“Don’t just speak: say something!”…and other insights from Next Radio 2016

Next Radio is an annual pick and mix conference of all things audio. Representing a broad church of marketing, production, content and innovation within the radio industry, both commercial and BBC, speakers have either 10 or 20 minutes to speak on their chosen subject.

Next Radio, run by Matt Deegan of Folder Media and radio futurologist James Cridland, offers a fantastic platform for younger speakers to share the stage with more familiar industry faces including David Lloyd (Orion), Steve Taylor (Bauer) and Sam Crowther (A Million Ads), providing a nice contrast of points of view on radio and its sister industries.

The voice of the ‘Youth’ market was a recurring theme of the day. Julia Hyball, freelance producer and lecturer at University of Gloucester, gave an inside perspective of the challenges facing tomorrow’s talent as they enter the challenging graduate job market. An interesting dynamic, given that the industry is having to actively court the demographic of Julia’s students as much as her students are starting to turn to the radio industry for employment.

Josh Divney (Fun Kids) and Cliff Fluet (Lewis Silkin) believed that the best way for radio to entice younger people in a connected world is to enhance their presence with vloggers, who have become increasingly influential as trust in bona fide celebrities diminishes. Tellingly however, they highlighted the distinction between vlogging and a radio DJ’s skill – the power of live interaction while vlogs are heavily edited and stylised. Many of their sentiments were echoed by Chew TV’s Ben Bowler, who spoke of the pluses and perils of live streaming. Interestingly, Andrew Bailey from Sky News hinted at greater synergies between their video and audio content in the future.

Two things go hand in hand with the matter of reaching the fickle 16-24 market. The first is innovation. Innovation is always a dream for conferences – it’s fertile territory for wacky slides and imaginative hypotheses: great fuel for inspiration, imaginative thinking and, in practice, also quite hard to challenge. Sam Crowther has extended his excellent Power of Sound presentation to cover off personalisation of audio ads to anchor the powerful interplay between sound and human behaviour to commercial purpose. Dan McQuillan from broadcast Bionics gave a similarly entertaining and future-facing take on innovation within audio (the irony of a few technical setbacks notwithstanding).

The other key ingredient, as with any audience, is relevance. From a research perspective, Francis Currie and Niklas Norden demonstrated their new tracking technology to measure engagement amongst different audience segments whilst listening to three different radio breakfast shows. The findings were particularly critical of Nick Grimshaw’s style *Sorry Grimmers*. Later, Richard Huntington, chief strategy officer at Saatchi & Saatchi, made a plea for a more sensitive and relevant approach to audience segmentation from agencies, media owners and brands. He says that as an industry  we need to forget about our own priorities and think afresh about what our audiences most care about and become more sensitive to what drives them. As David Lloyd said, “Don’t just speak: say something!” – and say something that matters.  The idea of reappraisal chimes with Radiocentre’s own mantra ‘See Radio Differently’. Our recent campaign targeting celebrity CMOs was also showcased at the conference and it was great to see such a positive response.

Next Radio was a great reminder of the value of good presentation skills both on stage and live on air. The issues of speaking to young audiences, the uncertainty of rapid media innovation and calls for relevance aren’t anything new, however it was refreshing to hear young voices in media offer up their own solutions to perennial challenges with such aplomb.