Becky Lancaster is an A-Level student planning Sociology at university and has an ambition to work in radio or TV production. Becky spent a week at the RAB to gain work experience. Here is her account of what she took away from her five days with the RAB:
People listen to radio for task accompaniment, mood enhancement and community involvement – this then partly relies on advertising to not disappoint. For these reasons the RAB is putting an impressive amount of effort into enlightening the industry as to the benefits and creative opportunities offered by radio advertising. In January this year the RAB launched a monthly column, ‘Private Hear’, in advertising print ‘Campaign’. The aim of this column is to draw people’s attention to the creative endeavours of current radio advertisers and be inspired by the potential of radio advertising. A key target for RAB is to encourage brand advertising, typical of television,(think John Lewis ads) to be presented on the radio in place of the tactical and repetitive advertising so often heard on commercial radio stations. Through liaising with advertising and creative agencies the RAB is promoting the idea that advertising with audio alone can be exciting through means of story-telling, comedy, music and celebrity and familiar voice-overs. Improving standards of UK audio advertising will not only assist the UK in gaining prestige and recognition at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, but will also improve radio fans’ listening experience. The RAB encourage advertisers to reach these goals by also holding the quarterly Aerial Awards which recognise creative and inspired radio advertising across the country.
Demonstrating how the creativity and success of a campaign can directly correlate, the RAB runs ‘RadioGAUGE’, a useful tool that measures listener response and feeling towards radio adverts, with research into brand awareness and perception, 800 people representative of the general population rate national adverts by 5 criteria: involvement, identity, impression, information and integration. This allows companies to assess the success of their ads through listener appreciation and opinion; it gives them valuable information on how to improve their adverts to being more consumer-friendly. In short the RAB have created a programme that helps define effective and ineffective ad campaigns. RadioGAUGE can be found on the RAB’s website. The website serves as a really interesting source of general radio facts, figures, statistics and information, featuring example case studies on ad campaigns, station mapping, a radio ads database and research projects carried out by the RAB.
Oh Thursday I attended the RAB’s monthly graduate training day. The day was insightful and showed the delegates of various media and advertising agencies the great advantage of choosing radio to project ad campaigns. It all gave further strength to the RAB’s Sony Award-winning ‘Britain Loves Radio’ marketing proposition. A statement proven still by Ofcom’s CMR 2012 report released on Wednesday with 89.9% of all adults in the UK tuning into radio each week.
Spending a week with the RAB and their enthusiasm for radio and advertising has been interesting and a great learning experience. Travelling from Leeds to work in London on my own for the first time was a really daunting prospect, but the RAB team made me feel instantly welcome and I’ve enjoyed every day of it. Thank you for having me!
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