Back To School...

September always feels like the 'back to school' month after the long, hot, balmy summer that we had here in the UK. Well... not really, but anyway...

And with that comes a glut of conferences to attend, clients to see and projects to develop.

At the tail end of August, it was great to hook up with all the guys from P5 in Norway at their summer conference. It was an opportunity for all the team to be updated on the current state of the market, new initiatives moving forward and what lies ahead for 2012. But even more than that, it was a great ‘team’ event. It’s easy to be cynical about these kind of get togethers, but I witnessed first-hand the great effect that making members of your station ‘walk the plank’ can have!! If your station doesn’t do events like this every now again, start doing them!!

There’s a good buzz about the nextradio.io conference in London in a couple of weeks time. There’s a fantastic line-up of speakers and I also have my allotted ‘9 minutes’ to deliver some sage words to the assembled crowd. I hope this event proves to be an annual get together, offering a forum for new, fresh and innovative ideas in radio.

Cyprus is a country I’ve not been to before, and I’m really looking forward to speaking at the ‘Radio Breakfast’ at the end of September organised by Dias Media, who are one of the big media players on the island. Any opportunity to drive home the benefits of using radio as a great medium for advertising is one that I can’t resist, and they tell me the sun always shines in Nicosia this time of year!!

Denmark’s annual get together of the good, bad, and erm... ‘damn good looking’ of Danish radio takes place at the start of October. Radiodays Denmark (from which Radiodays Europe sprung from) is always a great day, and the fact it’s combined with the Danish Radio Awards on the same night ensures it’s a hell of a party. I’m doing a session with the PD of London’s Number 1 Commercial station – Magic 105.4, Pete Simmons. We’re looking at “The Magic Behind Magic” (the title was too easy I know) and we’ll be dissecting the factors that have made that station consistently perform well in a tough market.

So, in between all that, I think some visits to client stations in Austria and Slovakia are in order, as everyone is now ‘back to school’. Plus **plug alert** my Saturday morning show on Absolute 80s (‘Cafe 80s’) which I present along with Dan McGrath, is going great guns and keeping us busy... so I guess that it’ll be a pretty busy month ahead.

Plus there’s another very exciting project in development... but more about that when the time is right!

Welcome ‘Back to School’ everyone!!