Why Advertisers Are Tuning In To Chinese Radio
During radio DJ Mike D's "Big Drive Home" show, on from 5 to 8 p.m. in Beijing, his audience floods Hit 88.7 FM with more than 500 cellphone text messages. More than just music fans, the listeners are participating in promotional contests from some of China's biggest advertisers, including McDonald's Corp. and Nestle SA.
Radio promotions, a relatively novel idea in China, signal what could be a turning point for the nation's oldest broadcast medium. Burgeoning car ownership and sharply rising prices for television-ad time are spurring a new life for Chinese radio, which is slowly emerging as an important channel for advertising.
About two-thirds of China's $14.5 billion in advertising runs on the nation's 1,150 TV stations. In contrast, China's 1,500 radio stations receive only about 2% of ad expenditures.
Long dismissed as a stagnant, state-owned propaganda vehicle, radio in China has been largely left behind as television quickly commercializes. Indeed, Chinese radio seems to exist on a different planet from Howard Stern's. While talk radio gains popularity, many shows are prerecorded so the stations can control content. Listeners who want to "call in" to a radio station, either to talk or to enter a contest, sometimes use their cellphones' message function.
As advertisers recognize the medium's potential, stations may begin to offer all-day music formats and other fare that can be used to target listener groups. Within the next five years, WPP Group's media-buying and planning company Mindshare's China operations expects radio to account for 8% to 10% of the money it spends for advertisers, compared with the current 2%.
Today, VNU's Nielsen Media Research is expected to announce the start of the first nationwide radio-audience ratings service in China. The data, to be collected from the same households whose diaries form the basis for Nielsen's TV ratings, will offer advertisers a quarterly picture of 35 Chinese markets and who is listening to what.
Right now, that isn't much of a mystery. The answer is almost always news. Scripted, state-filtered news reports are by far the most prevalent content on China's radio waves. In metropolitan centers such as Shanghai, broadcasts of newspaper summaries are among the most-listened-to programs; in wealthy southern cities, such as Guangzhou, entertainment news is more popular. Broadcasts of financial news and performances of Chinese opera also can be found.
Regular ratings data would go a long way toward helping transform Chinese radio into a marketing machine. "Radio is one of the last mediums that allows you to microtarget advertisements at a mass level, if you can find the right stations," says Mark Neely, Nielsen's Asia-Pacific director for news and research.
An early glimpse of Chinese radio's potential came in 2002, when a Nielsen rival, CSM, a joint venture of China's Central Viewer Survey and Consulting Center and British market-research firm Taylor Nelson Sofres PLC, launched a four-city radio-audience survey, conducted three times a year. It found urban listeners over age 10 spent an hour or more each day listening to radio, mainly at home, during work or study time.
But advertisers think as the number of new passenger cars in China continues to grow -- from 4.1 million vehicles in 2003 to 10.4 million vehicles in 2009, according to J.D. Power & Associates estimates -- radio audiences also will balloon. The growth isn't guaranteed: Radio audiences didn't grow at all from 2002 to 2003, according to CSM.
Still, radio is expected to prove indispensable to advertisers hoping to target China's so-called new rich, who are becoming more difficult to find watching prime-time TV. "They drive cars by themselves instead of hiring drivers, because they like to be in control," says Peter Tan, MindShare director of consumer insight. "We foresee a lot of premium brands slowly moving toward radio," he adds.
Another attraction radio offers is price: It is still inexpensive compared with TV, where rates, excluding discounts, are often 15 times as expensive, Mr. Tan figures. Many brands have been turning away from TV after provincial networks raised rates by an average of 30% earlier this year, triggered by new prime-time advertising restrictions.
Nielsen data should provide another boost. Big-spending packaged-goods multinationals, such as Unilever and Procter & Gamble Co., have been wary of buying Chinese radio time without a better indication of who is listening.
"We were using a finger in the wind before" to figure out audience patterns, says Clayton Fitts, vice president of sales and marketing for Virgin Radio Asia, which is a unit of Virgin Group and a programming consultant on the Hit 88.7 FM station in Beijing for China Radio International.
The station plays a mix of international musical hits from around the world, from Britney Spears to the latest boy band from Taiwan.
Media buyers warn that Chinese radio stations have to develop consistent, pure formats, such as all-jazz or all-talk, before advertisers can use them to tap audience niches. And advertisers say they want better assurances that the ads they buy are actually broadcast, because there is still no third-party ad monitoring system.
As the industry grows, multinational players including News Corp. and Viacom Inc. hope the Chinese government might open radio to the same kind of foreign investment that it began to allow in TV production this year. "The feeling had always been that radio was not possible," says Carl Folta, a spokesman for Viacom, which last month entered into a TV joint venture with the Shanghai Media Group. "It's clear that the Chinese government is really relaxing things quite significantly," he says.
电台－－中国广告媒介新秀
当北京的电台DJ Mike D在主持下午5点至8点的一档名为Big Drive Home的节目期间，听众的500多条手机短信疯狂涌入调频88.7。这些听众不仅仅是音乐迷，他们还踊跃参与来自麦当劳(McDonald's Corp.)、雀巢(Nestle SA)等中国最大的一些广告客户的有奖竞猜活动。
电台促销在中国还是一个比较新的想法，它表明中国的广播电台正异军突起成为广告的一个重要渠道。有车族的激增和电视广告费率的大幅上涨正在给广播电台这种最古老媒体带来新生。
中国的广播电台曾一度被广告商摒弃，因为政府对所有权的严格控制使得电台迟迟停留在作为一种宣传工具的阶段，远远落后于已经迅速商业化的电视。中国拥有1,150家电视台，在145亿美元的广告市场中占据了约三分之二的绝对优势，而中国1,500家广播电台仅占广告支出的2%。
VNU NV旗下的尼尔森媒介研究(Nielsen Media Research)预计于今天推出中国首家全国电台听众评级服务，这正是电台重焕光彩的一个重要例证。评级数据由从事尼尔森电视收视调查的同一批人员采集，将向广告商提供每个季度35个市场的听众情况。
该数据可能使中国的电台变为一个营销工具。尼尔森亚太区新闻和研究主管马克?尼利(Mark Neely)说，只要找到合适的电台，就能通过广播投放大众性广告。
WPP Group旗下的媒体购买和策划公司MindShare预计，在今后的五年中，电台在广告客户支出中将占到8%至10%的比例。
中国广播电台的潜在魅力始现于2002年，当时尼尔森的竞争对手、央视-索福瑞媒介研究有限公司(CSM)推出了四个城市的电台收听率调查，一年公布三次。CSM是央视调查咨询中心(Central Viewer Survey & Consulting Center)和Taylor Nelson Sofres PLC的合资企业。调查发现，年龄在10岁以上的城市听众每天收听一个小时或更长时间的广播，主要是在家里，一边工作或学习的时候收听。
中国汽车技术研究中心(China Automotive Technology & Research Center)称，随著中国轿车数量继续增长（预计2005至2010年间的年增长率为10%），广告客户认为收听广播的人数将会激增。J.D. Power and Associates估计，2003至2009年，中国轻型汽车的销量将增长一倍以上，由去年的410万辆增至2009年的1,040万辆。
无论怎样，电台可能提供了一个针对中国所谓新贵阶层的媒介。MindShare的消费者研究主管Peter Tan说，他们都是自己驾车，不雇司机，因为他们喜欢掌握控制权。他预计，将有很多高端品牌的广告逐渐流向电台。
广告客户对此颇感兴趣，因为在电台做广告的成本相对较低。Tan估计，没有折扣的电视广告费率是电台的15倍。许多品牌的广告已经从电视中撤出，原因是新的黄金时段广告限制措施使得省级网络今年的广告费率平均提高了30%。
单凭尼尔森新的收听数据也许就能够促进电台广告的发展。长期以来，在听众信息匮乏的情况下，惯于大规模投入广告费用的跨国消费品公司，如联合利华(Unilever NV)和宝洁(Procter & Gamble Co.)等不愿贸然在电台投放广告。
但是，媒体代理公司警告说，中国的广播电台需要开发出一套稳定持久的单一模式，比如全都播放爵士乐或者谈话节目，然后才能吸引广告公司来此开拓市场机会。此外，广告客户表示，他们希望能够更好地保证他们付费的广告真正播出，因为目前没有第三方广告监控体系。 随著行业的发展，新闻集团(News Corp.)和维亚康姆(Viacom Inc.)等跨国媒体公司希望，中国政府今年放开对电视节目制作方面外资限制的措施也能进一步推广到广播领域。
维亚康姆发言人弗尔塔(Carl Folta)表示，以前的感觉是，由于监管问题广告公司不可能涉足电台领域。他说，显而易见，中国政府正在明显放开一些管制。维亚康姆上月和上海文广新闻传媒集团(Shanghai Media Group.)组建了一家电视节目制作合资企业。
