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Mr Panday advocated adding radio slots to an advertiser's print or television plan for the `multiplier effect'.

Chennai , Sept. 25

IT has enormous reach, attracts hordes of advertisers and gets a steady stream of revenues from them. There is a scope for more growth. Still, private FM's future in India stands on shaky ground, thanks mainly to the "unrealistic" licence fee regime.

Heard it before? The private FM players, who bagged the licences through competitive bidding, are keen to repeat the script. This tradition wasn't missed at a seminar on radio conducted by the Madras Management Association in Chennai, where the Radio Mirchi's Chief Operating Officer, Mr Prashant Panday, one of the speakers, outlined the medium's potential.

Radio gives an opportunity to cover a wide range of audience, attract the youth and draw out a high degree of involvement from the listener, but that doesn't mean the medium can be used as a standalone, said Mr Panday. He advocated adding radio slots to an advertiser's print or television plan for the `multiplier effect'.

If an advertiser keeps increasing the number of slots or ads in a medium, the benefits tend to "taper off after a threshold level", which means the former has to scout for another channel of communication to extend the reach further, said a media planner whom Business Line spoke to.

The threshold level will differ according to factors such as the target audience and nature of the product, among others, the media planner added.

This is where radio steps in, with the newness of the medium and its popularity offering obvious advantages.

Hutch seems to have figured it out, with radio now figuring in its scheme of things. Mr Samuel Selvakumar, Chief Operating Officer (Karnataka and Chennai), Hutch, who addressed the advertisers' angle, said the cellular service provider has different strategies for different media. The company uses television for brand-communication and fighting competition, advertises the price cuts (now a regular feature, he admitted) through newspapers, employs outdoor campaigns as a supplement and runs radio ads to promote its range of value-added services, Mr Selvakumar said.

The mix, he said, has helped Hutch to "effectively leverage" all mediums.

In spite of the positives, radio in India is able to garner a mere two to three per cent of the total ad spends, nearly 10 per cent less than what the medium is able to attract (again as a percentage of the total pie) in advanced countries such as the US.

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