Advertising/Marketing: Dublin's new radio station, Newstalk 106, will hold back its advertising and marketing drive until after the station goes on air. The €500,000 campaign, devised by Irish International, will break next weekend while the new station, which promises a constant diet of talk and news, first broadcasts next Tuesday.
"It's a deliberate strategy," says Mr John Purcell, chairman of Newstalk 106. "The biggest mistake a start-up station can make is to over-promise and under-deliver."
With the radio market becoming increasingly crowded in Dublin - Spin FM is also due to go on air later this month - the real challenge facing the newcomers is not so much selling the talent on offer but the more mundane message of instructing likely listeners where to go on the dial.
In the past month, Newstalk has been selling its potential as an advertising vehicle to the agencies but in the launch phase the agencies are more interested in the station's own advertising and marketing budget than the biographies of its presenters.
"Unless a start-up has a decent marketing budget and a proper promotional strategy behind it, we're not interested," says Mr Aidan Dunne, managing director at MCM media planners. Independent radio stations compete with each other to boast about how much they spend on marketing. Agencies are often sceptical about the actual figures and they do like to see evidence of an advertising campaign with a strong media spend.
"The plan is to go on 100 outdoor sites, television and press," says Mr Purcell, "and we'll also be doing direct-mail type shots with people standing at strategic traffic junctions around the city handing out the programme line-up." The catchline "Your daily news fix" ties in with the station's aim to appeal to a segment of the population it has identified in research as "news junkies".
Looking at the station's line-up of presenters, which includes rugby commentator Mr George Hook presenting the evening drive-time programme and economist Mr David McWilliams in the breakfast slot, advertisers suggest the station's audience could end up as male dominated as that of Today FM.
"Ireland's fastest-growing sector is what marketers call the C1 group," says Mr Dunne. "Basically that means lower middle-class people living in semi-Ds. When it comes to spending money, they are the biggest economic drivers."
He added that a talk radio station could easily fall into the trap of catering for the "chattering classes" not the burgeoning C1 sector, which is interested in newsstand information but also in entertainment.
Women are slower to change radio station, which is a problem for start-ups, but they are more loyal to a station once they make the change.
Mr Purcell is aware of the "male-dominated" criticism but he believes that once the station goes on air, agencies will be satisfied they have achieved the right mix.
The new station has not made public its market share ambitions but it is clearly hoping that Newstalk will follow the lead of regional local stations, which have eaten into RTÉ's listenership figures. The latest JNLR figures show that RTÉ has a combined 47 per cent market share while Today FM continues to build, with a market share of 9 per cent (up 1 per cent).
In certain parts of the country, local stations are a real threat to the national broadcaster.
The top three local stations in terms of market share are Highland Radio (63 per cent), North West Radio (53 per cent) and WLR FM (51 per cent).
