| MUMBAI:
It is boom time for radio stations in the country. Radio Mirchi recently launched
two stations in Patna and Jalandhar bringing its total to 12 stations. In the
coming months it will launch 20 more stations giving it 32 stations across the
country. Radio Mirchi national
sales head Naveen Chandra made this announcement during his presentation to the
banking and financial fraternity.
His presentation was called Radioactive
IPO Marketing.
Surat and Baroda will launch in the coming six to eight
weeks. Stations will also be launched in Trivandrum and Kerala. He says that the
finance and banking category contributes 13 per cent of the stations ad revenue.
HDFC was the first bank to advertise on the station. It has done customised solutions
for clients. For instance they did an event for Standard Chartered Home Loans
a couple of years back. They roped in Vivek Oberoi and got top-notch builders
to attend. The event saw 3000 people in attendance and loans worth Rs. 400 million
were sanctioned. With Fidelity the station organised activities in malls.
An interesting case was
Bajaj Allianz. They wanted to recruit sales agents.
Therefore the station
did a recruitment camp and the cost per hire was less than other media he says.
He adds that 1.7 crore listeners tune in to the station everyday. He spent time
busting a few myths. One of them is that radio stations cannot reach 6.3 million
demat accounts. While print has literacy problems and the cable and satellite
penetration is limited radio has no such disadvantages he points out. He says
that the advantage of a station like Radio Mirchi is that it is both national
and local. So its Chennai product is in Tamil.
"We stack well in
the key IPO markets. In Bangalore we do car tracks to check listenership and we
find that a lot of SEC A tune in. We have so far worked with 36 IPOs. The biggest
one was Suzelon. There are three kinds of advertising for IPOs - product, corporate
and announcement. We also have a show Giraftaar. Here a CEO of a company that
is going in for an IPO is interviewed. We also have a fabric where a topic that
we feel listeners are interested in is discussed across all markets. Sometimes
this can tie in with an IPO.". He gave the example of Pyramid Saimira,
which runs a chain of digital theatres. At the time of its IPO theatres is Delhi
refused to screen YashRaj films after Yash Chopra increased the rates for Dhoom
2. The station felt that listeners would be interested in knowing about digital
screens where physical prints are not needed. Radio he notes also offers the flexibility
of changing the creative at a later stage of the campaign. For instance
a few days before the IPO a number can be given so that potential customers do
not miss out. He adds that Radio Mirchi is cost effective. While its ad rates
are higher it is cheaper in terms of the cost per 1000 listeners. | 
