‘At Radio City, most ads are made internally’

Radio City is going beyond merely being an FM station. In recent times, it has ventured into radio education and launched a brand activation business. Now, it is selling ad space on Meru Cabs, a private taxi service. DNA met Ashit Kukian, executive VP and national head, sales, for an update:

How have ad sales revenues been in the past two quarters?
In the radio space, the main advertisers are media, telecom, FMCG, personal products, services and retail. We are staring at a slight drop from finance and retail clients. There was a slight de-growth of 4-5% in the last quarter, which is still much better than the radio industry’s 30% rate of de-growth. Still, radio will stabilise at 18-20% growth levels.

What about non-metro markets. Will ad rates fall there?
The advertising rates for Tier II towns are really low, in terms of what advertisers are willing to pay. Also, 80% of the business into stations comes from corporates in the metros, so there is a certain rub-off.  But the card rates won't drop. Advertisers are now expecting more value out of the same cost.

How much will your brand activations business contribute to your bottomline?
About 10-12%, going up to 15% over the next one year.

Tell us more about the association with Meru Cabs…
We perform the ad sales function for them. Advertising space is sold on the body and insides of the car. There are about 3,000 such vehicles present in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi. For them, we’ve already roped in advertisers like Virgin Mobile, Bharati Axa, Kingfisher, JK Tyres, P&G.

A lot of advertisers simply supply the radio station with the audio track of the TV spot. Has that practice changed?
Almost 60-70% of advertising that happens on Radio City is created by my team. Almost 75-80% of my ad revenue will come from that. Even the biggest spenders on radio don’t give us radio spots by themselves. At least 90% of retail players get their radio spots done by us. So we’ve actually managed to convince clients that you can’t think of radio like print or TV.