Bharti Airtel / Radio Mirchi: Radio calling

A little-known fact about FM radio is that 20 per cent people hear it on the mobile phone rather than radio sets. Radio companies and mobile service operators have woken up to the possibilities this convergence opens up. Bharti Airtel, the country’s largest mobile telephony company, and Radio Mirchi have come up with Mirchi Mobile which provides Airtel customers 12 regional Radio Mirchi stations irrespective of where they live in the country.

For Bharti Airtel, it is an attempt to build bridges with customers in a fiercely competitive market place. Apart from tariff plans, rivals slug it out over value-added services; hence the new service. The company found that most cities have large pockets of migrants who would like to listen to radio in their language.

“We have studied the migrant population on the Indian Readership Survey, and we have mapped Airtel’s STD call-traffic, the usage of STD calls in each city,” says Bharti Airtel Marketing Director (mobile services) Shireesh Joshi. “For example, according to IRS, out of the 46 million people in Karnataka, 2.1 million have Marathi as their mother tongue, 2.4 million Telugu and 1.16 million Tamil. We felt the need for entertainment in these languages. Subsequently, this data was matched with the STD call patterns on our network.” The service builds on these two learnings, along with other secondary sources of information. Thus, the company offers in Karnataka Radio Mirchi Pune, Radio Mirchi Hyderabad and Radio Mirchi Chennai.

For Radio Mirchi, it is a differentiator in a highly crowded space. There are 248 radio operators in the country, though the medium accounts for only around 4 per cent of the total ad spends in India, which are estimated at around Rs 20,000 crore. According to a Ficci-KPMG report, the radio industry is expected to grow at 16 per cent a year from 2010 to 2014 when it will reach Rs 1,640 crore in size.

“We are calling it Hometown ka radio, which tells you what the service is all about. It’s about tracing people who are not living in their home towns — people from Trivandrum living in Delhi or people from Jaipur putting up in Mumbai and so on,” says The Times Group’s head of mobility initiatives, Nandan Srinath. (The group owns Radio Mirchi.) “One has to dial 59830 to subscribe. It is charged at Rs 10 for seven days or 100 minutes. The age group of 18 to 35 is more crooned to this service.”

Currently, Radio Mirchi and Bhrati Airtel are not looking at advertisements from the local FM stations. The service is powered by Spice Digital that provides music-on-demand services for Indian and international operators. Will it work? PwC India executive director and leader (entertainment and media) Timmy Kandhari says that such tie-ups can become a source of revenue in the long run. “Mobile being the best medium for music, mobile service operators are now incorporating music content. FM stations are funded mostly through advertisements. By tying up with mobile operators, they are looking at some sort of subscription revenue. It’s a win-win strategy for the mobile operator as well as the FM station. With the Mirchi Mobile initiative, while Radio Mirchi will get subscriptions, Bharti Airtel will hold on to its existing customers.”

But the USP may not stay for long. Big FM has partnered with VAS provider OnMobile Global to launch the radio experience on its mobile platform which will be activated soon. It will be called BIG Mobile Radio. Its service will offer local radio stations not only in India but outside India as well. Rabe T Iyer, the business head for experiential marketing (OOH and digital business), Reliance Media World, says, “BIG Mobile Radio (an initiative of Reliance Media World) will give mobile users the option to listen to 17 multi-lingual channels anywhere in India. This service will also be available in global markets such as Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the UAE which have Indian communities.”