Has Global Radio Achieved The Impossible?

It's that time again when every radio station in the UK has been poring over data-tables and trying to work out whether it's doing better and how it compares to its rivals. Yes, it's RAJAR time!

This book's quite an interesting one as it's the first quarter that some Heartified stations are publishing their results. For those at the back, Global Radio re-branded some of its heritage FM radio as 'Heart' at the beginning of January. Many in the radio industry have been thinking it was mad to ditch years of heritage whilst Global believes that today's audiences want strong brands. Anyhoo, how have they all one?

At first glance, and in general it seems that the 'Heartification' has been a good/negligable result for the stations. Looking at the reach, other than Broadland/Heart Nortfolk which has a had stormer, all the stations are up/down less than 8 points. And to be honest, that's about the norm for these stations.

Looking at the hours it seems that Norfolk, Peterborough and MK have had some great hours increases, in fact, their best hours result in the past two years, which is a real achievement.

Therefore it would be easy to summise that, at worst, there's been a negligable change with the introduction of the Heart brand and at best, it's really good news for the station's hours. These hours increases are important as it means Global will be able to get more money from its national advertisers.

However, the important bit to look at is the last column, the period. This is what describes the way that stations are measured. The H's mean that it looks at the last six months and the Y means that twelve months are take into consideration. In other words for all the H's the results combine three months as Heart and three months as their previous name. And for Y's three of Heart and nine of the previous.

Now the reason that they do this is that it makes the results more robust as it creates a bigger sample size. It also evens out any strange result. It's therefore the most unstable data. To explain this a bit more, i've done some charts for the new Hearts looking at the station's Reach.

Now, some stations it doesn't really effect. Let's look at Norfolk:

As you can see both the quarterly and half yearly figures match and that's because the station's quarters are pretty consistent, so they don't get 'smoothed'. It's a similar situation for Bucks:

and for Beds/Bucks:

Cambridge, though has some marginal ups and downs, but you can see that its half yearly figures take a nice average through the middle:

A similar situation to Ipswich:

Milton Keynes is interesting as it has a rolling yearly survey. As you can see below the peaks are smoothed out when the yearly numbers are taken into consideration:

In Colchester, another yearly station, I think the data shows another trend that often happens with yearly reporting stations - that there's a bit of a delay for changes to be taken into account:

A more extreme version can be seen in Peterborough below. It reports half yearly, but you can definitely see a delay for changes to come through to the published half-yearly figures.

So, what does this mean for Heart. Well, firstly, I think it's still a bit too early to say. What there definitely isn't is any particular proof that the change has been a disaster. Whilst it seems that the quarterly data suggests mainly falls it is still a bit up and down and nothing (wither way) is particularly drastic. it seems people are not turning off their local station in their droves because Toby Anstis has appeared and the name has changed.

The more interesting thing to look at is how the hours are doing. A big change to a radio station won't always decimate the reach but it could have an effect on the hours as people choose to tune in more or less.

Having a cursory comparison of last quarter's number and this quarter's forced three month figures you can see there has been much greater percentage decreases than the chart at the top of the page, however there's also been some stable hours and hours increases. So again, nothing to particularly suggest massive cliff-like falls are coming.

Looking at all the data, the jury is most definitely still out on the Heart changes. The only thing we do know, is that we don't really know.

In three months time they'll be more of an idea plus a new wave of Heartified stations will be publishing their data. And interestingly, it's some very different types of station. Wave 1 stations are in less competitive markets whilst in Wave 2 there's some heritage biggies.

It will be hard for Global NOT to crow about these figures and delcare the changes 'a success', there is the danger that any enthusiasm may be somewhat premature.