Frozen Indigo Angel
Radio 1's online efforts have always been excellent. They try lots of different things and have a feature set that, quite rightly, the rest of the radio industry are very jealous of.
At the same time Scott Mills presents a very well produced show that probably has more planning than any other show on UK radio. They do an excellent job of storylining a load of their features so they develop over a couple of weeks or so. It's clever because there's a constant series of peaks that keep the audience interested and engaged. With Scott as Number 1 Dep for Chris Moyles, they're also very good at rolling the storyline so it brings their drivetime to audience to breakfast and their breakfast audience to drivetime. It's a very clever hours building exercise, which is undoubtedly successful. They're also not afraid of re-developing ideas that have been successful on other stations, cough, Ryan Seacrest.
The latest campaign is giving a very non-traditional online viral approach spin to an old radio idea - that of somone getting fired unfairly and the audience then helping to solve the problem.
The execution is still in its early days, but the basic premise is that Paul Denchfiled is a freelance video producer who's been sacked for inserting random words - Frozen Indigo Angel - into Scott's video podcasts. He, of course, says this isn't the case and uses a blog, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr to proclaim his innocence. The strange words then start appearing in other places, like on Colin Murray's tracklist.
It'll be interesting to see which way they take it over the next couple of weeks, but it's a good fun way to bring the show (and the station) closer to the audience. Everyone loves a mystery...
If you have that nagging thought that you've seen Paul Denchfield before, you probably have, he was one of the 'trackers' on the excellent Channel 4 series 'Wanted'. Using a 'real person' who's got a backgroung in telly production is a clever way to make the scenario more real. What's not so believeable is that the blog and flickr have both only recently started, if they'd fabricated that back even further they could have made it even more believable.
I hope this doesn't get too much google-juice so listeners can enjoy the promotion's ride.