First Canadian commercial radio station launches podcasts as marketing tool

Podcasts – pre-packaged audio content delivered over digital networks and downloaded to MP3 devices – are commonly thought of as the new pirate or campus radio, but one of Canada’s most mainstream content providers is set to tackle the market. On April 21, Corus Radio announced that it will begin making available downloads of some of its popular spoken word programming. The radio giant hopes it can gain traction with advertising partners to creatively sponsor the content, including the use of non-intrusive product placement. Corus Radio president John Hayes says the company is taking "baby steps" into the uncharted territory, but that he has hopes the format will lead to partnerships around high-profile entertainment content. The first podcasts being introduced by Corus will be of content re-purposed from the popular Legends of Classic Rock show hosted by Vancouver Rock 101 personality Jeff Woods, and from The Ongoing History of New Music program hosted by Alan Cross, program director at Toronto’s 102.1 The Edge. The downloads will be available from the online portals of both Rock 101 and The Edge, as well as through CFOX, Calgary’s Q107, and London’s The Hawk and FM 96. The content was chosen because both shows are produced in-house at Corus. As spoken word productions, Corus owns all rights to the programming, and thus won’t have to navigate any tricky copyright waters. Podcasts are a natural extension for the material, says Hayes, since it can be easily converted to digital format and used over and over again. "We create a lot of this content, and we use it one time. (By re-purposing it) we’re able to re-use the content that we’ve already produced in a way that could be beneficial, or at least desirable, to audiences and also we can repurpose it to include sponsorship or commercial messages in a way that would be a little bit different, a little more elegant, than the kind of commercials that we run on the radio. We can include product placement and a different way of including sponsorships in these podcasts. And, whether we download a 15-minute segment and talk about whatever the topic happens to be or whether it’s a 90-second tool of the day feature that’s posted for download daily, it doesn’t matter. We still have this material – this content." The content was also chosen for its subject matter, which Hayes guesses will appeal to the demographic most likely to want to download digital content for their iPods and other MP3 devices. He says the market has been identified for about a year as an opportunity for Corus, especially given what he characterizes as an extensive Internet reach. "One of our core values at Corus is innovation, and looking forward, we looked at the iPods and last year at this time we said, well, we like the iPod, it’s a great device, but it’s not anthropological the way a radio station is. In other words, it doesn’t connect with community. It doesn’t reflect or have any sense of community. It’s just a garage for your music. It took some genius somewhere, I guess, with a software program and a lot of time on their hands…to figure out how to make spoken word content from a radio station or from somebody’s home computer or home studio available for downloading and then created the interface so that the files could be shared. And, voilà, anybody can be a podcaster. "So, we saw that and we followed it. We tested it. We said, ‘well, gee, this works.’ And, it was a very easy thing to connect the dots between our web sites, which are extremely robust, and have a huge reach in Canada. Our web sites, the Corus radio web sites alone, account for between 4% and 5% of the web site visits in Canada on a monthly basis." He notes that there are around 600,000 Canadians signed up for Corus Radio email alerts. Hayes notes that the cost to provide podcasts is minimal. Corus is already in discussions, he says, with major advertisers about sponsoring podcasts around unspecified major events. He wouldn’t disclose what the next step might be, but notes that one of the campaigns it’s looking at could be daily downloads related to a major event. While tentatively testing the download market, though, Hayes says the company will likely never make the leap into the music download field as rivals Standard Radio have. "There’s two reasons. One is the tariffs and the rights costs. The other is that the consumer can get it in so many places. Why would they need it from us? We don’t want to compete against Napster and KaZaA and we don’t want to compete against iTunes. We’re just not interested in being in the music download business. We’ve looked at it, and economically it does not work out for us. "Even if we were to create a white label, completely legal download service, it would not be of economic benefit to us to do so. Say we achieved a million downloads from our web sites by consumers nationwide at $0.99 a piece, the going rate for intermediaries for us would be $0.05, so that’s $50,000 a year. There’s where you get into the cost/benefit analysis of what does it take to create the white label service and then the ultimate question: why would somebody use Edge 102 for their music downloads instead of Napster or iTunes? There’s no benefit."

First Canadian commercial radio station launches podcasts as marketing tool

Broadcast | April 29, 2005

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