Commercial/BBC

Advertising on commercial radio is the loyalty of its listeners. They know the station’s personalities and they tune in for entertainment and information. Commercial Radio is particularly great for cities with a lot of traffic. This loyalty allows them to develop a relationship with these listeners. Over time, they can convince them to try their product or service, and increase the frequency of repeat or referral business. The best use of radio is frequency. Radio makes it affordable to reach this loyal listener over and over again in a short time span. Let’s face it, in this competitive advertising environment, and with hectic lives, they need to get their message across several times before anyone knows who they are and remembers their name. How often have you met someone, shook their hand, and forgot their name five minutes later? But what if their product is visual? Radio has the most vivid pictures of any medium- it uses your prospects imagination. With a great ad, you can make their mouth water and their stomach’s grumble with uses of sound effects.

I’ve even heard radio ads that make the product sound better than they really are! A benefit of radio advertising is it can cost next to nothing to get a commercial produced. Most radio stations will produce a commercial for free as long as they buy air-time on their station, commercial radio plays a mixture of music and advertisements targeted towards it audiences, commercial radio makes it money through playing a huge majority of advertisements as it’s a cheap way of promotion for many businesses and organisations to reach a selected or vast range of audiences, However the BBC has a selection of different radio stations that all specialise in different targeted audiences, for example radio 1 is endorsed towards younger people, then radio 4 that is constructed around speech based news, current affairs and factual networks.

The BBC accumulates it audiences in branches of different topics that relates to the listeners they are pointing to. Radio 1 is a music based radio station and the speech is aimed towards younger people varying to interviews with singers and a vast selection of updated music from different genres, the clever thing about BBC radio that there is something for everyone to enjoy instead of trying to host a meandering station that will suit everyone needs. The BBC separates it audiences to gain more dedicated listeners.

The BBC today runs ten national domestic radio stations, five of which are only available in a digital format: via DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting - i.e. Digital Radio), the Internet or the different forms of Digital Television in the UK. The five new stations are: 6Music (broadcasting rock, funk, punk and reggae), BBC 7

(comedy, drama, books, science fiction, fantasy and children's programmes), The Asian Network, 1Xtra and Five Live Sports Extra.

Each of the national BBC radio stations caters for a different audience. For example, BBC Radio 1 broadcasts contemporary popular music aimed at a young target audience, whereas BBC Radio Five Live broadcasts news and sport (including live coverage of sports fixtures).

The BBC also runs regional radio stations throughout the UK, for example BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio Devon. These stations focus on regional issues to a greater extent than their national counterparts, organising live phone-in debates about these issues, as well as lighter talk shows with music from different decades of the 20th Century. Compared to many advertising-funded Independent Local Radio (ILR) stations, which often broadcast contemporary popular music, BBC Local Radio stations offer a more "serious" alternative.