From auto to insurance, brands track the men on the FM radio trail

The growing band of male radio listeners is drawing in auto, insurance brands; changing the nature of the medium and traditional advertising patterns

What does the fact that more men are listening to radio mean? Or that more people are listening to it in the car? It means a drop in FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) advertising and a rise in advertising by brands that target male consumers, such as cars, banking and financial services. “The audience is becoming more male and 35 plus years. Women have given way to men, that is a big change in the last 5-7 years,” says Prashant Panday, managing director and CEO of the Rs 635 crore Entertainment Network India. It operates Radio Mirchi the largest operator in the Rs 3,100 crore Indian radio industry. 

According to the Indian Readership Survey or IRS data for the third quarter of 2019, radio listenership grew, somewhat slowly to 105 million, from 104 million in 2017.  The largest chunk of listenership comes from mobile phones, followed by people listening at home on a music system or transistor. But it is the third, car listenership, which has grown from about 22 million in 2017 to 34 million in the last study that is causing the shift, say radio operators. 

It has meant “No big FMCG brand is on radio. The biggest (by advertising volumes) is DP Group (Baba Elaichi), Shuddh Plus, Pan Parag and others. Now look at the big daddies on TV. There is Ghadi detergent, HUL etc. Radio has been reduced from 700,000-800,000 lakh seconds (advertising from FMCGs) to nothing. Because advertisers are seeing it more as a male product,” says Panday. On the other hand all the big auto firms from Hyundai, Maruti, Honda, Tata, M&M, Hero Motorcycles are on radio. So are LIC and Karur Vysya Bank among others.

In FY2019 male-oriented advertising categories accounted for 54 per cent of ad volumes across radio stations against 47.6 per cent in FY2014. In the same period female-oriented categories fell to 30.6 per cent from 34.6 per cent according to AirCheck, a radio spot monitoring agency. “The composition of advertisers has changed because now they are looking at radio for interaction. The usage is more tactical than brand building,” thinks Nisha Narayanan, COO and director, Red FM and Magic FM. 

Rahul Gautam, vice president marketing, Ford India disagrees. “We are active on radio. It works as a good surround medium for a ‘buy me now’ kind of message. It gives our channel partners confidence that marketing is behind us and supplements print and TV. But we don’t take radio just as a tactical medium,” he says. For example, in 2019, Ford launched the ‘Discover the more in you’ campaign with Radio Mirchi. It was a call for people to look within and take actions that helped them be more compassionate, calm and responsible. It was a mix of radio, on ground and videos with RJ Naved dressing up as a traffic cop and censuring people for honking. During Diwali Ford ran another campaign, on Big FM and Radio City, which included getting their RJs to Ford offices and at its dealers. 

“Today we are not radio stations but content creators. Radio combines live, local interaction and on the ground,” says Narayanan. It is perhaps this use of radio that has helped the medium battle its big challenges, of relevance and the lack of measurement. 

One reason listenership is slowing is not because people don’t want radio, but because many firms don’t offer an FM tuner with a smartphone. “Women would consume it largely on older phones. Now almost half the newer phones come without FM so where would they consume it? Also ten years back afternoon programming wasn’t there on television,” says Panday. He reckons that the whole Jio phenomenon could give a new lease of life to radio, because it hopes to sell 500 million of their Rs 1,500 phones, all of them FM enabled.

Even if listenership were to rise “Measurement is a challenge. Spending on radio is more of a judgement call and is based on campaign to campaign,” says Gautam. But unlike in TV, there doesn’t seem to be any effort to get a robust metric in place. It is perhaps the first thing the industry needs to fix if it wants FMCGs and other advertisers to come back.