Kagiso Media is seeing strong uptake of website inventory for its Jacaranda FM and East Coast Radio radio stations as advertisers leverage a blend of broadcast and online to drive better return on investment from their advertising Rand.
That’s according to Attila Bernariusz, operations director at Kagiso New Media who says that the company is seeing more advertisers put together converged radio and online campaigns that offer deep brand experiences to their target markets. The result is a sharp increase in placements on the jacarandafm.com and ecr.co.za websites, he adds.
Says Bernariusz: “We are seeing the radio station websites come into their own as powerful vehicles for advertisers, especially those that also place ads on-air with Jacaranda FM and East Coast Radio. With a 40% growth in the size of the audience over the past year, these websites are enjoying good growth.’
Brands that have advertised on these two radio websites include the likes of Tiger Wheel & Tyre, National Geographic, Durban Tourism, Castrol Magnatrek, Standard Bank, Maynards and Royal Canin.
The audience has the sort of demographic profile that advertisers covet, with a large percentage of listeners in the high LSM groups, many of them female, the majority living in urban areas and most of them primary or joint decision-makers in the home.
But the really important quality of these audiences is how engaged and active they are, both as website users and radio listeners, says Bernariusz. “There’s a high correlation between website users and radio listeners. They’re the members of the audience who are more invested in Jacaranda and East Coast Radio.’
Elton Ollerhead, managing director at Mediamark says: “Although we have grown and thrived in the radio advertising market, we have found an increasing demand for converged media buys that help our advertisers to better coordinate campaigns across multiple media channels and in doing so, they are able to unleash better return on investment. There is a growing understanding that blending different media channels into integrated, converged buys, delivers better returns than managing them in silos.’
Bernariusz says that digital and radio work well together, creating opportunities for brands to create campaigns that combine their strengths for exponentially better effects. “Radio is typically a lean-back medium which is consumed passively while listeners are doing something else. It’s a superb way to build brand awareness and issue a call for action,’ he says.
“Digital is a lean-forward channel where users actively engage with content, for example, by voting on polls, entering competitions, reading content, leaving comments, watching videos, flipping through photo galleries, and interacting with ads. Here, you can build deeper engagement with users, provide them with more info than you can in 30 seconds of airtime, and collect data (through competitions and opt-in subscriptions) that will help you understand your audience better,’ concludes Bernariusz.
