The radio sales map is complete once more. Or will be on 1 January
when Opus, GWR’s sales house, officially opens its doors. Opus will be
headed by Duncan George (Campaign, 5 December) and it will have two very
distinct and separate divisions - one for the 40 local and regional GWR
stations and one for Classic FM.
Opus is the last piece in radio’s new sales jigsaw and ends a hiatus
that followed the demise of Media Sales and Marketing in May.
Capital Sales and Marketing rose almost immediately from the ashes of
MSM; and Emap, as was widely predicted, took its radio sales in-house,
with the creation of Emap on Air, which is headed by Tom Toumazis. The
other major players are, as ever, Katz and Scottish and Irish Radio
Sales.
This is pretty much as everyone predicted when it became clear that
Capital’s proposed merger with Virgin meant that the Capital-owned MSM
would have to be wound up to pacify the Monopolies and Mergers
Commission. But, as the dust starts to settle, it’s time to assess the
pros and cons of the new sales environment.
MSM was hardly the last word in radio sales but it had one very
important quality - simplicity. And radio needs to be kept very simple;
not because agency radio planners are simple, but because radio accounts
for an average of 5 per cent of UK advertising spend. If it starts
demanding 6 per cent of an agency’s time, it begins to look like a
distinctly unattractive proposition - and, mysteriously, the medium may
stop making it on to the agendas for strategic planning meetings.
In any case, aren’t ever-larger sales houses the way forward for all
media? It’s clearly a more cost-effective way of doing business. It’s
the way of the world. But will radio be more difficult to plan and buy
next year?
Unsurprisingly, Duncan George doesn’t think it will. He comments: ’I’ve
endeavoured to place people of calibre at the top of the agenda. I will
put together the most knowledgeable, dynamic and hungry team that I am
able to. And, as they are part of the company rather than part of a
sales house, their knowledge of the product is bound to be better -
there is always a distance between an independent sales house and the
stations it sells.’
That’s fine, but does it outweigh the case for simplicity? And surely
the new sales points will be less well resourced than MSM? ’All the new
sales teams are investing heavily,’ George points out. ’And the medium
will benefit from having sales people who are not merely commodity
traders.
Agencies don’t want to be burdened by detail but they do want to see
some passion from the sales side. We can bring stations and radio
programmes to life. We will also offer clearer trading policies. From
our point of view, there will be more cohesion in terms of the
relationship between national and local sales. And the industry as a
whole will be no less cohesive than it was before. We will, of course,
be looking for points of difference as compared with the other sales
points but we’re not going to be obsessed with competing with them. That
would be bad for radio as a medium.’
That all sounds very reasonable. Do media specialists see it that way
too? David Fletcher, head of radio at CIA Medianetwork, is prepared to
keep an open mind. He says: ’MSM always looked better in theory than it
was in fact. One of the problems it had was trying to manage a volatile
internal market. It’s true buyers didn’t do anything to discourage that,
as long as they got the value they wanted. But individual media owners
were always vying for position and prices of individual stations could
be changed at the whim of individual managers. They won’t have the
excuse to moan about MSM not being fair to them any more.
’Now individual stations will have to be more consistent about setting
out and sticking to a market position. That has to be good. A more
realistic station-by-station price will emerge and that will increase
buyer confidence in the stability of the market.’
Derek Morris, the managing partner of Unity, agrees.
’The lines of communication will have shortened. We will actually be
talking to the people who are responsible for, and in control of, the
inventory they represent and that should make the whole process more
efficient,’ he argues.
’In the past, when you talked to MSM you knew it would have to talk to
the individual groups and even individual stations. Each group had
different trading methods and computer systems. It was like wrestling
with a hydra and there were a lot of things that could go wrong. I think
MSM actually carried the can for problems at the media owner end. You
also have to acknowledge that the relationship between local and
national markets in radio is very complex. If a media owner is down to
his last spot, will he sell it to Procter & Gamble or the Sheepskin
Warehouse in Manchester?
They find that a difficult one to resolve. But at least now we might
find out sooner what they actually decide to do. One of the problems in
the past was that we just didn’t know what was happening.’
Mike Hope Milne, the head of radio at Western International Media,
maintains that if you are merely in the business of bashing the spots
out, you might think that you were worse off under the new arrangements.
’But if you are using radio’s strengths, you really have to talk to the
people who know their own stations inside out,’ he adds. ’We want to
talk to people who know what individual stations are about and what the
programming opportunities are about. That really wasn’t the case with
MSM. For instance, if we want to talk about a syndicated feature across
all GWR stations, it’s going to be far easier for Opus to talk to all of
its individual station directors and come back with a decision.
’And the thing is that all the sales points have been sensible in
packaging their airtime. They’re selling mini networks, for instance
against football.
It will make airtime easier to buy. On the whole, the strengths of the
new sales environment outweigh the drawbacks.’
