Radio to reach youth markets : RAB Guide

Using radio to reach youth markets : RAB Guide
Using advertising to reach youth markets is quite a challenge. As any parent will know, young people's attention is highly selective and they're quick to reject anything they see as irrelevant or uninteresting.

Radio's Coverage of Youth Markets

Patterns of growth
Clearly the way children listen to radio changes between the ages of 4 and 15 (see section on Relationship With Radio for more on the qualitative aspects of this). Rajar analysis shows that there is a clear pattern of increase in radio listening over this age group.

As age increases, girls are somewhat more likely than boys to be listening to radio though the differences are not very great.
There appears to be a clear relationship between this growth in listening and the likelihood to own a radio personally. Youth TGI shows that the proportion of children who have a radio in their bedroom rises sharply between 7 and 15, peaking at nearly 90%.

In parallel, there is a dramatic shift in location - by 15, the bedroom is the pre-eminent listening location.




Listening across the day
The peak time for young people to be listening to the radio is in the mornings - ratings peak just before school and then fall away dramatically, picking up again after 3pm.

Weekend listening starts rather later - and there is a clear peak on Sunday afternoons when the Network Chart is on.

Inevitably, ratings across the day can vary quite widely for different age groups - as a simple example, the older ones will be staying up much later. Closer analysis of Rajar can identify the most efficient time to reach any particular age group (the Rajar survey is large enough to home in on a single age year, e.g. 11 year olds - for more information see the Rajar website at www.rajar.co.uk).

Strategic Roles of Radio

As Commercial Radio developed in the early days, its key strengths were seen as primarily tactical - fast turnaround, low capital cost and local flexibility. These days however, while the traditional strengths still apply, radio is increasingly being used for strategic roles.

Dominant share of mind
Share of mind can be described as the extent to which a brand makes itself salient within the consumer's mind - this is often the most challenging task in sectors where there are several top-parity brands, and/or high levels of competitive activity.

The ability of radio to create dominant share of mind is a product of its intrusiveness and the high frequency with which ads are broadcast.

Brands like the Carphone Warehouse have used this unique characteristic of radio to develop an unassailable lead within their category.

Support to other media
Young people are of course consumers of several media, and campaigns which use only one medium can miss out on the "media multiplier effect". Because of its inherent characteristics, radio can work in a complementary way to other media.

With TV it is traditionally used to add to the length of a campaign or to fill weeks where there is no TV activity - it can also be used to explain products or services in more depth, or to include additional information. Brands in fast-changing areas like retail or financial services often use radio for its ability to put over several different messages as an overlay to a core TV campaign (multiple executions in radio are very inexpensive compared to TV).

Radio also works exceptionally well with TV if there is creative synergy, most conspicuously in the form of a Sonic Brand Trigger.

To press, radio above all adds intrusiveness, because levels of ad avoidance with print are so high. Radio can also, like TV, bring things to life - for services or corporate advertising this can be very valuable in adding personality and tone of voice.

The "explainer" medium
Young people, because of their inexperience, often need the benefits of products or services explained to them before they can make a decision to purchase - for example, a bank account, or a promotional offer.

Radio is particularly useful for this as it uses the human voice in real-time. This means that the young people do not have to wade their way through extensive reading material before they even know what the proposition is.

Speaking from inside youth culture
As the qualitative research illustrates, young people begin to move away from their parents' world of choices and preferences, and to set up their own world independently. Inevitably this means that some media are seen as outside that independent world - newspapers for example.

Radio, as a personal "me-medium", allows the advertiser to speak from inside the so-called "youth fortress"

As the respondents said in the research, they feel as though the people on the radio treat them like adults - leaving their parents out of the equation. Tone of voice is a key issue with advertising strategies in this territory.

Radio Advertising

Consumer opinions
The evidence from the qualitative research is that young people feel their local FM station is aimed at people like them, but the advertising is not - they feel, probably quite correctly, that most advertising is aimed at adults.

However, because radio is a real-time intrusive medium, they have to sit through the full length of any ads which are for irrelevant products.

There was evidence of three sorts of advertising memories:

relevant
ads which mentioned areas or names of specific interest, e.g. films, outlets selling favoured brands, concerts

vague/ not relevant
memories of ads for local garages, cars and insurance companies - little or no specific detail remembered

Sonic Brand Triggers
much evidence of children's ability to pick up on musical SBTs and sing them out loud

Consideration
It seems clear from this analysis that children are very selective in their attention, and are strongly influenced by relevance of the brand or product advertised.

It would follow that, since they expect most ads to be irrelevant to them, care must be taken in the creative work to overcome this expectation - through linking to the relevant topic, involvement, surprise, tone of voice etc.

Tone of voice is a key area with radio: young people can tell when they are being addressed as equals, and when they are not.

Young people pick up very strongly on musical Sonic Brand Triggers, even for seemingly irrelevant brands.