Global buys Atlantic FM: There are no winners here.

I am disappointed at the recent news that Global Radio is buying Atlantic FM and rebranding it to Heart.

Programming will no longer come from Atlantic's studios in St Agnes but from the old Gemini FM studios in Exeter.  Programmes from Exeter, for a Cornish audience.  That's really going to get an audience... NOT!

You see Heart's owner, Global Radio, is a combination of all the worst parts of UK broadcast history.
It goes all the way back to 1980.  Back then, a radio station called Radio West started broadcasting in Bristol.  By 1985 though, it and nearby station Wiltshire Radio were losing money hand over fist.  The IBA, the regulator at the time, examined the situation and was presented by the stations with a proposal.  Allow the two stations to merge, and broadcasts could continue, otherwise, both stations would have failed and the licences would have to be readvertised. 

The IBA knew that re-adveritisng licences for areas where stations had failed could be problematic.  The IBA had previously disallowed a takeover of Centre Radio in Leicestershire in 1983, and the station had gone off air.  The owners of Radio Trent offered to start a new station in Leicestershire, called Leicester Sound, and 11 months after Centre Radio went off air, Leicester Sound signed on.  So the IBA had previous experience of the difficulties of re-advertising a licence.  They were determined not to make the same mistake again.

So the IBA basically allowed the merger to go ahead.  But in the process, a monster was born, that thought that expansionism was the way to go.  Once the IBA had been replaced by The Radio Authority and the ITC by Margaret Thatcher's government, GWR began expaniding it's reach.  GWR teamed up with Capital to buy Plymouth Sound and DevonAir Radio.  DevonAir was replaced by Gemini FM in a franchise auction, and Capital basically sold the rest of Plymouth Sound to GWR.  GWR continued to pick up stations including the Chiltern Radio network and would begin the process of slowly eroding localness from it's output.  First, all the AM stations were replaced by a networked Classic Gold service with just 4 hours of local output per day for 6 days out of 7, a total of 24 hours of local programming a week.

Then GWR tried to get local programming cut down to just 13 hours a day across their network, but the regulator said that it had to be 16 hours a day.  As a deliberate move, they made 3 of the local hours 3am to 6am in the morning, at the most unprofitable time of the day.  It was as though they were trying to send a message to the regulator that local doesn't work.  Network programming ran from 7pm till 3am.

Eventually, OFCOM backed down and basically local programming has been slashed on Heart ever since.  There is now only 7 hours of "local" programming on Heart on weekdays, and 4 hours at weekends, a total of 43 hours a week.  The company behind Heart, Global Radio, basically these days is a mixture of the GCap attitudes and the attitude of Charles Allen, who basically oversaw the downgrading of ITV from a serious regional broadcaster with a unique selling point, to a company that is little different from the myriad of digital TV broadcasters.  In short, it is the worst of all media worlds, joined together in one place.

People have said this will increase choice.  It won't.  Heart were already broadcasting in Cornwall via DAB Digital Radio, relaying the Devon service with Plymouth ads.  The least I can hope for is that on the Cornwall mux they arrange to playout the Cornwall ads instead.  Other than that, there would be no discernable difference in output, and we have lost the Atlantic FM sound on FM, to make way for Heart.  Jermey Scott called this an upgrade for Atlantic.  it is not, it is a downgrade, and most listeners in Cornwall will know this.
Expect the listenership figures for Atlantic/Heart to plummet from the current 71,000, to a level nearer 17,000 or even maybe nearer 7,000.

Pirate FM and BBC Radio Cornwall will undoubtedly be the beneficiaries.  There's enough history as well to back that up.  In 1999, Plymouth Sound AM was replaced by Classic Gold.   The figures dropped from 67,000 to 20,000.  Pirate FM picked up most of the listeners who deserted.  Now, history will repeat itself, and Global Radio haven't learned the lessons of the past.  If you don't learn from the past, you are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past, which is what Global will do.

The worst part is whilst Atlantic FM never made a profit, they were almost as well respected as Pirate FM.  They knew they were coming into a tough market with both Pirate FM and BBC Radio Cornwall being long established and successful stations.  That Atlantic FM couldn't be profitable despite their best efforts is regrettable, and understandable.  But the fact that Global haven't understood the dynamics of the area they are proposing to move into and are going to output to Cornwall from Exeter and London, shows how much the company is out of touch with actuality. 

Global Radio haven't even been profitable the last 2 financial years, yet Ashley Tabor has taken home about £6million in bonuses.  Bonuses for failure.  Failing to grow in terms of listeners, and failing to grow in terms of credibility and respect.

Global is about as hated as GWR Group and GCap Media were before them.  That sort of baggage only weighs a company down.  Global is a company that needs to change it's whole direction and priorities.  Being overfocused on cutting costs, does not lead to making profits.  Their whole mindset, has to turn towards growth, growing the company and investing in its future.  ITV know all about that.  Since Charles Allen left ITV, they have been trying to grow their business, but the market does not have faith in ITV.  It was in 2007 that ITV last saw their share price above the £1 level that indicates market confidence in a company, and even though they have recovered from their March 2009 lows of around 18p per share, they have still yet to recover above the £1 level.  Global is not a plc, unlike ITV, so it's shares do not trade.  But I would imagine that if they did trade on the stock exchange,they would similarly trade below £1.

This move is not good for commercial radio as a whole, and further reinforces the image that Global, through their actions, are slowly destroying local radio, in the same way that ITV decimated regional television.  And whilst that definitely isn't what they are trying to do, that is the perception they are giving off, and as I always say, perception IS reality.

Disney buys Marvel - more corporate conservatism?

Imagine this: you are webslinging across the New York city skyline, just like Spiderman. You swing round to see the famous Baxter Building, home of the Fantastic Four, twith its big "4" rooftop landing pad. But as you swing by, you notice something unusual. The circle 4 logo, has suddenly got Mickey Mouse ears!

Okay, this is not likely to happen! But, it does highlight the strangeness of this whole deal. Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. Sounds like a lot of money for a comic book company. But when you look at this in detail, like I have, you notice there are things about this whole deal that seem to be totally wrong here.

First off, is a simple one. The reputations of each company. Disney is well known for it's family friendly image. It's not well known for edgy, controversial and rosky storylines, like Marvel does in its comics. Will we end up seeing a Disney-fied Marvel as a result, with comics more aimed at younger children than at the current teen market? Only time will tell. But that must be a worry for the artists that work for Marvel.

Secondly, when you look at the indivdual properties that Marvel owns (most of these being characters and their related franchises), it would seem that Disney has got somewhat of a bargain, maybe even significantly underpaid the real value of Marvel. Marvel has over 5000 characters across its multitudes of comic books, and many years of history too.

Spiderman for instance, has been around since 1962. He made his first transition to television in the late 1960s cartoon, with perhaps the most memorable sung theme tune lyrics in history. "Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can...". He made his first live action appearance in 1978 TV specials, which were actually very well produced, and filmed, managing to achieve the effect of having him crawl up walls and make it look good. He had since also appeared in another 6 animated shows, including two running simulataneously in 1981, and the hit "Spiderman:The Animated Series" which ran from 1994 to 1998.

But it's been the recent Spiderman films that have made Spiderman a huge franchise. Since 2002, Tobey Maguire's Spiderman has catapulted the character into the stratusphere. Without doubt the Sam Raimi directed films have done more for the character than all the previous versions put together, taking almost $2.5 billion in box office revenues worldwide. Two films featuring another Marvel character, The Incredible Hulk, in the same time period, have taken over $500 million. Two films featuring The Fantastic Four in 2005 and 2007, grossed over $600 million. Put together the earnings from these three franchises alone, and it comes to $3.6 billion. Put that next to the $4 billion that Disney is paying, and it doesn't half look like Disney seriously underpaid for Marvel.

But the biggest concern I have in all this, is will we see the taming of the risk taking Marvel, by the more conservative Disney? It's been a growing trend across news media, broadcast media and entertainment media over the past 20 years. Corporations do not like taking risks. But Marvel had taken many risks over the years, including the purchase in 1981 of DFE Films, the company that produced the Pink Panther cartoons, which then became Marvel Productions.

The 1994 animated Spiderman series was a big risk, as they used a lot of new techniques in order to achieve the look that they wanted. But it cost a lot of money. So they started resorting to all the usual tricks to save money, such as repeating animations, a favourite trick of Filmation. Also, multi-part stories became the order of business, in order to cut down on the number of characters that they would have to animate.

Despite the success of Spiderman, Marvel went bankrupt in 1996. The fear of bankruptcy is what makes corporations very conservative. They will not take a risk. We've seen corporate conservatism at work already. In 1993, there were 15 ITV companies, each with their own ideas. Now, there is 1 dominant ITV company - ITV plc, and 3 smaller ones. ITV companies used to take risks with shows they had no idea if it would even work. Now, everything has to be in profit before it even aires. 15 diverse broadcasters have been replaced by 1 large broadcaster that seems scared of its own shadow.

Then there is the GWR/GCap/Global situation in commercial radio. In the late 1980's, commercial radio was forced to split FM and AM programming, creating two stations where there had previously only been one. The ILR heritage stations remained on FM< whilst new oldies stations were created on AM. GWR created Brunel Classic Gold on AM and as GWR bought up stations, they imported the Classic Gold name and format. In 1998, GWR sought the approval of the Radio Authority to network Classic Gold for 20 hours a day. They were granted this, and so began the process of creating a semi-national network, cutting expenses and local programmes, because of their growing corporate conservatism. Classic Gold is now Gold. But of course it didn't stop there.

They increased their networking arrangements on FM. Evenings and Overnights became the first easy targets for FM network programmes. It was understandable. In the early days of commercial radio, some neighbouring stations would get together to provide a mini network for evenings and overnights. The Yorkshire Radio Network, combinig Pennine Radio, Radio Hallam and Viking Radio, provided programmes most evenings and for a bit longer at weekends. Other little networks also emerged, so it was an easy target for GWR, or as they would later become, GCap.

But it took until Global had taken over GCap, for FM network to reach into daytime, with OFCOM allowing a rule change that allowed stations to broadcast just 10 hours of locally originated programming a day on weekdays. The Heart FM network would simulcast Toby Anstis between 10am and 1pm, in order, as they would say, to allow a big name personality to generate revenue across the network. Unfortuantely, Toby is such a bad radio presenter, that the only thing keeping him on air is his supposed star power.
That's the root of the thinking of corporate conservatism. Big names + big audience = profit. But it doesn't always work that way.

Now corporate conservative Disney is going to buy Marvel, and will we see the same corporate conservatism infect Marvel, like it has infected many other media corporations over the years? I hope not, but I'm not confident.

GWR In Trouble

Back in the late 19th Century, ask anybody in the South West what GWR stood for, and they'd say either, God's Wonderful Railway, or Great Western Railway. Now in the 21st Century, ask that same question, and you'd probably get a reply along the lines Gormless, Worthless Radio or words to that effect.

Here in the 21st Century, GWR is known as a radio conglomerate and not a particularly popular one among the listeners. Their listenership is down, and the advertising market is down too, meaning that their profits slumped 70% in the last financial year. These are troubled times for a company which started off from a merger between Wiltshire Radio and Radio West back in 1985. So just what has GWR done so wrong in the past year?

Well, it could be that they created a bad strategy within the past couple of years, when they bought up a whole raft of stations, when the ownership rules were last relaxed. The company had a new station, only on Digital Satellite, called The Mix. The Mix was and is basically what GWR wanted their local FM stations to be, albeit with a few changes to reflect the smaller, more localised audiences the local stations had. So, where the local stations had local info, The Mix usually had promos. Then on top of that, The Mix was networked for at least 11 hours a day from 7pm to 6am, consisting basically of a listeners top 30, late night love, and an overnight programme.

However, the worst was yet to come. Over on AM, there was a completion of a process that had been going on for years. Those AM services that had not been assimilated under the Classic Gold brand were then brought under that brand, among them, Plymouth Sound AM, who had been running a successful local service on AM separately from FM for 9 years. In the 6 months following that re-branding, Plymouth's AM service dropped from a regular audience of well over 60,000, to a regular audience of barely over 20,000. Similar patterns were happening right across commercial local radio with every service losing listeners, but the GWR owned services seemed to be worst hit out of them all.

This meant that advertising revenue fell away, quite sharply in some areas, as advertisers looked for bigger audiences elsewhere. The Radio Authority also intervened saying there should be a minimum local requirement of 16 hours on FM. This meant that suddenly 3 extra hours of local programming had to be found in the stations' schedules. Most took an early breakfast slot of 3am to 6am, but some did go for the 7pm to 10pm evening slot. However, they were only local versions of the Top 30 listeners' chart.

GWR was expecting advertising revenue to pick up in 2001, but two things prevented that from happening. One was the Foot and Mouth outbreak, which did not help business confidence generally and caused a lot of problems for many local economies across the country from Devon to Scotland. The second incident was September 11th, and although this didn't have as great an impact as Foot and Mouth, it did help to keep a downer on business confidence. It is now expected that the advertising market won't pick up until the second half of 2002, and although commercial radio has seen a pick up in the number of listeners again, GWR is seemingly lagging behind the rest of the sector.

It is this writer's opinion that GWR needs to rethink its network-orientated strategy. Stations that are truly local by name and by nature are doing well again, in some cases, even better than they were before. It would therefore seem to indicate that locally produced programming is far better at getting listeners for any potential advertiser, than a semi or mostly networked schedule.