect to be told that as an advertising medium, radio is seemingly experiencing some kind of rebirth. And according to Chetan Fernandes, group creative director at Concept Group, it has the crisis to thank – at least in part. Fernandes recently announced the creation of a radio consultancy (see Communicate, TKTK).

“In the recent past, how many articles have been written about radio? Quite a few,” he says. “We’ve not seen that happening in the past. So there is this new interest in the medium. With this downturn and recession, people have either slashed their marketing budgets or don’t have marketing budgets at all. And when you’ve slashed budgets, you still want that top of the mind recall, and therefore you go into cost effective mediums, such as radio.”

Steve Smith, chief operating officer of Arabian Radio Network (ARN), says the downturn has sparked new interest from non-traditional radio advertisers. The network even hosted a three day radio seminar last month (TK), showcasing advertising packages and giving out production tips to marketers.

“We’re getting a lot of inquiries from well-branded fast moving consumer goods. They look at radio and say, ‘You know what? That could actually work really well for us.’” Smith says that with print being the favourite advertising medium of the real estate industry, radio remains in a good position.

But the medium also faces several problems regionally: a lack of regulation, a lack of research, and a lack of creativity. This in turn translates to a relatively low media spend. Michael Hughes, executive director of strategy and engagement at The Brand Union in Dubai, says that radio is largely overlooked and underutilised as a communication channel for brands in the region. “The poor and less sexy cousin to television and newspapers, radio barely cracks a nod,” he says. “If you talk to media buyers in the region, they see radio as additional or supplementary, rather than essential.”

According to Hughes, radio in the Middle East struggles to attract two per cent of advertising budgets. With the UAE one of the most developed markets, he says the industry doesn’t even manage to attract one percent of the revenue, as opposed to the four to eight percent of the revenue it owns in Western markets. And while regional radio has come a long way in the past ten years, it is still in its infancy. As a consequence, another key problem is that the real reach and impact of radio is largely unquantifiable or qualified, says Hughes.

Fernandes from Concept says there are about 28 radio stations in the UAE which overlap frequently in terms of listenership. Those stations all claim to be the number one radio station in the country, with little substance to back it up. Advertisers are therefore taking a shot in the dark in terms of where they’re spending, because the market is not regulated.

“I can say I am the number one station from the age group of 15 to 24, or number one in Dubai from the ages of 30 to 35,” explains Fernandes. “But the fact is when you look at the numbers, it’s not justified. Every network, when they go out to meet advertisers and sponsors, they all say ‘We are the number one station with the age group from 3 to 7 years old.’ So it’s your interpretation.”

At present Ipsos, one of the world’s biggest survey based research companies, is the only organization undertaking detailed independent research into radio audiences in the UAE. Selected results of its research accompany this article.

At ARN, Smith says part of their drive to promote radio includes an education process. “This is a market that’s predominantly buying radio just in the breakfast drive or afternoon drive slots,” he explains. “What we tried to get across with our seminar is that there is such value outside of those peak times.
And in fact you’re going to talk to a totally different audience. If you’re just advertising in those times, you’re doing your brand a disservice. You’ll get good results, but you’re missing a whole other audience.”

It’s a view echoed by astute planners such as Yves-Michel Gabay, international business and development director at Mediaedge CIA. When planning for Communicate’s hypothetical brands in the January issue (see “Buyer’s Market,” page 24, Communicate, Jan. 2009), he advocated 15 percent of the ad budget for our cola brand be spent on radio at night. “When young people are driving out to go to parties or clubs,” he said.

Vegas, the Impact BBDO creative director behind BPK Recording Studios’ two Bronze wins in the radio category at this year’s Lynx awards, says he understands the shift to radio during tough economic times. But as noted earlier, he doesn’t think too highly of the medium, at least not locally.

The former radio writer and host says that the medium is abused. “Radio is a great brands medium, great for the theatre of the mind, but the day to day reality of radio is that it’s sold as a retail medium. Twenty five percent off, call this number, etc.; radio stations make the ads, so you’ve got the department banging out ads, which doesn’t breed great creativity. Clients just want the facts, and a lot of time clients will say they want their phone number twice in the script.”

But with advertisers using radio as a mainly tactical medium, Smith from ARN says radio can do much more. “Absolutely, it’s great for tactical. You want to cut through and get as much foot traffic through the door,” he says. “But you get a better result if you’ve checked your brand awareness up all the way through the month prior to your sale, and then you get consumers with the campaign about ‘come out to such and such retail store.’ You can only get a much better result if you’ve been able to keep the brand message up.”

Hughes, the founder of Australia’s first dance radio station, Kiss FM, says it is important to consider radio as part of a holistic communication strategy, and that it rarely works as a lone medium for any campaign. “Communication planning is about bringing together the medium and the message around one, big insightful, own-able communication idea,” he explains. “It is essential to look beyond tactics to uncover something that can differentiate and be owned by you.”

Industry insiders say the blame for radio’s misuse doesn’t lie solely with advertisers, though; agencies need to educate clients about the benefits of radio and how to use it properly. “It’s a blame game,” says Fernandes. “Advertisers blame radio stations, radio stations blame advertisers. The market has to give enough respect to the medium for it to be able to churn out quality stuff. Everyone is riding the fast horse, saying ‘You have only two days to come up with a campaign and put it on air.’ So as a result, your creativity at times goes for a toss, so you see radio stations cluttered with substandard commercials. There is a dearth of decent commercials on air, a dearth of research we want to look into, a dearth of talent we want to look into.”

Hughes says that investment in creative radio content in the region is minimal, with scripts designed specifically for the medium a rarity. “We are often subjected to badly written copy that doesn’t even make sense, or just transcribed from the print or TV commercial,” he says. “No, it’s not acceptable to grab a backing track, mention some vague points about the product and get the first person available – the receptionist, maybe – to do a quick read. Would you do this for TV?” Of course not, though it should be noted that not all TV ads are gold in this region, either.

Most radio stations strive to keep listeners locked into their frequency with entertaining DJs, good music or relevant programming. But Smith believes a radio ad break can make or break listenership. Accepted worldwide standards dictate that radio commercials work in 15-, 30-, 45-, or 60-second time slots; but the region does not yet abide by those standards.

“It’s not 32 seconds, and not 24 seconds,” says Smith. “This is one point that we can get the creative agencies to understand, that listening to a radio ad break needs to flow really well, so we can keep audiences in until we get to the next song or segment. If they’re all disjointed, your consumer, your listener, is going to tune out. Please, let’s work within those international standard parameters. And then let’s work on what makes a great commercial.”

They could start the process by identifying what makes a bad commercial, and it shouldn’t be too hard to find some examples. Just turn on the radio in Dubai and wait ten minutes.

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