Rathnakar Rai, Managing Director, Primetime International Services Ltd, founded Primetime in 1985 as an independent media company. In 1995, he led Primetime into a joint venture with Havas International, the number two player in independent media marketing in Europe. Realising the opportunities in the outdoor advertising market, Rai led his company via Prime Outdoors (currently known as Prime Market Reach) as a media planning and buying agency for the out-of-home advertising. Recently, with the spurt in FM radio licenses and the growth in the industry, Primetime has initiated the launch of Radio Minds in a joint venture with Kagiso Media, a leader in the South African radio industry. Rai talks to agencyfaqs! about the new venture and the prospect of radio consulting in India.

Q. I believe Radio Minds is the first consultancy of its kind in India. What services will it offer and to whom are these services targeted?
A. With the phenomenal growth we are witnessing in the radio industry, we believe that there is going to be dearth of talent in the radio space. Therefore, training of radio professionals including radio jockeys, station managers, programme structuring and formatting professionals, technicians are the areas for training we will be focusing on. The training can be on different levels. We prefer the long-term training intervention of up to two years which includes station pre-launch training to post-launch. Since it takes time for a station to stabilise, we intervene from the time the station is being planned through to the time the services are launched and when they are putting up infrastructure and studios and content.

The other services we provide are consulting - including strategic management, of which training is a part. Strategic research helps identify market gaps in audiences and using research in interesting ways to create programming format and structures and promos for branding and positioning is another component of consulting. Besides this, there are also ad sales services. For this, we use software customised to the radio business for inventory management, which has been in use by our partners, Kagiso Media, for the past 15 years - now optimised it for the Indian market.

Q. How will Radio Minds change the advertising model in the industry?
A. For the ad sales inventory, we will be working with a spectrum of radio stations, covering the industry as widely as possible. Our clients at any location can avail of inventory from all over India. We are approaching both ad agencies and media buyers. As radio stations may not have the resources to sell their inventory, we will bring together them in touch with the agencies who seek them. Therefore, a small radio station sitting in Orissa can become a part of the national grid, where the software will be an aggregator for individual radio stations. Using both content positioning and audiences who are listening at different times of the day, we can target audiences accordingly for the brand.

Q. What is your business development strategy at this stage? Who are the companies on board currently?
A.We are in the process of signing up a few radio stations. Our plan is to get into the market in association with these stations and reach out to advertisers. So we are meeting individual radio stations and presenting our proposition to them. We will be announcing our collaborations in the next few weeks. We will be largely working with the 290 private radio stations that have been licensed in phase two for FM.

Q. How did the deal with Kagiso Media come through?
A. In easily accessible media like radio we can reach out to diverse audiences. To get into the radio consulting business, we needed to be with the right people. Kagiso Media is the largest privately owned radio station in South Africa. They have a track record of turning around small radio stations to lead the market. They had their own constraints, in terms of regulations, and they wanted to expand to South Asia. Kagiso has an expertise in using out-of-home media, internet and mobile to boost audiences for radio.

With their experience and our inclination, plus our ad sales experience, we are sure this partnership has a great future. What we are bringing into it is our understanding of the market, our presence across cities and our relationships with agencies.

Q. Do you think there is a lack of strategic programming in Indian radio stations, as most of them end up sounding the same to the listener?
A. Perhaps there is a lack of strategic programming but I am sure different radio stations have their own means to tackle that. Strategies in radio, like any other industry, need to be based on the market segments - the target audience, and the content has to be created accordingly. This perfect fit is what creates strategy. The market segments in our radio industry are not clearly identified, which leads us to believe that there is generic content being played all over.

One of the reasons for this could be the lack of adequate research covering all of India. Though organisations like MRUC have taken steps in this direction, the research universe remains small. Still, we cannot say that radio programming in India does not follow a strategy. It is the lack of appropriate market segmentation which creates a gap. In fact, it is a matter of time that a better understanding of the audience develops through quality research on a better scale.

Radio Minds conducts research which is more relevant to the radio industry, which will help radio stations in deciding accurately what music should be played and for how long, and how should the airtime be decided between music and the RJ’s talk. It is more of a scientific process, based on algorithms.

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