Radio Plymouth - Ofcom Licensing

RADIO PLYMOUTH
All this combined with the forecast population growth and the improving transport infrastructure
means there is undoubtedly room for another radio service in Plymouth. Indeed the vast majority of
business people we have spoken to would welcome a new radio station and some competition in
the local media market place. We explore this further in the research section of the document.
Revenue
Our rate card is carefully crafted on good value, robust enough to ensure future increases are
achievable yet offering realistic competition in the local market.
Plymouth Sound recently quoted a CPT of £3.10 with an average spot rate of £34.98 for a three
week Daytime campaign comprising 105 spots. Whilst our rates will be competitive against those
figures, we want to increase radio’s share of the local advertising cake, not rob Peter to pay Paul.
Research shows our plan to broadcast a radio service aimed at a newly defined audience is
attractive not only to the bigger, existing advertisers, but also to medium and smaller businesses.
Radio is a medium that, until now, many have been priced out of. The tighter coverage area of this
licence allows some of the more locally focused businesses to get better value for their marketing
budget by using Radio Plymouth.
The highly successful local daily newspaper, the “Evening Herald”, charges £640 for a black &
white, one-off, quarter page advert and has a circulation of 42,194 claiming readership of 123,882.
(source: JICREG)
We believe we could sell 30% of our total available airtime (c.40% of 06.00-00.00) in year one at an
average spot rate of £10. Our basic weekly package of 35 transmissions, evenly spread across
seven days (06.00 – 00.00) will represent an investment of £350 and, according to our research,
should reach an audience of 40,000 adults in year one. This is consistent with our understanding of
what other similar sized stations are achieving from their local sales and when set against our
audience projections they generate a local revenue yield per thousand listening hours that falls
within that achieved by a range of stations that we used to benchmark our own performance
expectations.
We have been very cautious about our predictions for national revenue, not only in the first year but
thereafter. We are aware that we could sign up with a national representation house and that as
part of a group sell they have advised us that we could generate national revenue well in excess of
what we have included in our forecasts. However we also recognize that the yield on these spots is
considerably lower than is achieved at a local level and that the impact delivery basis of the sale
means that these advertisers require much heavier campaigns than we would normally want to run.
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