More Success at Radio Expres

It’s time again to give a radio station the credit it deserves. Congratulations go to client station Radio Expres in Slovakia. The latest MML ratings have been released there, and once again, the station is head and shoulders above the competition and its equalled it all time record reach figure. Take a look the growth of audience (on the orange line) since 2002...

Impressive isn’t it! Particularly in 2005, when they overtook the public service station Radio Slovensko. It shows that heritage public service broadcasters can be overtaken by commercial rivals if the product is focused in all key areas.

The team under the guidance of PD Ivan Antala, also work closely with Jochen Lukas the guys at Brand Support, who regularly provide them with great research to work with. As we all know, this is a really important element of any station’s success.

I’m travelling out to Bratislava next week to work with the team at Radio Expres on some creative activity for the ‘new season’ and thought it might be good to do a little ‘Q and A’ with Ivan while I’m there and get him to share why he believes the station has shown consistent growth. I’ll post this piece in due course. I’m sure it will make interesting reading.

In the meantime, here’s a recent video from their ‘summer morning show’, where guest female co-hosts (who were drawn from listeners that successfully auditioned to be a co-host) tried to put-off the ‘weekly weather guy’. This never used to happen when I was on air!!

NAB 2008 hits London

The annual ‘European Radio’ get-together hits London this weekend. NAB will be in town! I’ve checked the forecast and it looks like it’s going to be sunny with highs of around 14 degrees, so all of you who are expecting rain and fog may be disappointed!

As we all know, some conferences can be a bit hit or miss at the best of times, but the list of sessions for this NAB looks like it has quite a few interesting subjects to tickle the delegates. Areas such as radio brands travelling across borders, what presenters really think (!), and can networking save commercial radio in the UK are all tasty topics that I’ve written about in the past.

And it would be remiss of me not to plug my session with the exceptionally talented Ivan Antala, PD from client station Radio Expres which is Slovakia’s biggest radio station.

The session takes place on Tuesday 28th October at 9:15am and has the snappy title of “Back to the Roots - It's Time to Learn from Europe or Why We are Not Scared of iPods” We’re covering all the bases!! During the session we’ll reveal ‘The 10 Essential Elements of Great Radio’ as part of our ‘revisiting the basics’ appraisal, and theme of ‘despite technological advances, let’s not forget about the fundamentals of radio’. If you’re coming along to NAB and not too hung-over on Tuesday morning, please join us.

I’ll be posting the ‘The 10 Essential Elements of Great Radio’ on the blog after NAB, as well as a review of some of the more interesting bits, and sharing anything new that I glean during my time holed up in The Hilton Metropole Hotel!

Hope to see you there.

Prize Pig

Giving away hot tickets for a big event continues to be an audience winner. Giving away hot tickets for a big event in another country is even better! So, well done to all the guys at client station Radio Expres in Slovakia for pulling off a great bit of radio this week.

Radio Expres is a national, commercial Hot AC station based in Bratislava and is by far the number 1 station in the country, with a 26% share! As you’d expect, they don’t do things by half… and so with The Brit Awards coming they decided not only to send a couple of the DJ’s over to cover the Brits live, backstage at Earls Court, but to do hot ticket giveaway for a couple of their listeners. And I’d like to share the mechanic with you…

The station announced that listeners had the chance to win two VIP tickets for Brits, but the listeners had to offer the station something in exchange. On the first day, the station was flooded with offers for the tickets in exchange for a whole range of things including a plastic surgery operation... a cart full of wood (!)... and even a couples wedding rings!!

The person who was initially chosen, offered to have the Radio Expres logo tattooed on his arm! So he won the tickets – but here’s the twist.... he had to “come good” with his promise of the tattoo within 24 hours or he’d loose the tickets! As it happens, he bottled it, lost the tickets and game started again. So the next morning amongst all the strange and random offers that came in, someone offered... wait for it... two big roasted pigs (!!) and the morning guys (Dodo and Noro) decided that it was a great offer! So this guy got the tickets upon (presumably upon presentation of the pigs!)

The mechanic really gets going at this point though. Every morning, a listener came on the morning show and offered the current holder of the tickets something in exchange for them. It was up to the holder (in this case, the pig dude) to decide if he wanted to keep the tickets or exchange them for whatever was being offered to him to keep.

For the next 7 days, 'Mr Pig Roast' was offered everything from weekend trips & holidays, male and female servants, and Audio A8, some sperm (nice!!!), a cemetery plot... absolutely everything you can imagine! On the final day, the station arranged for one listener to come to the studio with 1,000,000 Slovak Crowns (well, 999,999 as "...only a fool would offer 1,000,000" so he said!) stuffed into a leather bag! Would Mr Pig Roast swap the tickets for a stash of cash??

Cue a great 'tension moment' that works so well on radio. You can watch action unfold on the video below.

No Deal!!! Mr Pig Roast sooo wanted to go to the Brits... and on Wednesday night this week, he and his partner had a great time watching the show live at Earls Court in London and then partying at the big backstage orgy that always follows! Plus of course the station had their guys there to broadcast all the highlights right from the centre of the action.

It’s a really good example of how to reflect and get involved in a big music event (like the Brits) on your station, and then create a fun, entertaining and talkable contest, getting the audience involved with some naturally entertaining moments.

More roasted pig anyone??